RANTS & RAMBLINGS

Harley and Mya have been walking around the shop looking like they're attending a Victorian funeral ever since this live CD showed up in our delivery crates. They've been playing it on the house system during the afternoon rush, and it is taking every ounce of my willpower not to snap the disc in half.

Look, I get it. The kids love the costumes, the theatricality, and the high-production angst. But this isn't punk rock. This is Broadway theater disguised with a distortion pedal and a layer of eyeliner. It's too clean, it's too rehearsed, and the vocals sound like a theater major having a controlled panic attack for a stadium full of teenagers who buy their clothes at the shopping mall. Punk is supposed to be dangerous and ugly. This is just corporate-approved moping.

THE VERDICT: The girls say it's a masterpiece. I say it's a headache. If you're under nineteen, you've probably already bought it. If you actually want to hear a real live album with teeth, go find a used copy of Motörhead's No Sleep 'til Hammersmith in the back bin.

I love Judas Priest. They are heavy metal royalty. But Nostradamus is a massive, two-disc, symphonic metal concept album about a 16th-century French prophet, and it is completely ridiculous.

Rob Halford's vocals are still incredibly powerful, but the band drowned the riffs in layers of synthetic string sections, operatic choirs, and endless spoken-word interludes like "Dawn of Creation." When they actually stop the theater and just play heavy metal—like on the title track or "Prophecy"—it hits like a sledgehammer. But you have to wade through nearly two hours of over-indulgent symphonic fluff to get to the good stuff. It's tedious, it's bloated, and it takes itself way too seriously.

THE VERDICT: Unless you own a velvet cape and a dungeon, you're probably only going to listen to this once. Skip the double-CD and just make a mixtape of the heavy tracks.

Five years between albums and this is what we get. Look, I liked Smash back in '94 just as much as anyone else, but Rise and Fall is a tough pill to swallow if you like your punk rock to have actual teeth.

Bob Rock produced this thing, and you can tell. He took a band that used to sound like an aggressive garage party and polished them until they look like a corporate board meeting. "You're Gonna Go Far, Kid" has a catchy, dance-punk beat that I know the local high school kids are going to request on the house speakers until my ears bleed, but it feels completely synthetic. Dexter Holland can still write a hook, but the whole album feels calculated for alternative radio playlists and video game soundtracks rather than a sweaty basement show.

THE VERDICT: It's harmless, catchy pop-punk for the mall crowd. If you want real skate punk, go flip through the Bad Religion section.

We have a new employee here at the Java Hole, and no, she doesn't want to talk about it. Leave your true-crime queries at the door because we're not going to answer them. Talk shop, buy a coffee, or GTFO.

— Staff

Three streetlights on Warren Street have gone out. Not unusual. What is unusual is that they are always out. The bulbs get replaced. The lights come back. A week later they're out again. Always the same three. Always the same stretch of road.

I mentioned this to a city employee and he immediately changed the subject. Which means one of two things. Either he knows something. Or he works for the city. Honestly, both explanations are equally suspicious.

If you walk up to my counter and ask for a "skinny caramel macchiato with extra whip," I am going to pour standard black drip into a paper cup and charge you five dollars for the insult.

This is a coffee house, not a chemistry lab. We have dark roast, we have light roast, and we have whatever records are spinning on the house deck. If you need half a cup of liquid sugar and artificial syrup just to tolerate the taste of caffeine, go stand in the drive-thru lane at the highway junction with the rest of the cattle.

The girls working the morning shift are too polite to tell you off, but I'm not. Stop holding up the line debating your lifestyle dietary modifications. Buy the coffee, sit in the back, and look at a book.

Haddonfield has officially lost its collective mind. Walked past the diner this morning and overheard three separate conversations about "suspicious figures" seen walking near the woods. The local neighborhood watch group is handing out flyers calling for a volunteer curfew.

Look, what happened last October was an absolute tragedy. It ripped the heart out of this community. But turning this town into a paranoid, gated-suburb police state isn't going to fix anything. Everyone is looking at their neighbors like they're hiding a butcher knife under their coats.

If you're too terrified to walk down Main Street without looking over your shoulder, stay in your living rooms. The Java Hole is still open, the coffee is still hot, and we don't do security checkpoints at the door. Leave the paranoia on the sidewalk.

Ninety percent of local rumors begin in coffee shops.

The remaining ten percent begin in parking lots and eventually arrive at coffee shops.

Thank you for your participation.

Phantom Video closed its doors for good on Tuesday. Hank threw a couple hundred VHS tapes into the dumpster behind his alley because nobody wanted to pay two bucks to rent a physical piece of celluloid anymore. Everyone would rather sit on their couches, clicking a plastic remote control to stream some compressed, artifact-heavy garbage directly into their television boxes.

I went down there and bought three crates of their old exploitation and Italian horror stock before the rain ruined them. They're sitting by the front counter now.

People don't get it. You lose the video store, you lose the record shop, you lose the local diner—you lose the blood supply of a town. Pretty soon, Haddonfield is just going to be a giant, sterile strip mall full of corporate banks and drive-thru pharmacies. Go down to Hank's and look at the empty windows. That's the future you're voting for every time you buy a digital track.

The high school kid I hired to sweep the floors was hovering around the shop stereo today while I had a vintage Judas Priest live bootleg spinning on the deck. He looks at the amplifier knobs, turns to me with a straight face, and asks, "Does that thing go up to eleven?"

I actually stopped wiping the counter. I was genuinely stunned. I didn't think anyone born after the Berlin Wall fell had ever even heard of This Is Spinal Tap. I almost smiled. I asked the kid how he even knew that movie, and followed it up by asking how old he was.

He says, "I'm seventeen."

Eleven. Seventeen.

I told him to go clean the grease trap behind the pastry case and shut up. It’s a coincidence. Obviously. But my brain is starting to feel like a skipping record with these two numbers.