What's on the Pod? - Week of Oct. 24 -- Halloween Songs

What better tunes for the approach of Halloween than those of The Gothic Archies? I paid for several songs on the New Despair EP a while back with Pepsi caps. With October's gray days and crisp air, tunes like "The Abandoned Castle of My Soul" seem a perfect soundtrack. They're definitely Halloween Songs

Discovery
I discovered the "group" on Lemony Snickett's celebrity playlist around the time iTunes introduced celebrity playlists. It's all twisted fun--grim tones and slightly goofy lyrics.

One dead on the money review invokes the word despondent, and I think that fits perfectly both the lyrics and the music. Ghostly white fingers, a bottomless emotional abyss -- heck, check the lyrics here.

Apparently the Gothic Archies are featured on Lemony Snickett audiobooks also and a new album will emerge from that effort. It's all in the Wikipedia article linked above.

Dark Country
In a similar vein but with a different sound, I've also added Lefty Frizzel's "Long Black Veil" to my playlist.

It's a grim if not ghostly crossover tune of death with imagery of graveyards, icy winds and an emotional if not legally wed widow in black.

Frizzel's soft, haunting rendition has stayed with me after I heard it on a radio program about story songs that I stumbled across on a long drive one Sunday afternoon.

Going dark
One other even darker Halloween-season song comes to mind though I don't have it on the Pod. It's on a collection I have only on cassette, which suggests how old it is.

If you've never heard The Buoys' "Timothy" it's a dark, tongue-in-cheek novelty hit about cannibalism, which I believe Rupert Holmes wrote with a plan toward getting banned. I seem to remember on a talk show he noted that he was listening to "Sixteen Tons" at the time he penned it. You know "muscle and blood and skin and bones."

Happy chills.