From East Texas comes an outfit sounding like they've crawled out of the Louisiana wetlands. Graveyard Shindig is sometimes sawing through a surf-y, beach vibe similar to The Champs or The Trashmen, while other tracks have a slow R&B sound of the early-to-mid 50s. The first track got me thinking this was going to be an instrumental record, but vocals kick in every so often ("Shadow Over Elkhart", "Hellbent Sickobilly") and give the record a completely different feel: very Cramps-esque, but with an even thicker Country Western flavor. Some tracks even have a hint of bluegrass throughout. While I can groove out on this album, and I would dig a small, private show, I wouldn't be able to handle a bar completely filled with Happy Days extras.

Feast fo Hate and Fear - September 2005

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A rather refreshing change-up from the typical Misfit-ed doowoppery that typically comes with bright green covers, drippy logos and vows of containing "pure rock & roll terror!!!", The Creepniks exude an interesting mulch of twangin' surf rock, parmesan-dusted spaghetti western strummery and WAY gone psychobilly slobbering. While the demoniacal Dick Dale-ing of "Surfin' With Satan" proved my favorite out of nine, there's no denying that the ravioli'd rumblage of "Pale Rider" and "Zombie Stomp" are sure to make Sergio Leone drum along on his coffin lid as well. "Vocalist" Johnny Lockjaw is mercifully used rather sparingly - appearing on just over half of GRAVEYARD SHINDIG's tracks. With a croon that artfully blends the talents of Lux Interior, Tom Waits and a pregnant manatee coping with Down's Syndrome while being broiled alive in dill butter, Lockjaw's talents are best shaken rather than stirred and, in spite of themselves, make for the most memorable portions of these ptomaine-tainted Texans' debut offering. While not something I'll bust out with the regularity of... say... The Cramps, Mr. Waits, or any of a variety of cruelly slaughtered Florida fauna, GRAVEYARD SHINDIG succeeded in dodging my preconceived stereotypes and is most likely sure to please any horrorbillypsychopunks out there looking for a new kinda voodoo-broo to fix up with.

Horrorwood Babbleon - September 2005

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The Catacombs of Paris, the Amityville house in New York, the Stull Cemetery in Kansas, and now the town of Elkhart Texas... These are among the most haunted, ghoul-filled places in the world. The first three are widely famous, and their stories known by all. Only a few fearful souls know of the fourth, but that is about to change... Elkhart now makes this list, as it is home to a force so evil, and so vile, that it has been called the "infernal tool of Satan", that force, is... The Creepniks! Ok, maybe that's a little over the top, but this band does have a kick-ass image, and a killer (literally) back-story. Anyway, what I first thought was just gonna be yet another horror-themed Surf record (which still would've been fine) has turned out to be a little bit more. You see, although this collection of musically inclined members of the undead do indeed play some creepy-ass Surf-Rock, they also add in heaping amounts of fetid Psychobilly, and a dash of o' maggot-encrusted Spaghetti-Western styled instrumentation. One might not think that these three distinct styles would sit so well shoulder to shoulder on the same disc (and often in the same song) but they do just that. We have four tracks that are strictly instrumentals, while the other five have been plagued by other worldly vocals, seemingly supplied from beyond the grave. A pet peeve of mine is that many bands of this ilk, who get on board with the whole horror thing, never really manage to sound creepy. They'll entitle their songs so they sound like a run-down of the videos for rent in the horror section of your local Blockbuster, but the tunes themselves never actually sound creepy in any way. The Creepniks however have taken up that challenge, and succeeded with flying colours! These songs actually sound spine-chilling at times. Hell, you almost expect to see a zombified Clint Eastwood trudging past your windows as you play this! Another element that separates these boys from the pack, is that most Surf bands keep it pretty up-tempo. The Creepniks on the other hand, choose to keep it mostly laidback, and eerily low-key. Great stuff, and a fine debut! Well, it's a debut, and it isn't, you see this was first offered up as a limited CD-R release. The artwork was different, and it was missing the live track "How Do You Sleep?". However the CD-R originally had six bonus cuts from other bands on GraveWax Records, so if you have that version, you still have something special. For more info on these grave robbing ghouls, check out thecreepniks.com.
RATING = 8 Surf-Rock / Psychobilly (Released 2005)

