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Japanese pressing. Cannibal Corpse's tenth studio album. Produced by Eric Rutan, the producer of Morbid Angel and Hate Eternal. Victor. 2006.
Publisher: Metal Blade
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In this pitch-black action comedy by Kihachi Okamoto, a pair of down-on-their-luck swordsmen arrive in a dusty, windblown town, where they become involved in a local clan dispute. One, previously a farmer, longs to become a noble samurai. The other, a former samurai haunted by his past, prefers living anonymously with gangsters. But when both men discover the wrongdoings of the nefarious clan leader, they side with a band of rebels who are under siege at a remote mountain cabin. Based on the same source novel as Akira Kurosawa's Sanjuro, Kill! playfully tweaks samurai film convention, mixing in elements from Italian westerns and established chanbara classics alike.
Publisher: Criterion
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Now under one cover, here are all six volumes of the notorious How To Kill series, the complete history of murder, assassination and death by design. The Hatchet Job, Smothering, Drilled to Death and other chapters provide gruesome testimony to why these books have been banned in certain countries! For information purposes only!
Author: John Minnery
Publisher: Paladin Press
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Publisher: INTERSCOPE/CHERRYTREE
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This duo subtly and organically fuses pop, glam, blues, art-punk, and hip-hop in a manner that flits between light and dark, funny and morbid, experimental and cute. The result is a short, sharp twelve track album of sensual, fresh, and atmospheric songs. A reminder that no one on earth makes rock 'n' roll quite like The Kills. Previous albums "No Wow" and "Keep On Your Mean Side" have sold over 70,000.
Jamie "Hotel" Hince might have become tabloid fodder thanks to his relationship with Kate Moss, but the third album by The Kills, his band with American vocalist Alison "VV" Mosshart, does relatively little to tidy itself up for mainstream consumption. Midnight Boom is a typically lean set of makeshift punk-blues characterised by Hince's raw, Nick Zinner-style guitar, and Alison's bad-attitude drawl: see the opening "U.R.A Fever", a beat-up call-and-response number reminiscent of Royal Trux than sees Hince and Mosshart swapping sour quips over loping bass and drum machine thud, while "Cheap and Cheerful" sees Mosshart declaring "I want you to be crazy/'Cos you're boring baby when you're straight". The presence of producer Armani XXXchange of Baltimore hip-hop outfit Spank Rock means there's a greater emphasis here on rhythm, often of a synthetic nature: "Alphabet Pony" bumps along on robust, lo-fi drum kicks and bursts of primitive electronics, while "Black Balloon" is a slow-burner that toys with layered percussion built from hand claps, scrapers, and tapped snare. The Kills still have problems with a big, memorable chorus–-assuming, indeed, that was ever their intention--but Midnight Boom is all about grit and grooves, and it does that just fine. –Louis Pattison
Publisher: Domino
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The mission was to kill the most wanted man in the world--an operation of such magnitude that it couldn’t be handled by just any military or intelligence force. The best America had to offer was needed. As such, the task was handed to roughly forty members of America’s supersecret counterterrorist unit formerly known as 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta; more popularly, the elite and mysterious unit Delta Force. Author: Dalton Fury
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
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Based on the national best-selling book by Evan Wright, Generation Kill is an authentic and vividly detailed 7 part HBO mini-series event that presents a uniquely epic and intimate portrait of the first 40 days of the Iraq war from the perspective of the Marines of the First Recon Battalion – a new breed of American soldiers.
