"Trick or Treat?" is a Question

Sometimes, we’re so familiar with things that we no longer perceive them in the way they were originally intended. Case in point - the phrase, “Trick or Treat?” See that question mark on the end? I’ve never imagined that it was there, but it is! Obviously! Trick or treat is a question. Do you want a trick or will you give us a treat? Duh.

Thing is, I never considered that before. My eyes were opened by the album cover above. It’s a laid back instrumental Halloween record produced by the Jazz Hop Cafe. You can check it out here. This UK group has lots of different themed collections, all of which are worth a listen even if the group (or individual) does masquerade as lots of separate artists. That’s a tradition that began with Halloween at High Noon. I don’t know why either group insists on continuing the charade, but both produce music that’s great for relaxing after a busy day of decorating.

But I digress. The point is still that question mark. I have to assume that it’s included on their release because they’re British. Americans are so used to the phrase that we no longer even think of it as a question. It’s like the Lord’s prayer of October - recited until it’s original meaning is obfuscated behind tradition and repetition.

Bandcamp Halloween

If you’ve ever worked on large scale haunts or even home decorations, you know you end up building most everything in July and August. Consequently, every year I start getting the itch to find some new Halloween music when the summer heats up. The best place to find it these days is Bandcamp. I love Bandcamp! I love that they give me the option to download digital purchases in lossless FLAC format. I love that every vinyl purchase comes with a free digital download. I love that they offer a very good music player app that I can use on any device. AND, I love that they offer a level playing field unlike any other. If I could buy all of my music through Bandcamp, I would.

But back to Halloween. If you click HERE, you’ll see all of the music on Bandcamp that’s been tagged with the word “Halloween”. Granted, they need to work on the color scheme of this page. A little orange here and there would work wonders. But the real gift is the enormous quantity of quality Halloween audio you can find on the page.

A couple of years ago, I discovered the purchases feed on the Bandcamp homepage. Just above the fold, there’s a stream of images of every album or single that’s purchased from the site globally in real time. That year, I saw an orange and black image of a haunted house flash by, and when I clicked on it, I found the awesome Haunted House Party album. Since then, I’ve enjoyed watching that stream every October for glimmers of orange and black.

On top of everything else, most releases on the site let you listen to every track a couple of times before they remove the privilege and prompt you to purchase. I can’t say enough good things about this feature because I don’t know many of these artists and being able to listen to entire albums before making a purchase is the skeleton’s knees.

Give Bandcamp a try this year. You won’t be sorry. You can even follow me there at https://bandcamp.com/freakengine.

The Twilight Sad Tour

Not to turn this into a Robert Smith blog (Are there such things?), but I have to mention the Cure’s US tour because they happen so infrequently. Their last full-fledged trek around the US happened in 2016.

The image above is from a poster for the Austin show that I turned into a desktop wallpaper. I have no idea what it has to do with Austin. I just like black cats and I like The Cure.

There are tons of videos online, but the best one IMHO is from the Hollywood Bowl show on 5/23/23. It’s the entire show including the encore breaks. You can check it out at the link below.

What’s amazing about it is that the person shooting it is in the front row and the sound is very good. You’d think the amplitude would blow out a camera mic, but it sounds great. My only real question is why the hell you’d spend the money on front row seats only to watch the entire concert through your phone! Oh well, people are weird. I just wish they were playing somewhere nearby so I could see them sans phone.

By all accounts, the shows have all been amazing. Robert’s voice is unchanged at the ripe old age of 64 and the current runtime is close to three hours every night. The band is pulling out all sorts of gems alongside the tried and true faves, so the show varies throughout the tour. Honestly, if this show is happening near you and you’re not attending, what the hell is wrong with you?

Haunted House Party 2!

It’s beginning to look a lot like Halloween! Haunted House Party just announced their second record of lo-fi loops and spooky sound samples. Perfect for Halloween night or any night! I bought the first record just because of the cover and the sample track and I was thrilled with the end result.