Urotsukidoji's Pad September 2005

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The Creepniks are a buncha dead fuckers from East Texas who play hollow-bones freakabilly with so much more taste and distinction than the last 666 Misfits grave-robbers to shuffle up my driveway that they don’t even NEED the groovy-ghoul angle, really. I mean, I’m glad they found a gimmick, it makes t-shirt designs easier, but the ethereal, heat-sick, warbly, midnight weirdo-ballads they bang out on this one are like Marty Robbins backed by the Beasts of Bourbon Orchestra as conducted by Sergio Leone, and all they were shooting for was 30 or so minutes of spooky Cramps-gunk to sell at shows! Seriously, dig the sparse, dead-man-walking instrumental “Pale Rider” and tell me you can’t smell sweat, leather, and Django’s blood boiling under a hot Mexican sun. “Shadow over Elkhart” is one of the few vocal tracks, and it’s a swampy deathbilly dirge that sounds like Nick Cave’s scariest Birthday Party ever. And so on. Personally, I dig the intro-mentals better, if only because the Creepnik on vox sounds like his rotten larynx is just gonna drop right out of his ruined, leathery throat and explode into dust on the floor, and that’s a little TOO creepy for my tastes. But when it’s just the lonesome guitars and booming rhythm section, these fellas will TAKE you places, Jack. Dark, strange places. So bring a clove of garlic, just in case.

Sleazegrinder September 2005

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It's always great to find something really interesting in the mail box - and this week we received the reissue of The Creepniks - Graveyard Shindig from our friends at Gravewax Records.

I was already somewhat familiar with The Creepniks thanks to some tracks that were available for download a while ago - the most memorable being "Hellbent Sickobilly" and I'm glad to say that the rest of the album follows suit. There are several spooked out instrumentals, some with atmospheric background soundscapes of growling chuckles and car crashes - but it's when you get a taste of the Creepniks lyrics that they really make their mark. The humor is black as pitch - just the way we like it - as you'll see in the following excerpt from "Zombie Kinda Love":

Two weeks later I couldn't believe my eyes.
She was standin' in my doorway, lookin' all putrified
She whispered through a mouth of dirt "Hey honey, did you miss me?"
And then you know what she did, well her cadaver tried to kiss me!

She was dead... she was dead.
That's what you get when you cross a shovel with a head.
But that talk won't fly, cause the dead don't lie,
When they've got ME... on their mind.

By now I'm sure you've gotten the idea that I'm liking this album. To make a broad comparison you'll find touches of The Cramps, Dick Dale - you know - the standards, without it sounding like they're emulating one or the other. You can find samples and more lyrics on the Creepniks web site, and if you check out the Gravewax site you'll find this for a mere $8.99 shipped - a deal you'd be hard pressed to beat. So go on now - get yourself a copy!

For more information visit Gravewax Records

Final Score:

Fiendish Files of the Black Order August 2005

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This is the second part in a series documenting my plan to save rock and roll and myself.

First, myself. I've always been several years behind the curve, music wise. I get into bands long after they've passed their peak popularity and have become yesterday's news. I started listening to NIN when The Fragile came out, Tool when Lateralus came out, Garbage when Beautiful Garbage came out, Weezer after Maladroit, Nirvana long after Cobain was dead.

The unwritten rule is that once a band has passed a certain audience number threshold the band is no longer cool. Either they've “sold-out” or they're still plugging away, but they're not cutting edge anymore in any case. Cool people are constantly On The Edge, looking for the next thing (not the next BIG thing) so they can say “I knew 'em when” if they become the next big thing. And once the next thing has become the next big thing it can be disposed of.

If my plan works I'll no longer be behind the curve, or over or under the curve, I'll be ahead of the damned curve.

Next, rock and roll. I'm not going to be one of the obnoxious people that gets weepy about the “sad state of music today” every few months. I listen to my little CD collection waiting for my favorite bands to come out with new albums and feel more or less fine. So rock and roll is fine for me, but I'm not the issue here. Rock's core audience, white kids, is abandoning it in droves in favor of rap/R&B.

This isn't an anti-rap/R&B screed, either. Those are pretty dull, or at least mine would be since I know little about the genres. What I'm trying to devise is a way to get white kids back into rock and roll. I'd like to get other ethnic groups into rock and roll as well, but I have no idea how to do that.

I applied the Socratic method.

Q: What do white kids like?
A: Pissing off their parents. I'm sure this plays some small part in rap's suburban popularity. Elvis and The Beatle's don't get much of a rise out of parents these days. Grunge rock might have pissed the mom and dad off a little, but they could still hear a vestige of their own childhood in it. Not so with rap.

Q: What else do white kids like that also pisses off their parents?
A: Satan. The Father of All Lies always goes over well with the youth. Whether it's the straight-forward evil of Ozzy and Alice Cooper or the more ironic devilry of Marilyn Manson, kids seem to respond to eternal damnation. Parents, except for the more progressive ones, are almost always against it.

Q: But Ozzy and Cooper and Manson and also Rob Zombie are all still around in one form or another. So what gives?
A: They're not cool anymore. In life the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. In music the devil you know is always less promising than the devil the hot girl at the record store told you about. Also in music, it's not good enough just to be good. If you really want to start something you have to be original too. You need a unique sound. You need to be...

...”PLAYIN' REAL TEXAS PSYCHOBILLY, SPAGHETTI WESTERN AND SURF.”

