Type O Negative might be a bone-crushingly obvious choice for Halloween. But that’s because they bone-crushingly OWN the goth metal Halloween soundscape, and if previous Halloween blog posts have been a bit fallow for haunting Type O replays, this year it’s full harvest – been end-to-end back-to-back Type O Negative albums all week.
And because the Brooklyn four bleed love, loss and death from every pore, you know there are deep cuts on every album that fit the season. So, let’s go there. Let’s cut a little deeper.
And slower.
Suspended in Dusk: time to hang.
“Damn me Father, for I must sin …”
From their many epics, Suspended in Dusk must be the slowest and the most atmospherically gothic. Hidden in the back catalogue like a shadow-lurking creephead, it snuck out as a ‘Previously too embarrassed to release’ B-side on the Christian Woman single. Then it loomed long over the digipak version of the Bloody Kisses album – the one with the thrash-punk and pisstaker tracks extracted so the slower, lusher, Type O vision could be revealed.
Which means there’s a fair chance that some ToN fans won’t even have heard it. That’s not going to change with this blog because I’ve got fewer readers than Michael Myers has facial expressions, but so what? Suspended in Dusk is pure gothic suspense in vamp’s cloaking:
“With every victim I pray for my own death
And as much as I love the night
I curse the moon’s eerie glow
This bloodlust that drags me to forever
The toxic rays of dawn that condemn me to limbo.”
Across eight and a half minutes of trademark Type O layers – groaning downer riffs, cavernous hymn-like surges, twilight-tinkling keyboards, funeral bpm – Pete Steele inhabits the vampire and somehow conveys the hopeless plight of the eternally condemned.
What’s that creaking and groaning? Ghosts? Vamps? Haunted floorboards?
No. It’s a barrel being scraped … welcome to a Halloween playlist that doesn’t even have a proper theme. Last year we had a bunch of creep-o cover versions, now we’re just repeating a formula – metallic spook ’em up tunes, retro-naff rock vids, seasonal nostalgia, you know the score – and beating it into a shallow grave, just like any good slasher film franchise.
But what mood are we going for this Halloween? Let’s use album cover art as yardsticks. If we get it right, we have something that feels as good as this artwork looks:
the right vibe
If we get it a bit wrong, it feels like this:
not right, is it?
And if we get it disastrously wrong…
???????????????
Let the music begin.
SECRET CHIEFS 3 – UR – Pesonnae: Halloween Mix III Holy disco volante! MrBungle have a new album out TODAY, twenty bloody years after the last one and it couldn’t be better timed, so let’s use that event to milk a Trey Spruance connection – let’s fill our sweetless buckets with this, a Season of the Glitch version of the mother of all chiller theme tunes. Thank you SecretChiefs3.
CATHEDRAL – Funeral of Dreams Halloween nights are damp. And draughty. And nothing captures damp draughts quite like Cathedral. Must be the flares. Obviously, they’ve got oodles of doom crawlers in their back catalogue but that’s not what we want today – we want some sort of pulse, not flatlines, and this little tinker has an unholy blend of right-on riffage, ghost choir, church bells and general tippy-toe creepabouts. Sorted.
ADAM AND THE ANTS – Ants Invasion Nothing builds tension quite like a man running away from … ants. Does it? Erm … anyway, check the terror elements packed into this deeper Wild Frontier cut: scratchy-ominous guitar motif. Time running out. Wrong decisions. A lifeless man, a strange incision. Fear. ANTS. Fucking ants, man. Biting guitars, mind.
ELECTRICWIZARD – WizardinBlack Dopethrone is more celebrated, but ComeMyFanatics is more B-movie, and right now we’re all about the low budgets. And tiny drums. And a Hammer House Satan opening his bowels in the background. A double-wizard bonus, does it get any more Halloween than this?
HELLOWEEN – KidsoftheCentury Helloween aren’t remotely Halloween, except their track Halloween (which is totally Halloween but a bit long. Great intro though). Anyway, the metal pumpkins are here, as are fried egg eyes, forks, bloody hands, floating guitars and shite-knows-what. YES.
