It’s not a massive stretch, or even a tiny one, to imagine Captain Beefheart as a jester-like storyteller but, on his final three studio albums, an extra gothic tone streaks the magic. Tracks starring bats, crows, ghosts, mummies and witch doctors are ripe for Halloween IF they’ve got a gumbo bizarro groove and voodoo flow – and these three definitely add a little swampy sauce to the Hallows’ Eve jukebox.
With a hypnotic, trance-inducing beat that replicates windscreen-wiper motion, Bat Chain Puller (Shiny Beast) is smeared with abduction vibes. Let your imagine flow and it’ll soon soundtrack a ritualistic fire dance stumbled on by some hapless rural wanderer … who will never be allowed to leave. Sax blowouts amplify the carnival bizarre and time slows to a paralysing taunt from a conga train of freaks and face masks, primed to assimilate any accidental observer.
When I See Mommy I Feel Like a Mummy is the very next track on the same album and you couldn’t get a better follow-up if Santa fell into the wrong season and delivered it hiss-elf. Rhythmically, this track takes some beating – surely one of the band’s best. Everything is so locked in but so playfully loose as well. Don’t be taken in by Mommy Mummy’s immense catchiness, though – not today. It’s a trickster move. The oompah-ish rhythm signals jauntiness but when the sax and trombone squeal, like victims in your mangled mind’s eye, you know the lunatics have taken over. Cue a fade to black ending and a Wicker Man style fate. Doomed.
The final short arterial squeeze of this Beefheart triple is The Host, the Ghost, the Most Holy-O. Same sideshow, peoples. Try NOT imagining an incessant lurch of the undead. Impossible. A stuttering spiralling riff and whacked-out gang chorus are your captors while the Captain lords it up as the aloof MC.
Early Halloween greets! Ready for a seasonal resurrection from the metal crypt?
Good – because Celtic Frost‘s 1987 meisterwork Into the Pandemonium is a dead cert Halloween enhancer. Here’s why.
First, the artwork – that hellish extraction from Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch – is pure badass badness that lays out the goth factor before you even hit play, especially if you’re eyeing the cassette artwork where the zoomed-in crop brings more proximity to flames, falling bodies and all-round damnation.
Second, Celtic Frost always fits the ‘ween vibe and that’s a cold-bodied fact. But this album, when they went full tilt for orchestral strings, horns and operatic duets after To Mega Therion’s dabble, is a Halloween double-good. Avant garde was the descriptor of the day and whether or not that’s fully accurate, Pandemonium IS experimental and does smash genre orthodoxy and listener expectations so, for that, we salute. Art metal, progressive metal, experimental metal, maybe even death metal – as in, death hangs in its damp air – are all fair game, label-wise.
Looking at some reviews on Metal Archives though and we see that Into the Pandemonium isn’t universally loved. Lowest rating = 17%. Plenty of bile is hurled at One in Their Pride for its programmed beats, NASA samples and general non-metal spirit but it’s always sounded good to me, working like an oddball interlude where dashes of horror-suspense strings still manage to connect it to the rest of the record. Sure, it’s primitive tech-wise but this was 1987, FFS. What were electro-metal supremos Ministry doing back then?
Becoming Ministry, that’s what. They sure as shit weren’t doing Stigmata. Not yet.
Tom G Warrior’s voice draws plenty of criticism on the Archives – much bemoaning of the moaning. It’s almost a fair point but his style is essential to the Pandemonium mood and, surely, he’s gunning for an effect: the translucent nearly-dead. Hence the Halloween allure.
The first track is a cover of Mexican Radio (never checked the Wall of Voodoo original until today – decades of shameful oversight right there, it’s ace) and it rocks metally, but it’s the following Mesmerized that introduces the gothic undertones, un-thrash pace drag and wobbly spectrals that come to define Pandemonium’s tone. Claudia-Maria Mokri takes the backing vocals and Warrior’s guitar is, as ever, cloaked in mausoleum chill even when it flirts with 80s pop rock (anyone else getting a blinky flash of Steve Stevens’ pre-verse Rebel Yell riffing halfway through?). All the while, Martin Eric Ain’s rolling bass hollows the earthly life out of it.
Skipping past Inner Sanctum just for a sec, we get our first fully-fledged case of the non-metal avants. Tristesses de la Lune, all cold vapors and morose orchestration, is voiced entirely by Manu Moan and drips moonlit melancholy over dancing strings and buried buzzsaw grind.
But Rex Irae(Requiem) takes it further. This track, a full-on duet between Warrior and Mokri with an oddly groovesome meter, is the fullest realisation of orchestral haunt. String stabs, scrapes and accents alongside Warrior’s nearly-dead vox pitch into sweeping overtures that make it the goth standout of the album – and the first part of the Requiem triptych that took more than 30 years for Warrior to complete. If there’s one track to nab as a standalone Halloweener, this is it. Might as well add Oriental Masquerade while you’re at it, given that it shuts the album down with doomy ceremonial grandeur.
So, there’s no shortage of graveyard atmospherics on Into the Pandemonium … but that doesn’t mean it lacks blackened metallics either. Inner Sanctum predates thrash metal’s move towards the mainstream four years before the Black Album but with more diabolus in musica, and I Won’t Dance (the Elders’ Orient) fucking MOTORS with anthemic cool and unbreakable beats.