Enter...The Creepniks.

In true rock 'n roll style, The Creepniks cut through the bullshit. Instead of dropping hints in interviews or liner notes they have an in depth biography on their web page. The biography, which I will quote from liberally, leaves few questions about where The Creepniks came from or what their intentions are. It also makes them the first band I know of with an origin story. Some excerpts:

“...It was at one of those [high school]dances that the delicate veneer of normality exploded with a force unequaled in the annals of Texas history or legend.”

“The heat of the house lights had begun to affect Jake's face; it was blistering and peeling at the edges. As this rotten facade sloughed off, the dancers bore witness to something that had lain dormant for years; the thing that had been found in that desolate pasture all those years ago. The decayed cadaver continued to lurch and sing, spewing graveworms all over the mike and the audience as the flayed features of the once handsome singer settled into a putrid pile at his feet. Upon seeing the grim visage and hearing the unholy shouts of Hellfire, the attendees at the dance started to panic, running each other over as they fled for the doors. The rest of the band followed the decaying frontman's lead, shedding the hollowed bodies of the band members they had so mercilessly gutted an hour before. That all-too familiar rune was visible on their slime-covered faces, leering like skeletons through a tissue-thin layer of gelatinous skin and grave wax. The walls trembled with the throbbing pestilence of their riotous cacophony.”

“...The carnage was total. The hardwood floors were covered in the flesh and blood-matted hair of the dancers. The whole scene looked like some blasphemous collage of anatomy books; a respiratory system here, a jellied brain there, the whole building bathed in the sheared-copper smell of teenage blood.

And onstage, the band played on.

In the decades following that brutal night, the town of Elkhart was quarantined off from the rest of the world. There was too much danger that the evil would spread. Sources say that you can still hear the band play in the now-decrepit gymnasium, now resembling more than anything the maw of Hell.
And the band plays on forever there, until the end of times when the Abyss will be thrown wide open to welcome them back home. Until then, the rest of the world can only pray that their evil is contained; that the naïve ears of the populace should never hear their damning racket or heed their luciferian beckon. That infernal tool of Satan, the Creepniks!”

http://www.thecreepniks.com/biography.htm

That's it. Were you not rocked? The Creepniks is the only band I know of that can rock you without making a sound. Their sounds rock even more.

Just like it says on their page, they're playin' real Texas psychobilly, spaghetti western and surf. I don't know what that means exactly but it's like nothing I ever heard before, or anyone else has for that matter, and the vocals compliment it nicely. Their lyrical style isn't reminiscent of EC comics; it's EC comics with music instead of pictures.

“Two weeks later I couldn't believe my eyes / she was standin' in the doorway lookin' all putrefied / she whispered through a mouth of dirt “Hey honey, did you miss me?” / and then you know what she did, well her cadaver tried to kiss me” -Zombie Kinda Love

And there you have it. A band with a brand new sound and a close personal relationship with Satan. If the kids don't go for The Creepniks than rock and roll is deader than dead.

But if The Creepniks make it big it works out great for me. “Excuse me, girl at party, but I overheard you discussing The Creepniks. Yeah, I knew 'em back when they were selling burned LPs from their web page. Their lead singer, Johnny, sent me some e-mails back when I was running a zombie web page. I might still have his e-mail address back at my place...in my bedroom.” If that's not good enough for at least a blowjob I'm even uglier than I think.

Ash Jhonen February 2005

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The Creepniks play seven songs, three of which are moody instros. Vocals on this disc are the disturbed "Shadow Over Elkhart," the demented "Hellbent Sickobilly," the twisted "Zombie Kinda Love," and the almost normal pompous rockabilly groover "Freaky Friday."

3 "Zombie Stomp"

Ringing chords open the surf sludge horror of "Zombie Stomp." Dark, spooky, and weirded out by Theremin. It's funny how this is able to just stay this side of the gimmicky line. Grinning and shuddering at the same time.
Horror Surf Instrumental Stereo

3 "Surfin' With Satan"

Right from the evil opening laugh, you know "Surfin' With Satan" will be cool. It moves at a moderate pace with a slowly double picked lead playing a fine surf melody. Accompanied by a distant chorus, it has a slightly desolate edge, while otherwise portraying the sea settling down after a major storm. Very cool!
Horror Surf Instrumental Stereo

3 "Pale Rider"

At seeing the title, I had visions of the Aquamen's "Ride A Pale Horse" set to reverb. It was not to be. It was not to be. "Pale Rider" is a slow sludgy surf dirge, a morose death march with reverb. The down nature of the song is an inversion of what surf usually is, yet it is quite compelling. Chilling vibrato, distant chorus, and that ultra slow pace stretched out for 5-1/2 minutes. It ends up being a perfect funeral march for a fallen rider.
Horror Surf Instrumental Stereo

Phil Dirt - Reverb Central June 2003