This is from the Nightmare on Elm Street 3 soundtrack. This track is somewhat corny, somewhat totally awesome. There's a little bit of its chill synth vibe that I wouldn't be surprised to hear on Pitchfork or something currently. I can smell the hairspray left over from these recording sessions.
Another one of the older songs I have this one is all the way from 1956 I believe. It's the Spiders which sounds like one of those great post swing songs. Early R+B I guess it'd be. I'm terrible with the older genres, but this is a great tune for the happier side of Halloween.
This is easily one of the oddest albums I have. Its out of the 80's so there's a lot of synths and poorly done new wave. Some of the songs just consist of yelling the chorus over and over with organ solos like this track, others have more lyrical content but there's a wealth of material to post.
Frankenstein and his Allstar Monster Band - Nightmares in the Sun
This is a somewhat kind of soundtrack album to Alfred Hitchcock Presents. What's crazy is despite being only 26, I used to watch that when it was on Nick and Nite and loved it. The Full and complete series was on Hulu a few years back but you may need to pay to watch all of it, if you dare.
Jeff Alexander and Alfred Hitchcock - I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance
Cannibal in the Headhunters are one of many forgotten (undeservedly so) garage soul bands from the early to mid 60's. They had a minor hit with a cover of Land of 10,000 Dances, but they have a lot of great material.
This is a great swinging little R+B song. My favorite part is the falsetto "Devillllll, In Disguise" chorus. The band reminds me a lot of some of Ray Charles stuff like Hit the Road Jack.
Sometimes I'm surprised in the 5 years I've done this I've yet to post some of the music going up. This is one I thought I put up years ago but realized it never made its way into a post. Sioxsie and the Banshees are one of those great unsung bands from England that never got as popular over hear as they probably should have. I think generally the population as a whole only has room to listen to so many bands or things because when certain bands don't become popular but others do I can never figure it out.
This may not be the scariest or even most relevant song I post. It's an isntrumental, however, I wanted to add it just for the creeping guitar part alone. Through use of effects The Deadly Ones create this laughing effect that I like to imagine is supposed to be the wail a ghost lets out while surfing...or something. I'm just in that kind of mood this month I guess so I'm easy on supernatural suggestion.
I make it a point to see any band I like. So far that has been a lot of bands from everything from George Clinton to the Beastie Boys to Guided By Voices. There's a part of me that is a little bit dissapointed I'll never get to see Bobby Boris Pickett play the Monster Mash live. At least he left an album's worth of music in addition to the Monster Mash.
This song, Sinister Stomp is a lot like the Monster Mash. It's not as catchy but it has this great backing vocal that floats behind the chorus of female singers. It shares a lot of the "Boris" cadence but is a great companion to the Monster Mash.
It's that time of year. Less than 2 weeks away and Halloween will be here. What are people going to be for Halloween this year? I will send the first two people to comment on the post a pack of Fright Flicks or Ghostbusters 2 trading cards. Yes they come with nearly 20 year old gum! I don't advise chewing it as it might kill you.
Back again, the posts are gonna start amping up here in time for Halloween. I'm excited to have some downtime this weekend and am gonna get working on finishing some remixes and mixes I'm putting together for the big weekend. Shameless plug time: If any of you readers out there want to share this and get some more readers in here, that'd be awesome and most appreciated.
This track reminds me of another one I posted a few years agoc called Ghostrider by Suicide. Suicide was more of a no wave band as opposed to the surf garage rock that Thee Oh Sees play.
If you dig this kind of thing there are a lot of bands with this particular sound and a lot of them are out of the San Francisco area. A band I posted a track from earlier in the year, The Fresh and Onlys are also out of San Francisco and just put out a new album called Play It Strange.
This is one of those songs that must have come from the studio or just a really bad creative type as this originally appeared on the soundtrack for Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw massacre 3. "You know what would be great? Let's get a sub par C-Rate Hair Bar Band to cover the Monster Mash".
It's charmingly cheesy. If you ever thought the original was dumb and ridiculous, or if you ever wanted a extended guitar solo in the Monster Mash, well then this will blow you away.
I was really surprised when my Dad referred me to some Good ELO songs one day on Facebook. I posted how I needed to listen to them and he told me to listen to Jungle which turned out to be a fantastic song. I instantly got into a bunch more ELO. It's a lot like latter era Beatles music with a little bit more of a classic rock feel as well. This track is originally from Face the Music.
More posts to come soon as I start to catch up. Things have been crazy, as I just had another birthday a few days ago and still have yet to make my Halloween costume or catch up on things at work. Sigh. Where does all my time go.
Gucci Mane is Dirty South ATL hip hop. I can't listen to him all the time but sometimes he's just too hypnotizing. This track called Vampires is off one of his more recent mixtapes of which he has a million.