SLAYER – Gemini You can’t beat a slow thrash for maximum intensity … hang on what is this, S&M Weekly? NO. It’s Slayer, crushing bones with their super slow serial killer intro thing. No kinks in this one.
CLIPPING – Nothing is Safe You know when you watch a fire and get mesmerised by the flames, so much so that you don’t realise you’re getting closer and closer until you smell your own eyebrows burning? That’s a bit what this is like. All hail Clipping.
ALICE COOPER – (He’s Back) The Man Behind the Mask It’s hard to believe that videos like this ever got made, such is their monumental shitness. But they did, and all Halloweens from then on are eternally grateful. Aren’t we? [Smashed pottery spoiler alert: HE’S OUT OF CONTROL].
HAPPY HALLOWEEN, see you in the Last Crack Sinister Funkhouse. No?
Halloween’s upon us and you know what that means – a chance to throw up a highly contrived spook-em-up playlist, all in name of rocking goodness. This year’s theme?
Cover versions. Covers that dirge, haunt or creak in their overhauls of the originals. Covers that gone done a massive creep on your front step.
Iron Maiden not featured. Eddie not finished
GET UR FREAK ON
MissyElliott … not what you’d expect from this band but it’s brilliant. And falsetto funny. And the guitar-blowout ending packs more fuzz than a werewolf’s merkin. It’s Eels. Dance to the power E.
I’M NOT IN LOVE
The lushest hit of the 70s? Maybe. Always hated it. The worst air-con blow-dry pop you could imagine – until you grow up a bit, hear how they made it and acknowledge 10CC’s vision and especially Godley & Creme’s experimentalism. You might never love the song but at least you object to it less. Then Tori Amos slides over and … turns it into a stalker’s kill song. It’s a good job she kept the vocal melody because without the safety of that familiar hook, we’d be crying like abandoned pups.
ROCK ON
It’s already a bit creepy, and not just because it’s David Essex – check that production and bass, it’s fucking amazing – so perhaps Tortoise don’t have much to do. But we know them better than that. What they do is take Rock On’s already-too-close vibe and pull it even nearer. Add a seedier intro, drop the second-half strings, feel the smoke-stained ghost of Pre-Millennial Tricky.
THE SUN ALWAYS SHINES ON TV
A-ha. Literally. Top of the pops with perfect cheekbones, who’d want to murder this? Nadja, that’s who. Except they don’t murder it. They unleash their tidal drone and bulldoze the pop out of it, revelling instead in subterranean effluence and dark earth tremors. For something more metal – and half a day longer – sign up to their slowed and stretched Slayer homage, Dead Skin Mask.
HEY JOE
We can’t have Halloween without Brooklyn’s gothic sons TypeONegative leering over us (Dead Again fills the ears while writing this). But we’ve already featured Paranoid as the best reworked metal cover of all time in a previous post (link below), so this year let’s have a Type O party with a bitter twist of Hendrix.
MONKEY
Low have a reputation for slow-core intensity and atmos, and Monkey definitely falls into one of their darker holes. How can you up the tension while staying on the original’s underlit road? Get the guy who can interpret a song better than anyone. Get Robert Plant to do it. His Band of Joy collective amplify its seductive burn and yes, it tops the source.
FORWARD TO DEATH
Not a household hit, granted, but this is just too hyperactively oddball not to include. DeadKennedys music is well suited to this time of year and here, Nomeansno sink their wild prog hardcore chops into it. Except they don’t. Voices only, a cappella. Vaguely unsettling.
COME TOGETHER
Great tune, goes without saying, and there’s something of a shadowy hush about it already. But if you need a beefed-out dragged-down version spooked up with a hypnotic string bend and a damp Louder Than Love vibe … Soundgarden.
THE GREEN MANALISHI
Nothing radical in this arrangement because it’s already slow, voodoo-heavy and verging on a breakdown. Who does it heavy justice? Not Judas Priest. MELVINS. Smell the glue. Then stick around for the last minute of beast-howl disintegration. That’s your Halloween bonus right there.
