Happy Hallowe’en! I hope you’re all having a monster
day! For those of you looking for a Hallowe’en friendly playlist, get yourself
over to my special
spooky post (and then make sure you hurry right back again).
Today’s regular blog has all the ingredients to frighten you too – Dinosaurs
and bugs are scary right?? If you don’t find extinct lizards or small insects
particularly terrifying (OK, that might well be most of you) – never fear! – because there is also some gruesome
mutilation to be horrified by. Yes, J. Mascis, quite possibly indie rock’s
greatest axeman, produces some of his all-time best fretwork, with the likes of
‘Freak Scene’ and ‘Let It Ride’ in particular featuring fantastic,
face melting solos. …No, they don’t literally melt faces, but they are 100% awesome… Hmm… still not convinced? Tough audience… well, how
about the paranoid, druggy lyrics and freaky titles such as ‘No Bones’ and ‘They Always
Come’? No dice? Last try. Dinosaur Jr. hated each other at this
point, and the internal feuding would lead to the band’s collapse shortly
thereafter. Principal songwriter J. Mascis wrote all the songs, including the
album closer ‘Don’t’, which is a
horrible metal effort and forces singer-bassist Lou Barlow to scream ‘Why don’t you like me’ again and again
in a torturous loop. Pained screaming and sadistic torture is good right? Ahhhh,
so I’ve finally spooked you. Maniacal laugh! Maniacal laugh! Maniacal laugh! Albumaday... rating: 7/10
Christmas aside, there isn’t a holiday out there that’s as
playlist friendly as Hallowe’en. New Year is too close to Christmas, everyone’s
a little too drunk to DJ on St. Patrick’s Day, and I guess Easter-inspired
songs about eggs just don’t cut it. Nope, Hallowe’en stands decapitated head
and shoulders above all other festive fun-times. And yet, despite the monstrous
amounts of creepy songs out there, we find ourselves listening to ‘Thriller’ for the five hundredth time.
Anyone can write a campy terror tune (check out 30 Rock’s Tracey Morgan’s effort) and ‘Monster Mash’ and ‘Ghostbusters’ are fun in a kind of ironic way, but it’s a sad point
that they have become pillars of the petrifying party.
We all put a bucket of blood, sweat and tears into our fancy
dress outfits (quite literally in some cases), so isn’t it time we put the same
into our party playlist? Yes, yes it is. Here are my ten favourite alternative
choices, featuring ghosts, zombies, and Ryan Gosling:
Roky Erickson &
the Aliens – I Walked with a Zombie
There’s something disconcerting about just how cheerful
Erickson is about the whole affair, even more so that he won’t divulge anything
more than just gleefully repeating that he “walked with a zombie last night”.
Throw in the fact that this is the same Roky Erickson who was the frontman of pioneering
psychedelic band The Thirteenth Floor Elevators – who quit the band after being
diagnosed with mental illness, had received electroconvulsive
therapy and once claimed that he had been possessed by a Martian – and it gives
the whole song a much more unhinged tone.
The Jim Carroll Band
– People Who Died
Jim Carroll was a poet and a writer as much as he was a rock
roll singer. He also knew a lot of people who died young. This unrelenting punk
rock hit is in reality a sad tribute to them all, but its peppy chorus of
“those are people who died, died!” makes it perfect Hallowe’en fare. Want more
punk rock? Try The Cramps’ ‘Human Fly’.
The Mae Shi – Run To
Your Grave
You have to dig a little deeper to find Hallowe’en ready
songs nowadays – gone are the days of Screaming Lord Sutch
sadly – but there’s plenty of grim stuff out there still. Like ‘Run to Your Grave’, a song that, even
after the title, encourages you to “tear, burn, soil the flesh” and “sleep in
your tomb” and warns that “they’re coming for your brain, but they’ll leave
with your head”. Lovely stuff.
Louis Prima and Keely
Smith – That Old Black Magic
Ok, ok, ok – I know that that old black magic is actually
love, but it still counts. And Prima’s yelps of “flame, flame of desire”trulymake him sound like a man possessed.