The mini-series tells the story of these young Marines physical and emotional journey into the heart of Baghdad in those initial weeks, and how the war reveals to be much more complicated, problematic and tragic than anyone had contemplated. Many of the complications and problems that arise are due to the unwieldy military bureaucracy which the Marines confront in the midst of the war, the challenges of over-zealous and incompetent commanding officers, ever-changing rules of engagement, a non-existent strategy, severe deficiencies in necessary armor and supplies, and an enemy they don’t understand. Generation Kill is a humorous and frightening first hand account of these remarkable men, of the personal toll of victory, and of the brutality, camaraderie and bureaucracy of a new American war. It is a profoundly insightful and realistic look at the risk, costs and ultimately, the failures of the war. Written and produced by Emmy-award winner David Simon (the Wire), and also produced by the award-winning George Faber (Elizabeth I). There's macho, there's military macho, and then there's the over-the-top machismo of the Marines. In the HBO miniseries Generation Kill, one character--a Marine--describes his branch of the military as "America's pitbull." The seven episodes of Generation Kill follow a battalion of Marines as they lead the invasion of Iraq, ultimately rolling into Baghdad itself by the last show. The language is dense with obscenities and military jargon, but it's surprisingly easy to follow, even if you don't study the glossary that comes in a booklet with the box set. What isn't so easy to distinguish are the characters themselves, except by surface details: This guy has a hoarse voice, this guy is an embedded journalist (a stand-in for Evan Wright, the Rolling Stone reporter who wrote the book the series is based on), this guy is a white supremacist, this guy has a mustache, this guy is an officer obsessed with the other guy's mustache. The problem is that people are ultimately defined by what they do, and soldiers in war are all doing pretty much the same thing: Shooting, swearing, and sitting around as they wait to shoot and swear some more. But Generation Kill isn't aiming for personal identification; the creators of the series (David Simon and Ed Burns, producers of the critically-adored The Wire) aim to immerse the viewer in the texture of the experience--which, in this case, is mostly chaos and confusion. Sandstorms are as great a threat as mortar fire; pizza trucks arrive out of nowhere on the brink of a mission (conveniently providing a bit of product placement); and the rules of engagement keep changing as the goals of the higher-ups grow increasing out-of-synch with the war on the ground. Generation Kill captures the frustration and increasing cynicism of the grunt troops with vivid skill, as their simplistic morality--kill the bad guys!--grows more and more hollow. Extras include some brief interviews with real Marines; the usual making-of documentary, mildly interesting but justly deleted scenes, and audio commentaries; and entertaining video diaries from Eric Ladin, the actor who plays the white supremacist. --Bret Fetzer
Publisher: HBO
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Publisher: Rhino/Warner Bros.
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Fashion be damned: Pop culture is just one big Hometown Buffet for writer-director Quentin Tarantino. Nowhere has that sensibility been more apparent than on his hand-picked soundtrack choices, and this oft tongue-in-cheek tale of a female assassin's revenge (his first film in six years) is no exception. With dizzy, almost palpable glee, Tarantino evokes the international hall-of-mirrors influences that energize martial arts films and much of Asian pop culture in general. Thus the hip-hop of Wu Tang's RZA (who, along with composer Charles Bernstein, concocts what passes for the score's traditional cues) somehow finds itself but one ingredient in a heady souffle that includes vintage TV and film cue rarities (Al Hirt's main title from The Green Hornet, Bernard Herrmann's haunting theme from Twisted Nerve, the spaghetti western melodrama of Luis Bacalov's "The Grand Duel," Isaac Hayes in full blaxploitation mode on "Run Fay Run"), Charlie Feathers' vintage rockabilly and a pan-kitsch sensibility that encompasses Zamfir, Nancy Sinatra's angst-in-the-pants take "Bang, Bang" and Santa Esmeralda's disco-era workout of "Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." Tarantino's contemporary Japan-Pop selections are no less giddy, ranging from Meiko Kaji's sultry "Flower of Carnage" to The 5.6.7.8's loopy "Woo Hoo." It's everything we've come to expect from a Tarantino score (including dialog excerpts and a few sound fx stingers), with a madcap trip around the pop music world thrown in for good measure. -- Jerry McCulley
Publisher: Maverick
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The good news is that most soldiers are loath to kill. But armies have developed sophisticated ways of overcoming this instinctive aversion. And contemporary civilian society, particularly the media, replicates the army's conditioning techniques, and, according to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's thesis, is responsible for our rising rate of murder among the young.
Upon its initial publication, ON KILLING was hailed as a landmark study of the techniques the military uses to overcome the powerful reluctance to kill, of how killing affects soldiers, and of the societal implications of escalating violence. Now, Grossman has updated this classic work to include information on 21st-century military conflicts, recent trends in crime, suicide bombings, school shootings, and more. The result is a work certain to be relevant and important for decades to come. Author: Lt. Col. Dave Grossman
Publisher: Back Bay Books
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