HURDY GURDY MAN
Let’s finish with a video – because it’s as wrong as any horror you’ll see this week. Nice one, buttholes.
For a few more Hallo-weeny playlists, try sticking these in your bag of tricks. Or treats…
GREETINGS, schlock pickers. Ready for some deranged voicework this All Hallows’ Eve? Good.
We’ve said it before but if Melvins are Halloween’s house band then super-colluder Mike Patton is surely one of its top MCs. From loverboy whispers and honeyed sweeteners to lullaby daymares, carnival histrionics and pure fucking gibberish, he does it all – and then some. Never more than a beat away from innocence or insanity, it’s this wanton skittery that makes him the rock-vocal equivalent of cinema’s most amoral psychos: the ones who do bad shit justbecause.
So, we’re digging the grave (yes) of his more rock-heavy oeuvre. If you’re short of time, hit When Good Dogs Do Bad Things first and fill the gaps later. 11 tracks, audio only, no videos except for our short sharp opening shot of… Will Smith?
Too right. Patton is the voice of his I Am Legend post-human nemesis.
FAITH NO MORE: SURPRISE! YOU’RE DEAD! Could have chosen Zombie Eaters for the title alone, but no. For those of us snagged into FNM’s world by We Care A Lot, The Real Thing was our first exposure to the new guy and it takes just four tracks for him to go voco-loco on our No Faith ears. The start of a new era.
MELVINS: GI JOE Boneyard beats in a street-smart bed. Non-maniacal menace. All in day’s work for a Melvins/Patton/Ipecac project.
DEAD CROSS: CHURCH OF THE MOTHERFUCKERS It’d be easy to pick the Bauhaus cover from the Dead Cross debut but Bela Lugosi’s Dead is all over Halloween anyway, so let’s gather for a more visceral midnight mass instead.
FANTOMAS: DER GOLEM A flawless, monstrous body of classic horror themes skewered and reassembled with grotesque results, The Director’s Cut is one of those albums that’s end-to-end fright-night perfect. It’s why their depraved Omen made our first playlist five years ago because it’s bound for the asylum on a brakeless hell-cart. Anything from this record could make the cut and this year, it’s Der Golem. Slow and Slayer heav-eee with Patton escalating the madness.
TOMAHAWK: WAR SONG Pace breaker, mood changer, heavy atmos spirited up from the rituals and songs of the Native Americans, Tomahawk style.
PEEPING TOM: SUCKER
Light relief with this voyeuristic hip-pop project, but it still fits. Check the seductive call-and-response voicework, catchy as balls.
DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN: WHEN GOOD DOGS DO BAD THINGS As if throwing your Salem’s Lot in with Slayer and Melvins wasn’t OTT enough, Patton threw his vocal pyros at this four-track EP back in 2002. Precision mathprogmentalism at its most possessed, Good Dogs is a frenzied attack whose first two minutes leave you savaged. After that, the lull a-bye-bye and slasher false end finale. Mike Patton’s finest six minutes? Maybe. Just load the EP and lose your senses in this one-off detonation of demented genius.
TOMAHAWK: WHEN THE STARS BEGIN TO FALL Tomahawk goes sneakabout and throws in some theramin? Perfect. Duane Denison’s chords muster the tension, Patton blows and soars.
KAADA PATTTON: INVOCATION Bacteria Cult is a better-named Kaada Patton record, but Romances gives us Invocation, a genteel creep that’s 60s sound-effect spectral and almost the ghost side of Fantomas – without the bloody metallic body parts.
FAITH NO MORE: MALPRACTICE A twisted tale of christknowswhat, under-the-knife molestation? Jagged riffage and a symphonic pile-up that’s borderline cacophonous, Malpractice is another of Patton’s most out-there Faith No More moments. APPLAUSE??? Done like a slain beast.
MR BUNGLE: THE HOLY FILAMENT It’s not their most avant or celebrated album – I guess Disco Volante is – but California packs some of Mr Bungle’s most potent moments and the score-ish Holy Filament is a mellow supernatural sliver of an ending to this year’s playlist. The first half sweats tension, the second half sweeps a falsetto from the afterlife.
