By: Phil Weller
Album Type: Full
Length
Date Released: 04/09/2015
Label: Rise
Above Records
“Horror films don't create fear. They release it,” – Wes Craven
(1939-2015)
‘The Night
Creeper’ CD/DD//LP track listing:
1).Waiting For Blood
2). Murder Nights
3). Downtown
4). Pusher Man
5). Yellow Moon
6). Melody Lane
7). The Night Creeper
8). Inside
9). Slow Death
10). Black Motorcade (Hidden Track)
The Review:
Although
they may have loosened their grip a little on their true identities, Uncle Acid
and his mercurial Deadbeats are still, to borrow a phrase from
Sir Winston Churchill, a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Their
vaporous, vintage fuzz led sound has poured steadily, like smoke from a flickering
fire into the underground’s eyes with a slew of steady and palpable releases
since 2010’s ‘Vol 1.’ That smoke is
now beginning to seep into the periphery of the mainstream too, and the
leviathan sized grooves of ‘The Night
Creeper’ both emphasises this band’s status as cult champions of the
underground and highlights why, like Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper, two of their major
influences, their music has a towering commercial potential.
Much
like the Amicus Productions which have inspired a plethora of their noir
recordings, their fourth volume sees them unleashing 10 more blood-dripped
tracks, like the mysterious Dr. Schreck does to his fellow train passengers with
tales of evil and darkness in Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965). Each and
every composition reeks of fear and makes your skin crawl; these are the
monsters that hide under your bed, these are the footsteps that stalk your
lonely, dark and cold walk home through dense fog. The
lurching grooves of opener ‘Waiting For
Blood’ shadow over you, commanding your attention instantly. An
undercurrent of uneasy Hammond organs and other, chilling textures give the
album a charming graininess which reverberates the band’s innate cinematic
complexion. Aesthetically the album once more gravitates towards that same
element once more; each song itself a horror film within a horror film. But
with music, the images aren’t there to scare you and so your crooked
imagination becomes all too willing to take its place. Through this
thought-provoking song writing, they have concocted something remarkable and
they’re basing a career out of it.
‘Inside,’
an instant standout the moment it snaked into my ears, builds upon a consistent
thump like a poltergeist destroying a house in the night, by the light of a
radiant moon. ‘Melody Lane’ is a twisted bop on which stabbing, doom-rock
guitars waltz with psychedelic tinges, together sharing a murderous intent. With a nod towards their earlier, rawer and
altogether creepier work on ‘Vol 1.’,
‘Yellow Moon’ draws from Alice
Cooper’s ‘Killer’ for a rancid
interlude. It’s soft and – alongside the Easy Rider influenced Stonerisms of
its predecessor ‘Pusher Man’ –
unassuming, but is arguably the most frightening and atmospheric song on the
entire album.
In
2015 Uncle
Acid find themselves as a well-established act on the cusp of
becoming something of a name so to
speak, and so this release comes with the albatross of expectation weighing
them down in many ways. They now have a recognised sound and here they stick
very much to the toil and trouble of their bubbling potion, but manage to
collate the focal points of each of their previous albums into one package smartly. If the record will
be met by their adoring fan base with the same hype and admiration 2011’s
insatiable ‘Blood Lust’ was, or be
deemed as an adequate successor to the robustness of ‘Mind Control,’ only time will tell. What we do know, however, is
that it’s another impressive release from this consistently unique and
enrapturing Cambridge quartet.
‘The Night Creeper’
is available here
