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.

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Videos: "Bullets Don't Argue"   "I Am the Night"   "Drink With the Living Dead" (live)   

The Psychodelics

Small But Mighty   EP

(Psychodelic Records)

Rising from the lab tilt-table is a creature stitched from outsider stylings. Punk, Psycho, and Rockabilly flesh are joined in crazy-quilt calculations that couldn't seem more torpedo-savory to quiffed wrecking-pit grapplers who have mail delivered to all-night monster-movie marathons.

Recommended: "Small but Mighty," "We'll Never Die," "Talk To the Dead," "Shut Up and Drive," "Good Kitty"

Videos: "Small but Mighty"   "We'll Never Die"   "Good Kitty"

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The Cramps

Smell of Female   CD or digital

(Big Beat Records / Ace)

Big Beat loosed anew several of the cellar-discotheque ghouls' back platters, 1983's Smell of Female being one twistedly alluring specimen. Kid Congo had by this juncture thrown in with caclcified cryptkeepers Lux, Ivy, and Nick Knox (scarred and gaunt Bryan Gregory having taken his axe beneath ground). Reverential reinventions of Roky Erickson, Hasil Adkins, and a notorious, curvy  cult flick invaded. Six tracks taken from a Peppermint Lounge spectacle the original release offered are here joined by bonus slices "Beautiful Gardens" and "She Said," recorded in the same witching hours. Additional extra song "Surfin' Dead" was the scare-cell's contribution to 1985 flick Return of the Living Dead. 

Recommended: "Thee Most Exalted Potentate of Love," "You Got Good Taste," "Faster Pussycat," "I Ain't Nuthin' But a Gorehound," "Psychotic Reaction," "Beautiful Gardens," "She Said," "Surfin' Dead"

Videos: "Thee Most Exalted Potentate of Love" (live)   "Faster Pussycat"    "I Ain't Nuthin' But a Gorehound" (live)   "Surfin' Dead" (official video)

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The Phantom A.D.

Revenge of...the Phantom A.D.

(Rock N Rhythm Records)

He never drinks...wine. Here in the Phantom A.D.'s cobwebbed, latex-monster hood, darkness is a 24/7 proposition. Splenetic chords race like risen-from-beneath, demolition terrors, hip to the ways of lost avenues Rock'n'Roll. Swirling his cape while surfing atop a saucer, The Phantom A.D. growls enunciations that bespeak horrors good men know not. Martin Milner scrambles for exit, though Mickey "Bip Bop Boom" Hawks and Shadowman Link stick around where the action is.

Change for the strange, it comes: In months before us, the Phantom A.D. will unfurl finger-popping bizzaritude across Norman Rockwell's placid middle states.

(Backstage, respect is due Isaac Rother. The man behind this all is a prolific composer, shaper of six-string stimulations, and master contriver of monstery kicks.)

Recommended: "Revenge of the Phantom," "Spider Baby," "Chainsaw Rock," "Alley of Terror," "13 Ghosts (in Illusion-O)," "Phantom's Rumble," "Mark of the Vampire," "Gator's Grin"

Videos: "Spider Baby"   "Chainsaw Rock"   "13 Ghosts (in Illusion-O)"   "Phantom's Rumble"   "Gator's Grin"

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North Carolina's Tremors: Primitive Plan 9 Bop

Jimmy Tremor (né Gardner), leader of North Carolina's sigogglin  hillbilly rockers the Tremors, ensured that they varied little over the course of 5 CDs. And the concept stalks yet.

The feral cats howl at the blood moon, from the red clay tobacco roads of America's lost-hick reality. They pitch runaway ruckus like gun-totin' revenuers are sneakin' through the sourwoods.

The string-tied booger men's credibility is beyond dispute. The three have torn up stages with illustrious fellow sons of the soil, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Hasil Adkins, and storied mountain dancer Jesco White.

They've knocked back audiences in both clubs and festivals, the Oneida Rockin' 50s Fest, Nashville Boogie, and Heavy Rebel Weekender numbered among the latter.

The trio was even inducted into the Hillbilly Hall Of Fame. An introductory HHoF post described them as "Hillbilly rock stars" whose "back story includes both zombiefication and alien abduction."

Jimmy now relates that the combo is working up fresh compositions. Before those loom for appreciation, appraisal of previous years' successes is appropriate.

1 - SCOURGE OF THE SOUTH

The debut disc doesn't wipe its feet or cover its coughs. It aptly portrays their helter-skelter personality, and is a rumbustious howdy-hi to Big Beat disciples who hunger for crudely crazed Rebel Sounds. 

Jimmy's manic picking is unerring. It summons a spasmodically jerking regiment of vintage Americana melodies, at once familiar and freshly inebriating.

Besides being gotta-buy wax, Scourge of the South blasted defiant notice that the South was rising again - this time, from beneath soil.