This year, the vinyl version is available in several colorways, and there’s even a bonus 7” with extra tracks if you dare! But don’t dally. These WILL sell out. Order now.

https://hauntedhouseparty.bandcamp.com/album/monsters-delight

In the Flesh

I've been going back and really listening to lots of music that I haven't listened to in years. Recently, I've been feeling good enough to actually listen to Pink Floyd’s The Wall again. It may very well have been one of the very first horror musicals. I think it's a terrible album to listen to if you're at all depressed, but in the right frame of mind, it sounds amazing. It really is a masterpiece of sorts. I was a teenager when I first bought a copy on vinyl and it made quite an impression.

I went to see the movie when it was released in theatres, but it was hard for me to focus on it because my friend Della was with me, and she cried through the whole film. She had somehow decided that her boyfriend was breaking up with her, so that’s all she could think about. It made for quite a filmgoing experience, let me tell you (and yes, the character named Della in my novel Caster is based on her).

Anyway, I began to wonder about the narrative of the album and some of the things mentioned in the lyrics. I searched online and found an interview with Roger Waters that was done back before Pink Floyd ever toured in support of the album. You know, back when Waters was reasonable. 

One thing I never truly understood was the title of the two tracks called In the Flesh. Well, I just learned that Pink Floyd's Animals tour was called the In the Flesh tour. The Wall came about because Waters was totally disgusted by their audience by the time they were done with that grueling tour. They were the most popular that they’d ever been so many people in the audience only knew their hits. Waters said that they had to perform like dancing monkeys for these partying people no matter how sick or tired the band members were. Pink Floyd did 55 huge shows in seven months and Waters said it felt like a prison sentence at times. It turned him into a different person, and that's who the character of Pink is based on. 

This is all news to me, but it makes sense. Every story I hear about life in the big 70s bands was that it was like being on some insane treadmill. That's one of the reasons why so many of those guys ended up doing lots of drugs. It’s sad that the general public never really knew the price these people paid to be entertainers. The myth of the rock star was (and is) so strong that many still aspire to be in their shoes. I used to crave a life in music, but now I’m happy that it eluded me. I seriously doubt that I would have survived a life on the road.

These days, almost no one makes money off of recorded music. They all have to spend night after grueling night fighting to make a few dollars playing to ingrates at small venues. If there’s a moral to this tale, it’s this - Please be kind to live musicians, and be grateful for the things they’ve gone through to be able to perform for you. It’s not a life of glamour, but one of crappy motels and road food.

The Groovie Goolies

When I was a kid, pretty much the only time I got to see cartoons was on Saturday morning. Sure, there were occasional movies and some after school shows, but it was Saturday morning that ruled. And nothing ruled harder in my monster-loving heart than the Groovie Goolies.

Cranked out by the crew at Filmation, the show was originally paired with a cartoon version of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. It was just a series of goofball sketches and music videos. The series only lasted from 1970 to 1971, but it was around long enough to lodge itself in my mind forever. It was basically a ripoff of Universal’s monsters, which were very popular with kids like me at the time. The old films, along with their Hammer Horror remakes, had hit the airwaves and kids like me were clawing for more. This is what some have dubbed the “Monster Kids” phenomenon of the late sixties and early seventies. I even had an Aurora model kit of Bela Lugosi during that time!

What set the Goolies on a higher plane for me personally was the fact that they were a rock band. That’s right - these monsters were in a pseudo-rock band for some reason. I didn’t care why. I just found the mashup of three things I loved - cartoons, monsters, and music - to be irresistible.

The show’s theme music was written by Richard Delvy and Ed Fournier of The Challengers - the band who wrote and recorded Wipeout. I have no idea how they got hooked up with Filmation, but the end result was fantastic.

Be warned, though. If you’re determined enough to sit through more than the opening song (below), you’ll soon discover the show to be unwatchable as an adult. Even through the veneer of nostalgia, it’s just plain awful. But the character designs and that opening song are pure gold. Enjoy, monster lovers!

