Mark Statler and His Creepy Classic Chiller Band

This CD is perfect for Monster Kids of Boomer and Gen X age. Not exactly a Halloween CD, it is still an excellent choice for perking up one's Halloween spirit. An online description of the CD describes it as "Bluesy 50's-60's light rock and roll tribute to classic horror films of the 30's thru 50's." If you like The Moon Rays, you'll like Mark and his band.

Both nicely-performed covers and original songs are here, including Statler-penned tributes to the makeup men of Hollywood and a tribute song to the annual Monster Bash classic horror film convention. Best of the covers, IMHO, are these tunes: a kick-ass version of Al Caiola's arrangement of Mancini's Experiment in Terror, an energetic Haunted House, and a romantic crooning of Moonglow, which opens with a wolf (or maybe werewolf) howl in the background. (The song is nice contrast to the horror novelty selections.)

You can listen to excerpts from the CD, and buy a copy, at Indie Rhythm .

You can also purchase or download it from CD Baby.

OR you can help support the Monster Bash, a great convention, by buying it at this Creepy Classics page.

Recommended for Halloween!

BORIS KARLOFF AND HIS FRIENDS is a legendary LP from the late Sixties. On it, Monster Kids from that era were treated to an audio trip thru Hollywood horror history with Boris Karloff as the host. It was conceived and co-produced by musician, makeup artist and mask-maker Verne Langdon, who also created the classic albums The Phantom Of The Organ and Vampyre at the Harpsichord. It featured a script by everyone's "Uncle Forry," Forrest Ackerman, the editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.

There has never been a tape or CD release of the record since that time.

Until NOW!

This CLASSIC RECORDING from Electric Lemon Record C0. has been DIGITALLY RE-MASTERED as a CD from NEWLY-DISCOVERED ORIGINAL 15 IPS TAPE MASTERS! This never-before-heard Monster Mania Master has never sounded so good.

A hallmark of horror for your sense of hearing, it takes you back to that Golden Age in "Horrorwood, Karloffornia", when all those Universal-ly loved monsters were up to no good on the silver screen. Besides King Karloff, you'll also hear Boris's friends in frightdom, such as Bela Lugosi, in clips from the milestones of monster movies.

Boris' magnificently malevolent voice is elegantly backed by the musical grandeur of the massive, 34-ranks-of-pipes WURLITZER THEATRE ORGAN, with a score specially composed by Verne Langdon for the album.

The ORIGINAL AN EVENING WITH BORIS KARLOFF AND HIS FRIENDS is where the celebrated collector's album all began, and the CD's booklet includes Verne Langdon's personal account of the afternoon spent with Mr. Karloff. ALSO included are photos taken at the session from Verne Langdon's own personal photo collection. Never before seen pics of the King of Horror? I SO have to buy one of these! This really is one of my favorite records, and I highly recommend it!

You can too--HERE!

Farewell, maestro: Erich Kunzel passes

Procrastinating due to my sadness at the news, I am late in mentioning the passing of Erich Kunzel, conductor of the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, who died on Sept. 1st. The CD above is one of my favorites, and always gets played during the Halloween season here at Casa Cabeza, as well as occasional other times during the year. I am saddened to hear of the maestro's demise. (As is my friend, fellow blogger Erick Bognar of
Wonderful Wonderblog. His appreciation of Kunzel is here; I recommend it.)

Kunzel-the cultural heir to Arthur Fielder--and the Cincinnati Pops made almost 90 recordings with the Telarc label, and most were successful. He embraced recording suites and themes from movie and television scores, and recorded music from many science-fiction, fantasy, and horror genre films spanning most of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first century. He did not select good film music from popular successes only; for example, he recorded a thrilling theme from the turkey Judge Dredd, as well as the march-like main theme of the clunky, low-budget film The Beastmaster.

The following are pictures of other Kunzel and company genre recordings; each is a link to a site where you listen to preview tracks and purchase the cd. I hope you will. Typical TDSH readers have seen the shows the themes come from-- but if you buy Kunzel's versions, you can enjoy the music in a new way anytime you want, with imagery supplied from both your memories AND your imagination.

31 Days of Halloween: Recommendation #1

From time to time this month, I'll be recommending items for Halloween that I've gotten and enjoy.

The first recommendation is the newest CD by Midnight Syndicate, The Dead Matter: Cemetery Gates .

This is dark orchestral music perfect for setting a creepy mood. The musicians behind Midnight Syndicate, Edward Douglas and Gavin Goszka, create what they describe as "soundtracks for the imagination," and the music does sound like you might hear in a contemporary horror movie score, with elements of classic horror film scores as well.

I own several Midnight Syndicate CDs, and listen to them in the car, and play them at home occasionally. Or sometimes, when I'm in a mood to listen to orchestral music, I'll mix some tracks of Midnight Syndicate in with whatever else I choose.

