Ghoultown: Death ain't nothin' but a thing
Tidings that recently emanated from BadlandsBeyond revealed Ghoultown -- a Texas Count Lyle production that last perpetrated wax some six years ago -- is again stalking studio passageways.
"We are in the process of recording our new album titled TOO BAD TO DIE," read a June 2 Facebook message. "This will be our 6th full-length studio release and 13th overall release.
"We are working hard to bring you the best collection of Ghoultown songs yet, offering a familiar yet amped-up group of songs that take you on a dusty and dangerous journey into our strange landscape of gunslinging Rock'n'Roll. No release date has been set, but rest assured it will be worth the wait!"
The group features on Facebook numerous behind-curtain photos of their studio activities, disclosing to all how sausage is made in spurred-monster kitchen.
During such time as will transpire until new grooves-of-the-macabre materialize, consideration is appropriate.
Few bands have accomplished that which distinguishes Ghoultown: the formulation of a truly singular persona. In the group's slap-leather milieu populated by shambling and hollow-eyed hombres from below, no string goes un-thrashed, and all poundings are doomsday ones.
Ghoultown's thunderous Tales of the Crypt transmogrification of Zane Grey's dusty-stampede world has never assumed deserved position in chart highlands. But that only illustrates Legs McNeil's dictum that cool music seldom enjoys mass popularity.
In the group's darkside rowdiness, guitars gallop like wild stallions with tone settings. Poundings-times-ten collude, lending animation against which spectral host Count Lyle's dead-man's drawl scrawls jaggedly.
Eyes wide and ears a-ring, slack-jawed townsfolk marvel at the spectacle: Sinister invocations so resolute as to force all bearing stunned witness into tonic-clonic floorshows.
Even Wyatt and Doc fall to their knees in sybaritic paroxysms.
It's been years since I stopped puzzling how the men who comprise Ghoultown developed staggering musical proficiency, when all around stank of human decay and lead-slingers from the netherworld sprang like wicked phantasms in midnight moments.
Wiser, I concluded, to unquestioningly dig the merging of remorseless metal and zombie-caballero airs that alternately hyper-pulse and unfurl in teasing ominousness, as ghastly swinging-saloon-doors-in-Twilight-Zone sagas bore into cerebra, never to be erased.
Mesa-looming wraiths etch Ghoultown's hard-lashed menace, Bone-cold determination is a core surrounded by echo-clad desolateness."We have 11 new tunes polished up and ready to record," reveals a Facebook Ghoultown message. "We can say the recording is coming along very well!"
Whispered words telling of Ghoultown's impending disc are no doubt passed down the bar from gunhand to apparition to saddle tramp to bloodsucker.
The barkeep polishes a glass, hoping to see sunrise.
Facebook
Bandcamp (All Ghoultown discs available here.)
Videos: "Bullets Don't Argue" "I Am the Night" "Drink With the Living Dead" (live)
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