2 - URANIUM ROCK  ep

Venerated sides that Warren Smith and Mack Vickery set loose in days when Sam conspired on Union Ave., came in for cattywampus reanimations amongst Jimmy's own calcium-rattling screeds. 

Too, while his hiccuped yowlings remind of Hasil Adkins and Pat Buttram, they are possessed by singular strains. Jimmy's jittery stumpjumper implorings, punctuated now and again by strangled yelps and white lightning-speed treble note guitar squallings, buckdance athwart plateaus of backwoods psychosis.

The tunes veer twixt marble-orchard mausoleums and mad-doctor Strickfadenery, with insane-in-the-brain vigor. Risen Maila Nurmi and her grieving, old man husband hunt Inspector Clay, while taking care not to bump cardboard plot markers.

3 - INVASION OF THE SAUCERMEN

The trio's riveting creature-bop was by this juncture loved by legions of the finger-popping undead. Sparks-shooting fervor from the B-movie beyond transmogrified backwoods hidey holes into hardwood juke joints. Rotted ghouls, already drunk as Cooter Brown, were in there like June bugs.

Drummer Stretch Armstrong and doghouse dancer Slim Perkins contrive some of the most frenetically rollicking rhythms on offer. They are crucial to the band's schizzing rocketship.

Jimmy's skewed sermons were punctuated now and again by strangled hoots, and reached dizzying heights of blood-freezing tiltedness.

4 - DEMON BOOGIE FEVER

Demon Boogie Fever careened through swerve 'n' stitch territories not found on conventional maps. The basic sound was more pronouncedly hillbilly than before. But what they did with that -- players twisted and contorted it into a strange new entity of unspeakable visage -- accounted for its wonder.

Here resounded stark and freakish hills terror. The slapped-up/stripped-down trio reveled in hectic and gruesomely-technicolored fracture, quaffing B-monster homebrew like they didn't care if it riled the Devil.

"When I was calling around to get the mechanical rights for the cover songs, I called Knox Publishing concerning 'Rock Boppin Baby," Jimmy once recalled. "The man who answered the phone said they didn't handle it there, but was curious about which song I was interested in. When I told him, he said, "That's an old song. I played on that.

"It turns out that I was talking with Roland Janes - I couldn't believe it! He seemed like a very nice, humble guy who had no idea of how extremely important his music really is."

5 - OLD FASHIONED HILLBILLY FEUD

This marks the studio debut of bassman Lowbrow Luke. He charges menu items with double bass navigations that manifest barndance bedlam. The good-time midnight special just barely stays on steel; songs never quite fly from the track, testament to the band's prowess amidst mad tempest.

The title cut and "Cabin Fever" are trademark Tremors: good-timey rampages that flip, flop, and fly off the chicken coop roof. Stretch and Lowbrow wreak assuredly frenetic rhythms that'll knock a mud hole in you and walk it dry.

(And when Jimmy dashes all 'round the fretboard during the fevered cover of "Wreck of the Old '97," you'll swear that he's lost his religion.)

Given the 5 discs considered above, the in-progress material to which Jimmy alluded needs to be in a very special class of reckless crazy. Smart money lets out with a big ol' Yee Haw!

The Palatinos

"Midnight Drive-In Show"  single

(Rebel Roots Records)

None of the necking juvies dug that post-transmogrification Lawrence T. was padding between steamed-windows Buicks, Chevys, Fords, and Plymouths. Preserved here is audio documentation etched in rhythm: Killer-cool bop creeps ominously; the narrator intones spook-cinema particulars, as lunar-bathed sax and stalking stand up mesmerize; six strings sting like stilletos. If Brian Setzer and Bobby Pickett sat down with a songcraft pad between them...

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Contessa & the Squires

Horrorama   EP

(Self-issued)

An Italian trash-Rockabilly combo whose niche teemed with squirming lovers of the bent string. Contessa & the Squires issued this in 2016. "The worst Rock'n'Roll in Florence" was their tag, though only plausible if one defined "worst" as so ginchy and danceable as to induce finger-popping paroxsyms among the Lunar-bathed risen.

Word that Horrorama has sold out only hastens procurers.

Recommended: "Monster Jamboree," "Rockabilly Sabbath," "Lost Boys," "Wolfgirl"

Videos: "Monster Jamboree"   "Lost Boys"   "Wolfgirl"

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Cherry Auction

California Psychobilly   digital EP

(Sleepy Ghost Records)

Monsters tantalize. Just as rugged rampaging turns up here, so, too, do teasingly drip-drip-drip sinister movements. Like Horror authors and filmmakers, Cherry Auction understands suspense yields reward; the combo cleverly exploits same. The cumulative experience is jaggedly haunting. 

Recommended: "Bloodslide," "Surfin' On Elm Street," "Dead Ex-Lover," "The Manor," "Zoltan"

Videos: "Bloodslide"   "Zoltan"  (live)

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