Roky Erickson - The Evil One

Counting down to my 500th post and perusing the archives lately has brought to light some glaring oversights, albums I haven't posted yet that form the backbone of my musical taste.  Many of these (this one included) have remained un-posted because I listen to them so much that I can't imagine life without them.

The first one that came to mind was The Evil One, the most well known and arguably the best album by Roky Erickson.  I have posted many Roky albums here before and casually assumed that anyone perusing my little Swamp would at least have a passing familiarity with the man.  A huge percentage of albums on here are directly influenced by him, and many others have a spiritual kinship in their themes of paranormal phenomena, struggles with madness, and weird gibberish.

Lyrically, Roky draws from vintage horror movies and urban legends as much as he uses early rock n' roll's predilection for mantra-like refrains and cribbed blues motifs.  Musically, it's basically Buddy Holly and Bo Diddley squeezed through a proto-punk meat grinder.  Creedence Clearwater Revival's Stu Cook played bass on and produced much of this album, lending a layer of cosmic hillbilly mystique to a record already doomed to obscurity.

Of course now Roky is known as an essential part of any rock fan's collection and he continues to produce new material, against all odds, but this is the pinnacle.

I Walked With a Zombie

Stoned

In keeping with the spirit of the season, let's all listen to Acid Witch's superior second LP, Stoned.  This album was easily one of my favorites last year, and still gets frequent rotation in the Swamp, especially this week.  Acid Witch explores the sort of death/doom purveyed by Coffins and Hooded Menace, but in contrast to the dark and cryptic vibe of those bands they explode with technicolor gore, like a Suspiria-inspired marker set by Lisa Frank found in the cheap costume aisle of your local grocery store, the kind that get you high as hell.  With festive seasonal gusto in the lyrics and a warm layer of horror-movie organ to fend off the foul weather, and several trippy digressions into cinematic abstraction belying the knuckle-dragging facade, Stoned glows like a pillar of green flame rising from a distant pile of corpses.

Thundering Hooves

Jack Starr - Born Petrified

Not to be confused with the guy from Virgin Steele, this Jack Starr is a Texas-bred rockabilly outsider and monster-movie director, famed for his dark, twisted music and larger-than-life persona.   A marvel of ingenuity, this album reflects the duct-taped mentality one would assume prevailed upon his seemingly lost filmography as well: glaringly home-made, using an old bathtub as an echo chamber, varying wildly in quality and length, at once charming and unsettling.  Given a dusty ambiance by the tinny, distant sound and Starr's nasally wail, the songs float among a sea of hiss and ectoplasm, sounding a good thirty years older than their sixties vintage. 

It's the little seat-of-the-pants details that really give the record depth - for example, "Done Away With the Mean Old Blues" contains a middle passage that sounds like Starr playing piano with one hand and slapping his leg in counter-rhythm with the other.  Occasionally the recording descend into frenzied gibberish worthy of Men's Recovery Project at their most obtuse.  Other moments offer pure, fragile beauty and joy.  And then there's the songs about vampires and shit, those are good too.

Constellation of a Fool

Nightmare!

Here's a moody little slice of cinematic horror jazz from Creed Taylor and his orchestra, simultaneously oozing hepcat cool and slithery menace. The third of three collaborations with film composer Kenny Hopkins, these albums are not connected to specific films but based on short horror stories and classic monster archetypes. Anticipating much strange fringe music of the next fifty years, the mix of creaky sound effects with abstract tone poems and lounge rhythm, along with occasional muffled voices, creates a delightfully eerie atmosphere that must've been a riot at cocktail parties and secretive black masses alike.
Red Eyed Rats

Mummies vs. Wolfmen

Another one from the crypts, today, intrepid explorers! This seven inch record contains two songs each from Swamp favorites The Mummies and their like-minded brethren The Wolfmen.

Insane in an Insane World

Dishammer - Under the Sign of the D-Beat Mark

One of the overlooked releases of 2010: Spain's Dishammer pound you over the head with nasty, crusty, semen-caked black punk. Honestly there's no point in attempting to describe this sort of thing eloquently, as there are only so many permutations of "skull-crushing" and "paint-peeling" one can reasonably be expected to use, yes?
Turn crosses upside down and make pentagrams bleed in your werewolf chest.