Haunted House Party

Halloween season goes by so fast that I sometimes neglect to post about some of the cool things I pick up on a whim. This past Halloween, I stumbled upon the Halloween House Party record on Bandcamp and was very happy to have gotten this cool gem of a release. I buy a lot of my music on Bandcamp because vinyl purchases also come with flac and mp3 versions and their streaming app is terrific. Anyway, I browse around the site frequently, and one of the best ways I find random goodness is by watching the flow of “selling right now” releases on the Bandcamp home page. That’s how I stumbled upon Haunted House Party.

While this isn’t the Sgt. Pepper of Halloween music, I think it’s something special. It’s basically a DJ spinning tracks with samples from Halloween vinyl fare from the last 50 years. This basically became the soundtrack of my 2021 Halloween season. It’s terrific background music for decorating, building Halloween props, and hosting your own haunted house parties.

Check it out here: https://hauntedhouseparty.bandcamp.com/

Cereal Box Records

photo from Ebay listing

When I was a kid, I ate cold cereal for breakfast most mornings. Back then, a lot of cereals for kids included cheap toy giveaways inside. I’ll never forget the Cap’n Crunch submarine that ran on baking powder and never worked because I used baking SODA instead. Oh well.

Some of the best giveaways were actually records! You cut them off the back of the box and played them on your turntable. Yes, they sounded like ass, but they were free records! They were basically a clear plastic flexi-discs with cardboard backers. The boxes were heftier back then, so they usually played without skipping. They worked well enough for a few plays before I got bored with them anyway.

The one I remember most fondly was a Halloween record that came on the back of a Honeycomb box. There were three different records but I only remember having the one pictured above: “The Haunted House.” If you’re curious, some industrious YouTubers have posted the audio from all three.

Halloween Kills Soundtrack Preorder

While I’m not a huge fan of the last Halloween movie released in 2018, I did enjoy the score by John Carpenter and friends. Having Carpenter work on these sequel scores has been the real win IMHO. Yes, I was pleased by the comeback of Laurie Strode, but I honestly feel like Halloween H2O should have been the end of the series. It was a wonderful vehicle for Jamie Lee Curtis and it didn’t take her character down the bizarre prepper path the new movies have presented.

At any rate, John Carpenter has produced some wonderful new music in the same vein as his previous syth-based soundtracks, but this time he’s involved other musicians (including his son, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies) to beef up the production a bit. It’s enough to put the Stranger Things composer to shame because this music isn’t a retro throwback copy of Carpenter’s old music, but a progression of that work. Based on the two tracks I’ve heard so far, I think this would make great Halloween night music for the TOTs.

The new soundtrack is now available for preorder with some very cool colored vinyl options as well as CD, cassette and digital download. Thankfully, these are available at Bandcamp, my source of choice when it comes to purchasing music. If you buy the vinyl there, you automatically get the digital download as well in whatever format you desire, including lossless FLAC. That means when you place your preorder, you’ll get the first two tracks today. I really love the Bandcamp business model. I highly recommend buying your music there when possible. Click the link below to check out the soundtrack.

HALLOWEEN KILLS ON BANDCAMP

Halsey + NIN

Whenever I hear of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross working on a new project, I’m always interested. Why? Well, mainly because I feel that the Nine Inch Nails game plan is far too restrictive for the kinds of work these artists are capable of. I get it - NIN is a brand these days and they don’t want to stray too far from the music they’ve made to date. Anyway, that’s why I’m interested in this new release by Halsey.

Clearly, she’s got balls - the number one requirement for a female recording artist in this day and age. The #METOO movement may have happened but the music industry is, has, and will always be run by pigs. That’s why I was thrilled to see her parading around the Met with her preggers belly hanging out for the reveal of her new album cover. This, ladies and gentlemen, is rock and roll.

This teaser is just a little taste of the collaboration. I also read that Lindsey Buckingham and Dave Grohl make appearances on the album. And just in time for Halloween season. I can’t wait!