But they get played most often at this time of year. I use them for Halloween parties and for eerie music for the trick-or-treaters who come to my door. They have quite an effect!
The music on Cemetery Gates is tied in with an upcoming independent movie titled The Dead Matter, which concerns ancient Egyptian occult relics, vampires, and the living dead (and directed by Edward Douglas.) Those elements influenced the motifs heard in the music recorded for CD, which is not a soundtrack album, though three bonus tracks from the movie are included. The music compositions presented are original compositions created solely for Cemetery Gates. My favorite tracks were Nightfall (effective stark use of solo piano), the title track Cemetery Gates (has a dreamy quality; also made me think of a dirge in waltz time), Alchemist's Chamber (I'm a sucker for it's use of organ and harpsichord) and Exodus (eerie blend of strident strings and cymbals.) You can hear excerpts by clicking here.

I found Midnight Syndicate CDs on a display stand at a local Party City; you can find them at Hot Topic and other stores. (Including internet outlets like Amazon; a list of online retailers can be found at this page.

Above: Musicians of the macabre, Edward Douglas and Gavin Goszka.


For this Halloween, The Dead Matter: Cemetery Gates is the CD for conjuring phantoms of the mind's eye. Buy it. Your imagination will be inspired and haunted by it.

To see a trailer for the The Dead Matter movie, click here (where you can enter a contest to win a trip to the premiere) or watch it at YouTube.

Rip Van Boy Man by David Patrick Kelly

David Patrick Kelly, one of my favorite actors, (and interviewed here) recently released a CD at CD Baby. It's titled Rip Van Boy Man, and I've heard it and love it, and want to recommend it here. He shows that not only is a considerable actor, but a talented singer/songwriter as well -- all songs on the CD but one were written by Kelly.

The album contains both new songs and material recorded in clubs in the mid-1970s (in Kelly's words on the CD sleeve, "New from Now and Live from '75"), but none of the tracks have been released before. Although the songs aren't weird, macabre or comedic like much of what I focus here at TDSH, the album certainly shows imagination and a sense of humor, and there are some dark elements in the poetic lyrics of a song titled "Seven Days".

I posted a review of it at the CD Baby site, and here's part of what I wrote:

"This CD collects some of Kelly's songs from his club scene days in the Seventies with some new material. We hear his youthful voice, when he sometimes sounded like an American John Lennon (esp. on "Lautrec in Mudlight"), to the smokier sound he has today. But in all the selections, his expressive voice has conviction and brings color and emotion to the lyrics, which often remind me of Lennon and Leonard Cohen. The lyrics of the title song 'Rip Van Boy Man', 'Seven Days', and 'Cupid and the Champ at Max's' are poetically memorable."

The title song alludes to the surprise of finding oneself older, and to the value in embracing both one's past and the present. "Cupid and the Champ at Max's" is a Paul Simon-like song about an ex-fighter the narrator knew once, and the impressions of joy they both felt in "lost moments." And the song 'Apologia' is a sly but honest embrace of one's flaws and the impossibility of being kind at all times to everyone in one's life, the narrator both amused and bemused at this condition we all find ourselves in. It is written in a style reminiscent of Leonard Cohen, and would do Cohen proud if he recorded it himself.

By a slight margin I liked "Seven Days" best (hard to say which is the best song, because I like all the original songs very much). I asked about Kelly about the song's melancholy lyrics that emphasize dream imagery, and which contain the refrain "Where are you?". He responded, "'Seven Days' is about people that I met in the former Yugoslavia in 1986. 'Where are you?' comes from a Serbian slang term meaning 'What's going on?' or 'What's Up?' but roughly translated is 'Where Are You?'."

Kelly uses the now non-existent country as a metaphor for his now-past youth, seemingly as marked by idealism and turmoil as the state he visited more than twenty years ago. It's a memorable piece of "alternative folk rock", the description Kelly gives to his songs on the CD. (It an e-mail, Kelly also described the album as "not thrash and burn...more lyrical like proto Radiohead.")

If you didn't click on the links above, be sure to click on the one below, so you can hear excerpts of the tracks-- and then place an order.

http://cdbaby.com/cd/davidpatrickkelly

Carnival of Souls -- the music video

Not a music video based on Herk Harvey's 1962 film, but a video by Kelly Mann with a creepy Verne Langdon musical (de)composition of the same name as its soundtrack.

The video is a montage of eerie images set to a theater organ/calliope version of the Langdon tune, heard on Langdon's CD release, The Carnival of Souls Collection. (Physical copies available for purchase here, and for download purchase here; brief previews of the tracks can be heard at the latter link.) Recommended.

Verne Langdon is the musician (and makeup artist, professional clown, and mask maker) who recorded the classic spooky records Vampyre at the Harpsicord and Phantom of the Organ, among others. (Some of you will recall seeing 'em advertised in the back of Famous Monsters magazine.) The music in Carnival of Souls will bring back fairground memories to its listeners, and probably Halloween ones, too.

That reminds me. One Halloween back in the '8os, I sat in a movie palace, The Orpheum in Memphis TN, and listened to the stage manager play strange and spooky music on the magnificent Mighty Wurlitzer organ for me and some friends. I can remember the vividly weird images the music brought to mind; it was one of my best Halloween experiences.

So go click on the link and get a little creeped out.

Update: If you like the Kelly Mann/Verne Langdon video linked to above, then you'll want the hi-rez, expanded video that will be on dvd! Coming out August 1rst, from Warren Music Group. Coming to an online retailer near you!