R. Dean Taylor –
There’s a Ghost in My House
Again, the ghost here is actually Taylor’s lost love, and
the most likely case is that she’s simply moved on. But let’s stretch it a bit
and think that she’s in fact passed
on, and the lyrics become much more haunted: “I just keep hearing your
footsteps on the stairs, When I know there's no-one there” and “Sittin' in my
easy chair I feel your fingers running through my hair”. Also, what is this Youtuber looking for...?? For another belting
blast of R&B with a tenuous link to Hallowe’en, check out the phenomenal
horns of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “I’m Your Boogie Man”.
Tom Waits – Whistlin’
Past the Graveyard
Tom Waits is without peer as a songwriter of the unnerving.
This one’s so good Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (he of 'I Put a Spell On You' fame) covered
it.
Ariel Pink’s Haunted
Graffiti – Fright Night
Two in one right there in the titles! Add fuzzy, distant
vocals, lyrics of Ouija boards and a mysterious person who will “Knock knock on
the door three times” and it’s enough to really give you the heebie-jeebies.
Kid Cudi – No One
Believes Me
Rockwell’s ‘Somebody’s
Watching Me’ is undoubtedly a great paranoid song, but it too has been done
to death (which you would think is a good thing around this time of year).
Instead, try on Kid Cudi’s ‘No One
Believes Me’, which is effectively an update: the gist is the same, the slow guitars are unsettling, the
video’s a hoot, and it’s as fresh as newly slaughtered carcass. Hip
hop has a rich history of cartoon violence, peaking with the Horrorcore
movement of the 90’s. Although the music of Insane Clown Posse and Kung Fu
Vampire couldn’t ever qualify as party songs, Gravediggaz’s ‘Constant Elevation’ is
worth a listen.
Nick Cave and the Bad
Seeds – Red Right Hand
There are scarier film soundtracks, but play the chilling ‘Suspiria’ by Goblin
at a party and you’re bound to clear the room within seconds. ‘Red Right Hand’, which was used in the
Scream franchise, mixes theatricality and suspense with a rock vibe, all pinned
together by Cave’s ominous croon.
Dead Man’s Bones – My
Body’s a Zombie for You
Ryan Gosling’s band! It’s true! The entire self-titled album
really is brilliant, but for sheer drama – a children’s choir singing “My
body’s a Zombie for You” is wrong on so many levels – this one couldn’t be ignored.
What will you be playing at your Hallowe’en
party?
Bugger! Bugger bugger bugger. It seems that in my
eagerness to listen to Pulp I clean skipped a day! Silly me. Still, first time
it’s happened in 303 days, that’s not too bad a record I feel… Today’s post is
for yesterday, yesterday’s has been updated to today (haha, make sense??): The thing is, this is hardly a forgettable record.