Really, for Halloween, you could pick pretty much any Tom G Warrior record and it’ll fit. Sticking with Celtic Frost, Monotheist‘s bleak pitch-black brutality and To Mega Therion‘s gothic thrash energy are both right up there. But for seasonal spook in sound and vision, Into the Pandemonium just about has the edge – more wayward, irrational, mercurial and over-reaching.
It’s just that bit more vamp, don’t you think?
Into hell, Into the Pandemonium
Cassette tracklist:
Mexican Radio Mesmerized Inner Sanctum Tristesses de la Lune Babylon Fell Caress Into Oblivion One in their Pride I Won’t Dance (the Elders’ Orient) Rex Irae (Requiem) Oriental Masquerade
(Sorrows of the Moon does not appear on the original tape but does appear on other formats. Tristesses de la Lune features Charles Baudelaire’s poem in French. Sorrows of the Moon is the English translation but has different music. Running orders vary depending on release and format. Confusing, I know…)
Deathly greetings all, how’s your horror-themed listening going . . . what’s that? Not got started? I feel your unfeeling zombie pain, my friend. It’s those pesky midweek Halloweens, isn’t it? Tuesday, my arse.
What we need is a perky goth-metal pick-me-up and that’s exactly what’s lined up
in a blog somewhere that actually knows what it’s doing.
In other words, not here. We’ll be gearing up for halloweenery high jinks with joyless, beatless bleakness.
Sorry. It’s SUNN O))).
SUNN O))) – A Shaving of the Horn that Speared You
Dare you to sit on your own at night and listen to this from start to end. Not as background, not in daylight, not while cooking or doom scrolling, none of that. Just you. And this. For 15 and a half minutes.
[note: the White1 CD booklet lies. It lists the track as 15’ 36” but in reality it crawls past that marker for two more whole minuteswhich, in SUNN O))) world, feels like three weeks.]
White1 is the album where SUNN O))) went prog, I guess. It’s avant drone metal gone batshit crazy with a wild collection of (very occasional) beats, guest voices, swathes of un-monolithic ambience and – wash your eyes, drone fiends – teeny fragments of clean guitar.
Being an avid Julian Cope fan, I first heard of SUNN O))) through his Head Heritage site where he’d wax hyper lyrical about them alongside Sleep, Khanate, Comets on Fire and too many other freakouts to count, convincing my clueless but curious self to pursue some of these subterranean sonic explorations. So, when White1 came out, it was the no-brainer SUNN O))) entry point, mostly because Cope himself was on it. The Drude was the safety net.
That track, My Wall, is a stupendous 20-minute tidal surge of low frequency fog ‘n drift that begins the album. Cope’s lengthy ode takes in Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Thor, Death, Ragnarok and more on his poetic voyage, and even SUNN O))) themselves (‘Play your gloom axe Stephen O’ Malley…sub bass clinging to the side of the valley’) get namechecked as Cope sermonises over death-knell riffs and tremorbass vibrations. ‘tis a magnificent gloomer and a genuine Halloween playlister.
But we’re not really here to talk about My Wall (much). Nor are we swinging on the offset hinges of The Gates of Ballard.
No, this Halloween we’re hanging with SUNN O)))’s biggest sonic experiment to date at that point: White1’s closing track, A Shaving of the Horn that Speared You.
Spooked the shite out of me on first play.
Admittedly, in hindsight, the conditions were possibly less than ideal. At the tail end of a monster Sunday hangover, it did seem like a good idea to check this brand new album in the end-of-weekend deadzone. So, lying on the floor of a basement bedsit in Hammersmith, headache fading, White1 went on and My Wall lulled.
Fell asleep.
Woke up in panic to deathly exhales, forlorn chimes and backwards, fuck-knows-what effects, terrified because it was all too horribly unsettling and disorienting. That was this, A Shaving of the Horn. It has haunted me ever since.
Sure, heard in full consciousness and/or daylight, it’s not that extreme. In fact, it’s not extreme at all, especially two decades of drone-and-noise exposure later, but there lies SUNN O)))’s grasp of atmosphere and future vision. The trademark oppression-by-force is gone. There is no feedback, riff or gloom axe. Instead there’s texture, intense space and undead vocalisms with vibrations that hum and swell. Fragments of orthodoxy – like a clean guitar strike – evade your touch as they warp and dissolve. It’s like you’ve been knocked unconscious and abducted, only to come round in some massive, living slow-breathing tomb while people outside ‘fix’ things.
Groaning and oozing. Death breaths. Things that should be inanimate but aren’t. This is what the track conjures. No climax, no payoff, no sudden death ending, nothing but a slo-mo creep masterclass. Dance to THAT, Tuesday Halloweeners.
PREDICTABLE FALSE ENDING ALERT
We need at least one gasp of light relief after all that nightmare psychedelia, so how about sticking this on your playlist? Old-school wormhole guaranteed to follow.
BLACK SABBATH – The Shining
Think ‘80s Sabbath’ and you might think Dio. Fair enough, but that was all over by 1982. Really, it’s the Tony Martin years that best define Sabbath metal in the 80s and The Shining has it all: killer riff, soaring vocal hook, nailed-to-1987 keyboards and posturing videos with dry ice and windswept women with birds. Lots of Tony crosses too. Extra points here for Martin’s un-Sabbath fashion sense … but then again, all of Sabbath was un-Sabbath by this point. Rocking tune, ripe for a Halloween replay. Rise up!
amplifier wordsmith 