Maybe I've managed to hide it, maybe I haven't. But I am a huge fan of Ghostbusters. It's easily my favorite movie. Although this probably isn't a huge surprise to anyone reading a Halloween music blog. The movie, the cartoon and even the soundtrack were all awesome. I own easly to many weird odd Ghostbusters collectibles and I'm not even super addicted, just some figurines, trading cards and comics here and there on the side, I'm sure plenty of other collectors got me beat.
Out of the four Ghostbusters, it's Winston that gets the least love. Played by Ernie Hudson, he was left off of the original movie poster, was the last to be released of the New Ghostbusters figures. It's sad really as I don't consider him any less of a character. Especially in the cartoon where some of his stories were among the best. Check out the Real Ghostbusters cartoon if you can get ahold of it by the way. A lot of the episodes feature very strong writing including some by J Michael Straczynski.
This track is a simple remix of the current Duck Sauce track Barbara Streissand. It was made by Castewar from Proton Charging a Ghostbusters web site. In the original, the audio in the break calls out Barbara Streissand but this remix calls out the 4th Ghostbuster Winston Zeddemore!
The Almighty Defenders are a supergroup of sorts that consists of Members from King Khan and the Shrines and The Black Lips. Both groups are garage type bands but King Khan has a little more soul and R and B and the Black Lips are a little bit more punk and folk.
This is snarling driving number that may or may not be named after Beetlejuice. I'm not really sure but they sing the title and chug along with a solid groove. That's good enough for me.
I know I'm currently a few posts behind. I was a little under the weather and didn't manage to get blogginb but promise to get caught up soon.
I'm not sure what it was exactly in the 50's and early 60's that created such a meld between both sci-fi and rockabilly. I think it must have been that both were predominantly mediums directed at teenagers and most of the rockabilly musicians were in their late teens and early twenties so they were writing about the safe cheesy films they'd catch at the drive-in or theater.
I'm lucky enough that there's a great drive-in not far from I live that's called the Vali-hi that features 3 movies a night all summer long for only 8 dollars. They've got videogames, cheap concessions and todays modern day drive-in film, the summer blockbuster. I've seen some terrible movies there, most notably when I saw the most recent Indiana Jones and spent the majority of the movie laughing and making fun of how bad it was.
This is a brand new song, just like the Black Angels before them. Its some great garage rock that reminds me a lot of the Deadly Snakes, only with less horns. It's got that lazy droning vocals that totally remind me of a lot of early to mid nineties alt rock bands
The Black Angels are pretty good for a blog like this. Pretty much every song they make is full of droning, buzzing guitars. This is probably one of the most upbeat songs they have and even it is still a little scary.
It's off of their new LP Phosphene Dream, their third they've put out since 2004. They're from Austin and are basically a hybrid of psych, stoner rock and garage rock. I've amazingly yet to see them live but I think they'd make for a good show.
This is a unique track done by Phantom Planet for the soundtrack to the Xbox game Stubbs the Zombie. Its a bizarre album as it has some scary type songs but mostly a lot of covers of old 50's songer by modern bands. Some of them are surprisingly cool especially the Orangemen's take on Mr. Sandman. Which is just an amazing song and one that always makes me thing of Back to the Future.
I could never tell if I thought Phantom Planet was a good band or not. They weren't terrible. I probably doesn't matter though as I'm sure they did well enough off being the band that did the theme song to the O.C.
This is a track of one of the multiple Munsters albums from back in the sixties. I thought this would be an appropriate choice for this Halloween since it appears that they may reboot the show for the second time after that stint in the late 80's. That reboot ran for surprisngly longer than I think anyone would have thought.
If they do reboot it again, I should probably be ashamed to admit this but I'd probably watch it for sure. Sigh. I'm a sucker for that stuff, but its not like I don't watch plenty of bad tv.
I'm back with the 5th year of The Ghost Town. Tonight we have a track from the legend Zacherly with 30 more days of songs and mixes to go. I hope to be putting up multiple mixes and possible some remixes along the way. I've got a great stack of things to go through and will be digging further into the odd archives.
THis weekend I am hoping to do a redesign although nothing to major. Check out the Twitter page at twitter.com/theghosttown and a Facebook page will also be built this weekend. Thanks for coming and tell your friends.
This is one of the songs from Horror/Novelty music legend Zacherly. It is probably the most upbeat account of murdering a woman and then burying her corpse you'll ever hear. Boisterous laughter, bopping sax and that late 50's harmony backing vocals making deposing of a body sound like the most natural thing in the world.
Updates to come soon, including a mix that will debut on friday the 1st! There is also a twitter at http://twitter.com/theghosttown and a Facebook fan page to come soon!