Happy listening? We didn’t even mention perhaps THE most fitting Patton track of all, and that’s because it’s an album: Delirium Cordia by Fantomas (who else?). A score of fragments and wide-open spaces means that between the bursts of Patton garble, Lombardo assault, ghostly ambience and white noise, your mind has much room to roam about in – and if you’ve flicked the album’s artwork, those pristine surgery scenes (dislodged eyeball, intestinal wash) make you feel a wee bit queasy. And there’s no escape, because it’s a 75-minute track. You can’t skip anything. Trapped, imprisoned and captured till you hit the 20-minute vinyl run-out groove at the end. Music for voluntary confinement … keep the lights off if you dare.
For a less sombre listen with some mildly retro metal videos, check Hairy Halloween I and II from the last couple of years, or dabble in the gothic splendour of the late Saint Pete of Steele and Type O’s Sabbath slowdown. PUMPKINS OUT, over.
A pumpkin-grin welcome to anyone who’s there, and this year’s handful of Halloweeny hitters is a straight follow-up to last year: another blast of old-school rock tracks, videos and vibes that fit the ‘ween thing, and like all slasher sequels, it’s probably not as good as the one before…
…OR IS IT??? Wait for the dark.
JOE SATRIANI: Big Bad Moon
What do you want from a Halloween vid? A dark, deserted street? Check. Full-moon menace? Yep. Amplifier being kicked down the stairs so a guitarist can solo the frig out of it? Errrrrrr no, but why the hell not??? Enter Big Bad Moon. Not only is the mood right, but you get an electro-shock Satch hair-ender that’s undead-worthy (low budget special effects version). Killer tune, killer solos.
TOOL: Stinkfist
Less blitzy than Satriani, but Stinkfist does anything but reek. Any number of Tool tunes could make a dark-side playlist, and this creepsome promo makes Tool a shoe-in. Check the Stinkfist sand people, watch ’em peel.
MR BUNGLE: Quote Unquote
Odd weird. Sinister weird. Which is what you expect from Mr Bungle, right? Soundtrack to a death circus. With masks.
JUDAS PRIEST: Turbo Lover
Sure, A Touch of Evil makes more sense on the surface, but we’re not going as deep as surface here – we’re going for the vibe, specifically the Terminator-as-argonaut retro stink flying off this hilariously shit video. Rocking tune, though.
DAVID BOWIE: Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)
A fair few Bowie tunes could land on a list like this, but if atmosphere and menace are on the menu instead of literal Scary Monsters, the predatory pre-Blackstar Sue (Or in a Season of Crime) jazz ensemble racks it up nice and noir.
VOIVOD: Astronomy Domine
Did anyone else find the Tribal Convictions video a bit creepy as a kid? No? OK, that’s embarrassing. Let’s have a disembodied Voivodian vocal in a flicker-flicker-flicker-bam Floyd cover with a video of a band on a rotating wheel instead. Better?
ALICE COOPER: Killers
The creep factor in this version of Is It My Body has nothing to do with Alice stage props and effects – it’s pre-Nightmare, but Cooper was a theatrical master even when his props were nothing more than a shiny onesie, a shoe and a pink leotard. Classic. But this video for Killer (live) is a wee bit more showtime, shall we say. If the noose fits…
SMASHING PUMPKINS: Ava Adore
Graced with gothic electronica, alt-rock’s very own Uncle Fester goes full Nosferatu in the video – check the Corgan choreography for some pretty slick Nosfer moves you’ll wanna steal.
If ever there was a Halloween house band, Melvins would surely be it. Tool could do visuals, but there are no visuals here – get the headphones, kill the lights and sink deep into a 15-minute pit of top-grade Toolvins.
AC/DC: Night Prowler
A rat runs down the alley, and a chill runs down your spine…can there be a better lyric to end on? Pure slasher, a Bon ace over a deadly, bluesy groove.
