Sunday, October 30, 2011

SPOOKY KABUKI: A Momus Halloween Playlist

By Steve Jones.

If there is one thing I love more than the macabre, it is the celebration of the macabre.  Therefore, it is not surprising that Halloween is my favorite holiday.  The costumes and candy are nice, but I just really enjoy a day dedicated to death, monsters, superstition, and overall spookiness.  There is a lot of fun to be found in fear.

I wanted to make a slightly unusual kind of playlist for this holiday, and I settled on restricting myself to the discography of the Scottish artist Nicholas Currie, better known as Momus.  Of course, doing so was not much of a "restriction"--he has almost thirty years worth of material to dig through, and he is a fantastic storyteller.

In the spirit of SPOOKY KABUKI, I have chosen 13 songs which I think reflect the dark masks, themes, and sounds of a Halloween playlist.  We have disasters in space ("Landrover"), lamentations of monsters ("Dracula"), some droogs having fun ("Symphonies of Beethoven"), a pirate shanty ("Is It Because I'm a Pirate?"), classic Halloween tales ("Ichabod Crane"), the revolt of a creation against creator ("Pygmalism"), and plenty of other unsettling topics.  Put this on when you're handing out candy and expand some minds.

Here's a YouTube playlist, because I don't know about you, but I use YouTube more than any other service when it comes to checking out new and unknown songs:


Playlisting (all tracks by Momus):
  1. Death Ruins Everything (from Hypnoprism)
  2. Cibachrome Blue (from Voyager)
  3. The Rape of Lucretia (from Circus Maximus)
  4. Sinister Themes (from The Ultraconformist)
  5. The Symphonies of Beethoven (from The Little Red Songbook)
  6. Landrover (from Timelord)
  7. Dracula (from Joemus)
  8. A Complete History of Sexual Jealousy: Parts 17-24 (from Slender Sherbert)
  9. The Thunderclown (from The Thunderclown with John Henriksson)
  10. Is It Because I'm a Pirate? (from Oskar Tennis Champion)
  11. Ichabod Crane (from Joemus)
  12. Bantam Boys (from Otto Spooky)
  13. Pygmalism (from Folktronic)

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