And now the last of my Halloween song favorites for this year ...
Generally speaking, I don't have a lot of time for vampire stories. Sure, I love the notion of the undead, but I don't buy into the hoary fables as slavishly over-romanticized by people like Anne Rice (now a Jesus freak) and Stephenie Meyer. Film-wise, "Bram Stoker's Dracula" by Francis Ford Coppolla certainly featured a commendable performance by Gary Oldman -- although that guy could read from a phone book and still make it riveting. But the rest of that film was marred by Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves; two people who have no business being in such a period piece. My favorite vampire film is Tony Scott's "The Hunger," starring David Bowie, Catherne Deneuve and Susan Sarandon (plus blink-&-you'll-miss'em cameos from Anne Magnuson and Willem DaFoe and an amazing opening credit sequence featuring Bauhaus performing "Bela Lugosi's Dead"). Refreshingly, the vampires in this film dispense with the whole fang motif and slay their fare with the help of tiny, ankh-shaped daggers. For fans of sapphic erotica, the film also boasts a tasty love scene between Deneuve and Sarandon.
Beyond that, though, I couldn't really give a damn about vampires, which is what makes my final selection for Halloween songs somewhat incongruous. To hear them explain it themselves, "Tenderness of Wolves" by COIL (taken from their pointedly disquieting debut LP from 1984, Scatology) concerns "several species of vampire." There are more creepy songs in COIL's prolific catalog than you can shake a wand of unspeakable depravity at, but I've always been especially taken with this one, not least as it features the histrionic vocals of Gavin Friday of my beloved Virgin Prunes (also no strangers to the scary and harrowing). Gavin wrote the lyrics, which mine the fertile mythology of vampire lore, but that isn't the part that gets me. I still privately shudder at the sounds the emanate in the background of this track. Tucked behind the booming Fairlight synthesizer and some sparingly plucked acoustic guitar, there comes a piercing cry. It's hard to say if it's a human child or animal, but its wordless caterwaul connotes torment and terror, as if the anguished entity waits in some damp, squalid cell somewhere, begging for merciful release. Heard in certain circumstances, the effect can be quite chilling.
I remember inserting this song (somewhat cruelly, in retrospect) on a mixtape for a female friend of mine several years ago, squeezed in between incongruously sunny pop ditties. Suffice to say, she was not at all amused.
Anyway, here's COIL with "Tenderness of Wolves." Take a bite. Happy Halloween.
I've written about my ardent love of The Stranglers here before. I first heard their music thanks to the inclusion of a few choice tracks like "(Get a) Grip (On Yourself)" and "Bring On The Nubiles" on a mixtape given to me by a friend. The Stranglers were sneery, sweary, and pugnacious leather-clad thugs with a distinctive sound (anchored by the rumbling low-end thunder of bassist J.J. Burnell), and I was immediately intrigued. This was still the early 1980s, and the band had yet to fully morph into the more user-friendly incarnation that recorded mellower fare like "Always the Sun" later in the decade. I stopped into a local record store on East 86th Street & Third Avenue (long, long gone) hoping to find a copy of Rattus Norvgicus or No More Heroes. The only Stranglers' LP they had, however, was a curious-looking artifact called The Gospel According To The Meninblack. I sprang for it.
Largely bereft of their type of taut, propulsive punk rock that won my initial attention, …Meninblack was a densely strange record filled with odd time signatures, sprawling instrumentals and melodies that didn't quite sound right. A concept album about the Men in Black (long before it was a silly Will Smith film, the notion of a secret cabal of government agents assigned to safeguard the clandestine existence of aliens was a conspiracy theory robustly supported by a large community of deeply paranoid people), this was the quintessence of a "difficult album." If I recall correctly, Ira Robbins' Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records called it "a departure for nowhere," but I grew to really dig it. For all its myriad faults, there are some great tunes here (I still count "Just Like Nothing on Earth" among my favorites by the band). But its bizarre, cryptic subject matter and the oft-unwieldy, radio-hostile music contained therein didn't do the band any favors. In David Buckley's awesome bio of the band, No Mercy, the boys say that lots of odd, inexplicable things started happening to them during that period, casting a further pall over the proceedings. It should also be noted that they also admit to taking a heroic amount of drugs at the time. They soon abandoned this direction shortly afterwards.
"Meninblack," the track I'm citing here, wasn't on the original album, rather it was a track on the preceding album, The Raven, that acted as a place-setter of sorts. Herein, the Men in Black (voiced by what sounds like a sinister chipmunk) reveal themselves as aliens and disclose their master plot (read: that "Twilight Zone" episode: "How To Serve Man"). Couched in droning electronics, plodding percussion and Hugh Cornwell's Morriconne-inspired guitars, it's truly a strange song, setting the table for later weird tracks on the Meninblack album like the haunting "Manna Machine" and the giddily disquieting "Waltzinblack."
... `cos Chuck Biscuits is alive & well. It was all a tasteless hoax. Check out Glen's testimonial (along with more of his amazing photographs of the man in action like the one below). Phew.
Addendum:Credible reports are suggesting that the demise of the mighty Chuck Biscuits (ex-D.O.A., Black Flag, Danzig, Social Distortion et al.) is but a tasteless hoax.