Hooded Menace - The Eyeless Horde

As the sun sets on day four of Blind Dead Week, Finland's Templars of Doom, Hooded Menace, lurch forth from their crypts to sniff out your blood. Splitting the difference between the solemn pace of this week's doomier entries and the feverish lurch of yesterday's entry, the band maintains a fairly steady mid-paced gallop, like the spellbinding last reel in La Noche del Terror Ciego where our monks overtake their prey on horseback. These monsters have been responsible for two of the best metal LPs of the last few years, both of them accordingly NOTBD-related, but it all began with this grim seven inch record. As a bonus we also have the werewolf ode "Fulfill the Curse," the title cut off their first long-player.
Virgin Sacrifice Grants Us Life Beyond the Grave

Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires

Take a long, careful look at that cover: dub wizard Scientist and his monster-hunter crew tooling through the Swamp, blasting strange reggae music from his speakerboat to the horror and confusion of the array of classic Universal monsters that lurk there, doing who knows what. Present on this album are a morbid gallery of musical Frankenstein's monsters, thematically concerned primarily with vampires, mummies, and zombies, with occasional nods to other archetypes. Dub, like much music created on the fringes of cryptic subculture, is nigh-impossible to accurately describe, and similarly daunting to listen to for the uninitiated. Much of it is the aimless noodling of fried-minded headcases, but at its pinnacle it is transcendentally weird and can wreak permanent mental change upon the unsuspecting. If the stars are right, mayhaps this can happen to you.
Your Teeth In My Neck

White Medal - Agbrigg Beast

A remarkable demo by Yorkshire's White Medal, centered around some sort of local werewolf legend, posted here in celebration of the looming full moon. Some truly terrifying sounds here: frenzied lyrics croaked opaquely in thick Yorkshire brogue, with the guitars swirling and bobbing like will-o-the-wisps on a peat bog. This cassette seems to be out of print but it has been re-released by Seedstock in expanded LP form. I recommend you take heed; hear the distant howls.
Threap an she'll bite thee no mistake
Thoil thus burden an break fert wood

Death SS - ...In Death of Steve Sylvester

Another no-brainer, perhaps, but I'm in the middle of a long weekend with little leisure time to ponder the imponderable, so let's just go for it. The mysterious Death SS, an EC-horror inspired metal band from the 80's, most clearly defined their worldview on this release. Not only did them band members fully realize their stage personae, dressing as a mummy, a vampire, a werewolf, etc., but also the first five songs straightforwardly address each individual character with song titles such as "Vampire" and "Werewolf." Musically, it's a bit all over the map, pulling influences from doom, death metal, thrash, early black metal, 70's shock rock (note the Alice Cooper cover) and Hammer horror soundtracks. This is great, visceral music that remains untarnished by the current abomination using the name Death SS - best to pretend that doesn't exist and just immerse yourself in the dark creaky cobwebbed atmosphere presented here.
Here, in the coffin, yes this is death!

Speedwolf - Denver666

Well then, sorry about that Ziggurat business, here's something to make up for it: The new seven inch record from Denver's Speedwolf. Two songs, slightly over four minutes of bullshit-free speed thrash (although the b-side settles into a nice mid-tempo trot) to cleanse out your turd-filled ears. This is pretty new, so you should probably shotgun two beers and try to buy it here.
In the meantime....

Lurking Fear - Songs in the Key of Lovecraft

Rudimentary Peni's Cacophony is widely regarded as the most important Lovecraftian punk album, but few seem aware of this forgotten 80's gem by Missouri punkers Lurking Fear, who claim to be inspired by not only H.P.L. but by Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and Alan Moore. This last manifests itself in the the song "Swamp Thing," which morphs from a crazed hardcore stomper into a spacey death-rock groove with Moore's words recited over it, and then bizarrely shifts into the "Wild Thing"-styled theme from the 80's cartoon. Other tracks include "Born in Fear", "Werewolf" in the which the singer howls wildly, and "Innsmouth Bay." The sounds range from caveman pounding to moody, swirly goth, played at the far fringes of competence and traditional notions of what constitutes a song.

There's something in the basement...