BATTLE OF THE BINGE
By:
April 28, 2026
One in a series of occasional detours from Adam McGovern’s irregularly scheduled column OFF-TOPIC.
Keeping your story straight is no fun, so I’d rather follow the lines that cut across and curve around Tales From the Tall Pines, a collection of recent singles and one new track from my fav blue-state conscious country band that plays like a great anthology of short fiction that tells the deep truth.
Building songs that sound like mid-last-century tabloid headlines set to music is a Tall Pines trademark, and for the new and defining song here, “Abducted by Love”, singer Connie Lynn Petruk sets her superhuman soul pipes to wailing and banging against the inside of the metaphor in deadly earnest and cosmic jest. These are sympathetic anthems of ordinary people living the extremes simplified in old exploitation cinema, and “Dirty Rose” is a whole life story that got left in the editing booth, an epic road saga told in its intimate consequences and moments of mercy. On both, guitarist Christmas Davis slings his endless menu of irresistible riffs, buzzing like a tuned diesel truck engine with 100 gears.
“The Leon County Sing-Along Blues”, the raucous premortem on the resurgent Trump era released the week before Election Day 2024, charges like that truck coming through the East Wing, with a tale of marauders as would-be messiahs. At the other end in every way, the powerfully plaintive “Little Bird” flies low over the wreckage for a heartbreaking allegory of the holy spirt still flickering among the flames.
The typical hellraiser hero of the Pines’ beloved 1970s grindhouse filmography (or for that matter of ‘Leon County Sing-Along Blues’) switches lead roles with the reality of strong resilient women in “Burt Reynolds Grin,” whose heroine, having stolen back the swagger of the title star, is celebrated in a count-off of badass exploits which breaks into an in-song call-and-response and multi-voice literal chorus, as if the song is so delightful it spontaneously generates its own audience participation. This is classic country for the contexts and characters writing it all new chapters; “Satisfaction Guaranteed” is rural music that kicks the shit out of its anthem of unguilty pleasures.
The only two songs you’ve heard anything like are remakes of past Pines favorites. “Sister Rose” tells the story of the first, unsung rock guitar goddess Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Connie’s heavenward howling against Christmas’ laid-back guitar creates an intriguing tension of a legacy obscured, but a spirit unsilencable (though you owe yourself a listen to the original balls-out gospel-rock version, on a separate EP here). It’s hard for me to unhear the original “Spend My Life With You” that this album’s version is a variation on since perfection needs no alternative, but a lovely melody for a sweet sentiment, unpretentious and emotionally truthful, still comes through, probably just as well to listeners for whom this is the first time.
I’ve jumped around, but I should mention that Jeremy Chatzky weaves in a bumping, rolling bassline to songs like “Reynolds” “Spend” and “Satisfaction” that keeps us bouncing through the truck stops and back roads with solid grounding and high strides.
That’s Tracks 2, 8, 1, 4, 5, 7, 3 and 6; I took it out of order cuz that’s the most interesting route, and getting lost aims you where you were most meant to be. We’re all thrown together in this moment, and will make sense of it, in harmony, as we go.
While Tales for the Tall Pines works in multiple directions, Dean Haspiel’s ANTIMATTER anthology comic coalesces into a kind of mini-novel. The trails in and out of the major timeline are twisty, as Haspiel’s stable of creator-owned characters collide in ways we’ve never or not usually seen. And some we have; his mythic archetypes of amory Billy Dogma and Jane Legit are at it again, rocking a lot more than a trailer as their brownstone rattles apart with their tumultuous coupling; luckily Haspiel’s looks-how-he-sounds Chest Face, a standup comedian turned anatomically-condensed mutant powerhouse, happens by; for the rest, you’ll hafta be there. Genetically and technologically engineered US supersoldier AI Joe seeks to override his militaristic program by boffing his computer-brain out with a transistorized soulmate; it doesn’t end well, but it does end nobly. Pandemic post-humans Lincoln Bio and Fate Majeure fight to free one last couple of fertile homo sapiens (don’t ask, just watch) while a clock ticks on our species’ final climax (why help myself?). Along the way faces familiar from the previous pages and Haspiel’s shared and traded universes show up, and the whole book is donut-ed by single-page comicstrip treatments of Haspiel’s ex-boxer/reformed burglar semihero The Red Hook; poignant slices of life that read like one-scene plays. Haspiel’s been cutting his own door with these self-published, crowdfunded “Deep Cut” one-shots, and ANTIMATTER feels like both the redemption of blockbuster corporate event-comics and a reinvention of the anarchic sexual psychedelic underground-comix movement of a bygone but surprisingly kindred DIY age. This book tells us that, despite everything we do, it all matters.
MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2025 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern’s and Paolo Leandri’s comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: FAWLTY TOWERS | KICK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JACKIE McGEE | NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JOAN SEMMEL | SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRO and THE LEON SUITES | FIVE-O YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JULIA | FERB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: KIMBA THE WHITE LION | CARBONA YOUR ENTHUSIASM: WASHINGTON BULLETS | KLAATU YOU: SILENT RUNNING | CONVOY YOUR ENTHUSIASM: QUINTET | TUBE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: HIGHWAY PATROL | #SQUADGOALS: KAMANDI’S FAMILY | QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: LUCKY NUMBER | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JIREL OF JOIRY | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: “Freedom” | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby’s Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti’s comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam’s posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE