Well folks, it’s time to slap on your skull make up and set your quiffs to stun, this time care of Deutschland’s premier purveyors of horror punk, The Other. On this, their forth album ‘New Blood’, the band combine punk, goth, metal, and no shortage of skeleton gloves and coloured contact lenses as they channel the spirits of The Misfits and Samhain in a hook laden forty seven minute journey through the graveyards and haunted castles of Transylvania.
Starting as they very much mean to carry on, after the instrumental intro ‘New Blood’ that could easily have been lifted from the Hammer Horror sound library, is ‘Back to the Cemetery’, a short punchy number, shot through with kitsch lyrics about the fun of corpses and dissection, the vocalist Rod Usher sounding to all the world like he learned English by singing along with Dave Vanian. Hey, if horror punk is your thing, you can’t help but be influenced by the aforementioned front man of legendary punk progenitors The Damned.
From track to track, no beloved and time honoured horror reference is avoided. Vampires flit through the punk stomp of ‘Transylvania’, before the Scooby Doo horror fun fair of ‘Ghost Ride to Hell’. A quick visit to Google translate showed ‘Heir Kommt Die Dunkelheit’ was celebrating a visit of nameless Lovecraftian death in an altogether non discordant bouncy package, Cthulhu again raining doom down upon earth in the equally upbeat ‘Demon’s Walk the Earth’. The essence of that other titan of gothic horror, Edgar Allan Poe, is later summoned by the power of the proto-thrash guitar riff in ‘The Burial’.
In ‘New Blood’ The Other have delivered a simple, unpretentious package of zombies, werewolves and monsters, all about as scary as the Addams Family, and every bit as fun. Now, where’s my copy of Earth AD? I somehow feel the need to have a listen and laugh!
http://www.myspace.com/theother
http://www.the-other.de