There may be a large number of singer-songwriters out there, but there are few
like the kooky Swede Frida Hyvönen. Blessed with a
gorgeously icy voice (best heard on this Judee Sill cover), Hyvönen
writes personal lyrics, stuffed with poetic imagery and extended metaphors, and
crafts them around her basic piano-led music. When it works, it is marvellous –
album opener ‘Dirty Dancing’ is easily the strongest of the set (and
actually one of my favourites from the whole year), weaving a tale of two past
lovers who are reunited years down the line around a ‘Be My Baby’-inspired
chorus. The album doesn’t always hit those heights (and the wailing chorus of ‘Highway
2 U’ is almost comical), but each song is likely to have something of
interest: from the seemingly autobiographical lyrics of ‘My Cousin’ and
‘December’ to the bustling tribute to our capital ‘London!’, a
city she has a real love-hate relationship with. ‘Birds’, despite sounding a little
unfinished,might be the song that indicates the direction Hyvönen will
head to next, as it shuns the piano and embraces a more electronic sound. The
lyrics too become more repetitive and less convoluted (i.e. more like a pop
song), and in all it feels like the least solo effort on the record. Then
again, trying to second guess a singer as individual and unique as Frida Hyvönen
is probably about as clever an idea as posting that bloody Pulp post yesterday. Albumaday... rating: 7/10
Britpop’s crowning glory didn’t come from Oasis or
Blur, or even Supergrass or The Verve, but from a band that weren’t really very
Britpop at all. Pulp had been floating about on the periphery of the UK’s indie
rock scene since 1978 – back when the Gallaghers were just ruddy-cheeked
rapscallions, scrapping away in primary school playgrounds – and had released
three unremarkable albums before hitting big with His N’ Hers in 1994. Although
their sound was more ensconced in alternative rock and post-punk than any
Sixties revival, the public picked up on the lively ‘Babies’ and the single ‘Do
You Remember the First Time?’ and bundled the Sheffield group on to the
burgeoning Britpop bandwagon. Fast forward a year and Pulp had headlined
Glastonbury and scored a huge hit with the unbelievably good ‘Common People’ (a song so strong that
even a cover by William Shatner
couldn’t undermine it). Different Class was released in October and it became
clear that any one of the other 11 tracks within could be released as a follow
up single. As it was ‘Sorted for E’s
& Wizz’, ‘Disco 2000’ and ‘Something
Changed’ all made the top ten, but the theatrical opener ‘Mis-Shapes’, the relentless ‘Live Bed Show’ or the calm closer ‘Bar Italia’ could surely have troubled
the charts too. The album is stuffed full of accessible rock pop, with Jarvis
Cocker’s pithy observations about class-tourists (how about: “What's the point
of being rich if you can't think what to do with it? 'Cause you're so very
thick.” or “You will never understand how it feels to live your life with no
meaning or control and with nowhere left to go”) and accented vocals the cherry
on the cake. About the only thing that hindered their commercial appeal was the
sexualised content of ‘Pencil Skirt’ or
‘Underwear’, and the darker moments,
such as the frightening ‘I Spy’ and
the insecure ’F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E’
. The following year Cocker wiggled his bum at the
Brit Awards audience during Michael Jackson’s performance, got arrested and
released without charge thanks to Vic and Bob’s Bob Mortimer acting as legal
representation, and forever cemented his place in my mind as one of Britain’s
greatest frontmen. Albumaday... rating: 10/10
The best music has an ability to transport you far
away from your bodily situation. Hence, although it may be miserable Monday
morning in late October – one where we I am groggily sat in work preparing
myself for the worst storms to hit these shores for a quarter of a century,
whilst my girlfriend is sunning herself in beautiful Sicily and my housemate is
en route to Paris – when the opening bars of ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’ kick in I still feel all warm and
fuzzy and good inside. If ‘You Are
the Sunshine of My Life’ is just a little too sickly sweet for you (I do
get that, but for me it’s just too pure to warrant cynicism), rest easy that
this isn’t just a collection of saccharine love songs. The funky hit ‘Superstition’ is blistering in its
attack on old-school mind-sets, whilst the Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ shoots down power hungry politicians who only care
about the population during voting season. Even those tunes about love aren’t
concerned only with giddy infatuation – ‘Maybe
Your Baby’ is overwhelmingly paranoid (“Maybe my baby done made another
plan with another man”), whilst ‘Blame It
on the Sun’ is genuinely heart-breaking self denial. If, after all, you do just want a gigantic,
no-holds-barred love song, then look no further than ‘I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever)’, quite possibly
the most uplifting five minutes Stevie Wonder ever recorded. Albumaday... rating: 10/10
1.You
Are the Sunshine of My Life – 2:58
2.Maybe
Your Baby – 6:51
3.You
and I (We Can Conquer the World) – 4:38
4.Tuesday
Heartbreak – 3:02
5.You’ve
Got It Bad Girl – 4:59
6.Superstition
– 4:26
7.Big
Brother – 3:34
8.Blame
It on the Sun – 3:26
9.Lookin’
for Another Pure Love – 4:43
10.I
Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever) – 4:53
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