But you can’t really have a halloween sequel without a farcical false ending, so … a heroic big-hair resurrection it is – check the big-budget cheapness in this Elm Street cornball. Who were those guys, Freddie? Eh? Lynch axe still cuts it, mind.
Last year we took in a few soundtracks and noir-funk jazz scores to make a break from any metallicus extremicus noise stuff. This year, we’re going for the retro metal sound: mostly classic bands from the late ’80s or thereabouts, a bit of a slasher vibe, a bit of ‘remember that?’ in 11 (yes) tracks. WARNING: hair metal is on this list, no apologies. DOKKEN: Mr Scary Big hair kick-off? Too right. George Lynch had one of THE guitar tones of the 80s, a tone that would sit on any commercial horror of the day (maybe that’s why they did Dream Warriors for Nightmare on Elm Street 3) but this heavy instrumental from Back for the Attack is a shock for anyone who missed it, thinking that Dokken were nowt but hair and teeth. Well, they ARE hair and teeth, but Mr Lynch’s Mr Scary is a scorching exception and a horror-themed must. OZZY OSBOURNE: Suicide Solution (live version from Tribute) Can there be a rock voice more suited to Halloween than Ozzy’s doleful projections? Doubtful. But this live version (can’t find it on youtube) does more than showcase Ozzy – as the album title says, it’s a Randy Rhoads gig and the Suicide Solution solo has enough stuttermoanandscreech to commune with the undead any time of the year. MEGADETH: Go to Hell Snarling sneering wavy Davy, so Mustainey. Lost on a Bill and Ted OST, Go to Hell makes the list because it’s not overplayed, it’s literally hellish and it’s got one of those thrash-sinister vids that captures the right atmos – low sophistication and max impact, just like the flicks we’ve already mentioned. Bit weird. Decent tune. Exhume. JANE’S ADDICTION: Ted, Just Admit It Right, we’ve had George Lynch and Dave Mustaine, but what connects them? Dave Navarro (yep) – they both appeared on Navarro’s guitar tutor videos online (well worth a look, ‘specially to see Dave N fail to master Dave M’s admittedly awesome spider-chord) – and so we might as well have a bit of Jane’s … might as well have Ted, Just Admit It. Detached and creepy and wrapped in Ted Bundy, it erupts as violently as the lyrics: art shocker. What a band. CARCASS: Incarnated Solvent Abuse Video. Black rubber. That’s all I’m saying, scared the shite outta ma younger self. Weirdly disturbing and low-budget effective, it’s a grindsome tempo shift with a guitar tone to die for. Or be suffocated by. CELTIC FROST: Rex Irae (Requiem) Haunting theatrics abound on 1987’s cold bold foray Into the Pandemonium, and none more than Rex Irae (Requiem) here as a half-dead sounding Tom G trades lines with afterlife siren Claudia-Maria Mokri over heavyweight orchestration. DANZIG: Soul on Fire Evil Elvis, Fonzig, whatever he’s been called he’s definitely a singer with a fine bag of halloween pipes, and there’s enough demon, possession and Samhain refs for some proper rocking out on All Hallows’ Eve. Not spooky, but it’s Danzig, right? It just fits. Got the attitude. In fact, you might as well just play the whole album from Twist of Cain right through to Evil Thing. MOTORHEAD: Nightmare/The Dreamtime The least-Motorhead track Motorhead ever did, except for the one that named the album that this track came from (1916). Semi-ambient, drumless, bassy, keyboardy and loaded with Lem-menace thanks to a fistfulla backwards masking. Golgotha, ace of spades, damn right. METALLICA: The Small Hours Check that opening. Tension? Ominosity? Double yes, that’s the soundtrack to Stalkerville Central and it’s backed by a predatory proto-grunge riff lurching outta the shadows of 1987. Still haven’t heard the original, mind. MELVINS WITH JELLO BIAFRA: In Every Dream Home a Heartache Hunter S Thompson said that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Melvins have been pro all their lives, but on Everybody Loves Sausages they went for Roxy Music at their creepiest and outcreeped it by letting Jello Biafra do the vocals. Not only does he sound uncannily like Bryan Ferry – true, hear it here – but, being Biafra, he ups the sinisterism without even trying. Oh, and it’s heavy as a bastard as well. WHITESNAKE: Still of the Night Go on, HAVE IT. Light relief with ace riffs. He hears the wolf howl (honey), sniffing around your door. Here’s the tune, but if you want the video for an old-time’s laff…. Not cool enough? Seriously? Then here’s a lawless screamer to bang a final nail in a hairsome Halloween playlist before you load up a classic late-night film… Prince of Darkness, anyone?
