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While there aren’t quite as many classic Halloween albums as classic Christmas albums, the good news is that they will not only chill your bones and heat up your dance floor at this most wonderful time of the year, they also sound good year-round!
You can pick up Monster Mash, Ghostbusters and what not on any number of compilations (this one isn’t bad), but for the ghoul that remembers when the construction of a perfect album was considered an art form, these four are essential.
ROKY ERICKSON AND THE ALIENS - The Evil One
True stories from the mouths of demons, dreamed up by a Texan with a big-ass voice and a stomping rock and roll band. Witches, ghosts, goblins, vampires, werewolves, zombies, bloody hammers, creatures with atom brains, Russians, alligators and Lucifer himself, all his to command. Not a bad position to be in, when you think about it.
And in case you haven’t heard, Roky walks among us this weekend. Tonight at 7:30 he's signing books and introducing a showing of his “all time favorite horror movie”, The Creature With The Atom Brain, at the Silent Movie Theater, and playing with his latest crew Evilhook Wildlife ET onSunday night at the El Rey. Your Pre-Halloween weekend just got creepier. We haven’t had a visit from this fellow since 1980, and the one before that was around 1966, so avoid him at your extreme peril.
THE CRAMPS – Songs The Lord Taught Us
It’s one of life’s great mysteries… if they truly had no idea how to play – producer Jim Dickinson likes to tell the one about how he asked them to play a D and they had no idea what the fuck he was talking about – then how the hell did they make THIS? Ignorance of the law is no deterrent. Through sheer willpower, they conceived and delivered one of the most sincerely fucked-up pieces of trash ever to slither out of NYC (however, since they moved here a couple years later, feel free to consider them hometown heroes if you like.)
There’s an awful lot of titles out there for a band with about 120 minutes of material in its catalog. For the budget-conscious, this is the one to get, containing as it does such holiday classics as Astro Zombies, Vampira, Braineaters and Mommy Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight – as well as the overall best representation of the band under one title. The only slightly less intense Collection 2 does include songs titled Halloween and Halloween 2, which prove that everything you ever read in Chick Tractsis true. So if only for seasonal purposes, you owe it to yourself to go for both.
BLACK SABBATH - Black Sabbath
All doom, all the time. Blue Cheer and Zeppelin were loud, but Sabbath in 1970 was death itself: an evocation of dread and torment that hadn’t been heard in popular music since Wagner was popular. It’s the moment that thirty-seven years of heavy metal has been chasing after, basically. Also one of the few rock debuts you can call truly original, and original thought can be the most frightening thing of all. They’d eventually get cheesy like all the rest but for a couple years there, they were as unpretentious as Black Flag, and no less potent.