Two entirely incongruous items I wanted to pass on to you this morning:
Firstly, Glen E. Friedman ruminates on the current whereabouts of Flaming Pablum favorite John K. of "Ren & Stimpy" infamy, and exhumes one of the fabled (and decidedly NSFW) episodes of the iconic 90's cartoon. It's really a must see for fans of Kricfalusi's signature brand of hyper-detailed/hyperactive animation. Go check it out. John K's own weblog is also worth a visit.
Secondly, Scouting New York continues its excellent "New York, You've Changed" series by re-visiting locations from Roman Polanski's horror masterpiece, "Rosemary's Baby." If you're a fan of arcane movie minutia and esoteric NYC trivia, this is absolutely worth the click. Go check it out.
The third installment in my countdown of creepy Halloween songs ...
It wasn't until my junior year of college that I discovered the myriad bizarre joys of Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians. Filtering the lysergic perspective of vintage Syd Barrett through a Byrds-y, pastoral pop sensibility, ex-Soft Boys leader Hitchcock found an endearing middle-ground between Dadaist absurdity and hummable, hook-laden whimsy.
The particular track I'm highlighting here comes from an roundly engrossing odds n' sods collection Robyn released in 1986 called Invisible Hitchcock. Sounding none too removed from the afore-cited "11 Mustachioed Daughters" by the Bonzo Dog Band (which predated it by at least a decade), "Let There Be More Darkness" ominously unspools a doomy creation narrative with a frightening twist, prodding the innate fear of the dark (and the unknown that waits within) that each of us privately harbors. My collegiate classmate Ben and I used to crank this unsettling track at inconvenient hours of the night after some hearty imbibing in the hopes of psychically scarring the neighbors. I'd like to think it worked. Play it loud, ... but try to remember where the door knob is.
Here's the second installment of my Halloween hit countdown-of-sorts. "Hamburger Lady" is arguably the most well-known track in the disquieting canon of Throbbing Gristle, the infamous industrial ensemble renowned for their willfully antagonistic and unabashedly antisocial art. However punk rock & confrontational you think you might be, you'll never one-up Throbbing Gristle. Provocative and nightmarish in equal turns, TG's music came specially designed to disturb. And more often than not, it handily succeeded
"Hamburger Lady," a track from their clinically titled second album, DOA: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle isn't your conventional pop song by any stretch of the imagination. Above a slow, oozing pulse, vocalist Genesis P-Orridge (pictured above) spins a harrowing, disjointed yarn about a woman in a hospital burn unit who has been charred from the waist up. Couched in woozy electronic moans and crying, treated guitar, the song is an inescapable dirge of torturous suffering and despair. When I worked two overnight shifts a week at the TIME Magazine newsdesk in the 90's, I used to play this track in the small hours when no one else was around and completely freak myself out. In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure why. However compelling, it can still give me the willies this many years later.
I'd say "enjoy," but that's not really an applicable verb here.
A few years back, I started posting lists of suitably creepysongsfor Halloween. Oddly enough, these posts continue to garner more hits than almost anything I've ever put up here on Flaming Pablum. This year, I thought I'd mix it up a bit and devote a bit more space to the individual songs themselves. As the week progresses, I hope to highlight at least three or four tracks that, to my mind, capture the suitably sinister flavor of Halloween. This particular entry is dedicated to a strange track by the Bonzo Dog Band off their album, Urban Spaceman.
Generally speaking, the Bonzo Dog Band didn't usually indulge in purposefully scary music. A giggly troop of Dadaist musicians steeped in surrealist humor, the Bonzo Dog Band (led by one Vivian Stanshall) was a profound influence on the nascent Monty Python (Bonzo mainstay Neil Innes was actually a frequent Python collaborator). Initially, I didn't know much about them beyond their characteristically bizarre cameo in the Beatles' equally weird cinematic opus, "Magical Mystery Tour" (wherein the Bonzos provide the musical accompaniment for a stripper show in the form of a little ditty called "Death Cab for Cutie" -- a title later swiped by a currently-popular-if-somewhat-yawnsome indie rock band). A co-worker in the earlyl 90s named Leslie, however, forcibly insisted that I know more about this bizarre ensemble and I dutifully sought out a compilation of theirs called The Bestiality of the Bonzo Dog Band.
Some years after that, however, I read about a Bonzos track on the ILX music discussion boards that really piqued my curiosity, prompting a long search to finally hear the song in question. "11 Mustachioed Daughters," the final track on the band's second album from 1969, retained the band's penchant for goofball whimsy, but came lyrically steeped in some creepily specific references to the occult, replete with allusions to Mandrakes, sacrifice, witchcraft and lycanthropy . The music lists and creeps in an ominous succession of murmurs and cacophony, flecked with creepy background snippets of percussion and impenetrable conversation. The lyrics, while still a bit silly, do emit the faint whiff of brimstone.
To my ears, it conjures that same feeling of that which should not be disturbed as mined in b-movie horror flicks. Silly, but still with a disquieting air of menace. Hit play below and see if you agree.
You may remember an item I posted here a little while back that expressed my incredulousness and disapproval of the Pittsburgh police using military-style sonic weaponry to quell a riot situation at the G-20 summit earlier this month. Well, it seems that was just the beginning of a new and disquieting (pardon the pun) trend in law enforcement. My friend, college classmate and fellow tinnitus-sufferer John just called my attention to a new story. It seems that the NYPD are now going to be employing "super-sirens" that emit palpable vibrations. Yeah,`cos the ones they use now are just so subtle, aren't they?
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