It started with a wolf, howlin’. Evil (Is Going On) was on BBC 6Music in all its electric-version glory as part of a ‘ween spesh, and it was soon followed by I Put a Spell On You. Classy sassy stuff (thanks Cerys Matthews). Got me thinking: instead of a bleak-o heavioso metallic horror soundtrack for halloween this year, why not go for some killer (yes!) atmos? The creep not the scream, the shadows not the gallows. Tension over bludgeon.
Henry Mancini.
Now, your man Cini might not be in thrall to demons and satan and Marshall stacks, but what is Shot in the Dark if not a tip-toed creepabout? Ditto The Pink Panther Theme and double ditto the perfectly titled Experiment in Terror, its sticky harpsichord adding enough gothic suspense for Fantomas to wind it through their avant mangle on The Director’s Cut (mentioned this album a couple of halloweens ago, insane and essential is what it is).
But if we’re on the prowl for a killer soundtrack that’s literal, we need a killer, so let’s call on the guy who always gets the shit end of the stick – the big fella, the head-clean-off guy, the in-all-this-excitement guy: Harry Callahan. Lalo Schifrin’s Dirty Harry seedy funkjazz score dwells in permashadow and night-time neon, and in No More Lies, Girl we even get a mention of halloween. It’s too jaunty a track for tonight though so for max creep you gotta go to Prologue/The Swimming Pool, Scorpio’s View, The Cross, Floodlights and School Bus (and you’ll not hear a filthier bass this side of November than Scorpio’s View and School Bus, promise).
From Dirty Harry we take a cinematic sidestep to Harry’s namesake …. Dirty Barry. Sounds dodgy already, like a cross between Pulp’s Seductive Barry and Mark and Lard’s Fat Barry White, but it’s by the guy who’s almost got the Addams Family name, one Barry Adamson. Check Oedipus Schmoedipus and there it is, track six, but skip back a few and you also land on Something Wicked This Way Comes.
See where we’re going now? Down the unfound road to a Lynch-ing with the nails of nine inches for bad company, aka Lost Highway, David Lynch’s unfathomable 1997 trip that’s tracked by as good a collection of goth-tinged electronic rock as you’re gonna get. Pulled together by Trent Reznor, it’s heavy on Angelo Badalamenti and B-Adamson scores and haunts, but there’s axe as well as strings. The Perfect Drug is perfect NIN– menace plus hook plus destruction plus ambience –Smashing Pumpkins get their pre-Adore electronic spook on with Eye, and David Bowie … well, he claims I’m Deranged from the never-bettered Outside.
Finally, for an axe-heavy non-Highway finale of monstrous bloody heft, dig up the bones of Another Body Murdered by Faith No More and Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E from Judgment Night soundtrack. Not a bunch of guys you’d want on your doorstep demanding sweeties.
Of all the seminal heavyweight scare-alls you could choose for a Halloween soundtrack, you’d be hard pushed to choose chillier than Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath from Black Sabbath – not just the slowest, most-ominous anti-groove put to tape at that point in heavy rock’s short history, but a track that’s got the imagery to match: the Hammer-horror dread that Ozzy conjures in your shitting-it mind and, of course, the spectral Presence on the album’s cover.
But despite all that, we’re not picking Black Sabbath the track for a Halloween playlist, not this year. 2014 belongs to PARANOID.
I’ve never much liked it.
Easily the least essential of Iommi and co’s anthems, it stands supremely un-tall against Sabba-manna like Wheels of Confusion, Fairies Wear Boots, Hole in the Sky and the like. No-one, surely no-one, would pick Paranoid’s pop-metal bounce ahead of any of those.
But what if it was slower – like, a LOT slower?
Or blacker – like, none-more-Tap blacker?
Or deader – like, graveyard undeader?
Cue Type O Negative.
If ever a band embodied the Halloween aesthetic and staked it with wry gallows’ humour, Type O are it. Halloween in Heaven, Black No.1, Bloody Kisses and All Hallows Eve are literal enough links but really, any track of theirs from Bloody Kisses onwards that’s not thrash-fast is pretty much game – Suspended in Dusk, Everyone I Love is Dead, Haunted, The Profit of Doom, take your pick. You get the gist.
But it’s the realm of the cover version that pulls everything together today. The band have got form in this area, lending the Negative touch to Neil Young, the Beatles, Hendrix and – most perversely/brilliantly – to 70s harmony-pop smash Summer Breeze, dragging the Seals and Crofts/Isley Brothers classic from sunshine floater to a slow-low-lower hot sticky trudge.
And so it is with Paranoid, stuck on the end of the faux-live pisstake Origin of the Feces.
Hypnosis-slow, lavishly arranged and knowingly soaked in trademark vampiric goth, Brooklyn’s least celebrated give Sabbath’s 3-minute chugger a makeover so total and so Type O that they absolutely own it: seven luxuriant minutes of pure Para-satisfaction, making it feel like the first time all over again.
Sneak a bit of Iron Man’s downward bender of a riff into the mid-section and you’ve not just got a top Sabbath tribute and a ‘ween classic for the rest of time.
You’ve got one of the best metal cover versions EVER.
*recorded in 1994, it’s 20 years cold!!!! Dig it out from post-94 issues of Origin of the Feces.
Aaah yes… Halloween, the most metal of yearly celebrations. What makes the playlist? Sabbath, Maiden, Misfits, Cradle of Filth?
I’ve got two favourites for All Hallows’ Eve but two ain’t exactly a playlist so let’s pad it out a bit first with a few other choice, possibly bloody, cuts. In no particular order:
APHEX TWIN – Come to Daddy. Even without the video of Aphex-faced hoodie thug manchilds, tower-block terror and TV-horrorthing screaming G-force hell in a pensioner’s face, this nail-hard track never sounds less than wholly possessed. Demonic electronica, anyone?
SUNN O))) – My Wall. Yeah, the creep kings of low frequency unsettle the vibe magnificently with this 25-minute oozer. You could pick from a tonne of SunnO))) tracks but My Wall has Julian Cope’s ritualistic spoken word giving it that extra resonance.
EXTREME – More Than Words. A shocker on every level.
SCOTT WALKER – anything from The Drift.
MELVINS – Goggles. A slo-mo dead-body DRAG of noise, screams and distortion straight out of a serial killer’s basement. Find it on Stag. Goggles is mixed by Alex Newport so that’s some extra heaviosity credentials right there.
NINE INCH NAILS – Screaming Slave. A nauseating deconstruction … could it be the S&M mutilation screams and violent industrial production? Yep, reckon so. Total assault. Never EVER fall asleep to this, you’ll awake to a wide-eyed nightmare. Get it from the Fixed EP of Broken reworkings.
OK, top 2 time. In reverse order:
FANTOMAS – The Omen (Ave Satani). In a word, diabolical. Patton, Osborne, Lombardo and Dunn hit new peaks in mania with this dementedly OTT version of Jerrry Goldsmith’s classic score. Utterly inspired, check the Director’s Cut for more killer themes.
And finally …
TYPE O NEGATIVE – Suspended in Dusk. Type O Negative are made for the year’s twilight and this track – all 8 and a half minutes of it – shows the Brooklyn crew at their slow, suspenseful, vampiric best. A dark highlight of the entire Type O back catalogue, Dusk was hidden away as a ‘previously too embarrassed to release’ bonus on Christian Woman. Funny bastards. RIP Pete Steele.
amplifier wordsmith 