Halloween?… Well, why not be cool and drop an album right on the date. Like the serious bands do. Like the grocery store, which has had pumpkins since August.
Seriously now, a little: Halloween is the one night a year when nobody asks why you’re in costume. The rest of the year, they do. The rest of the year you rehearse the smile, count the eye contact, laugh on cue. They call it masking. I call it Tuesday.
And ahh, yes: I also want candy. That way my head speeds up to the speed of light. Because it was already doing ninety.
The problem is that Halloween is also sudden screams, flashing lights and an animatronic skeleton yelling at you in the cereal aisle. So fun. For a head like mine that isn’t a party, it’s overload on sale. So I made a Halloween record with no jump scares: Halloween… in Neurospicy and rated E for everyone. Every creak, every bell, every monster laugh lands on the beat, right where you expect it. The spooky stays. The startle doesn’t. Revolutionary, I know: warning people before you scare them.
It isn’t out yet, mind you. It’s coming soon, before Halloween. If my hyperfocus doesn’t get in the way and somebody hits the brakes on me.
Four monsters, four ways of being wired:
- The host in One More Monster! loves the party until the doorbell won’t stop and the lights get too loud. He says so. And the monsters, imagine that, turn it down. Pure fiction.
- The ghost in The Residual Shuffle walks down the same thirteen stairs every midnight. The living say he’s stuck. He says that’s where his calm lives. Guess who’s right.
- The scientist in Flap-Flap, It’s Alive! forgets dinner, the clock and Halloween itself because the experiment is that good. When it works, his hands start flapping. Mine do too. No, it can’t be fixed. It doesn’t need to be.
- And Dracula, in The Count Counts to a Thousand, learns to be human from a manual, until he finds out everybody else is faking it. Spoiler: everybody is faking it.
Rated E? Well… I don’t want my mom coming over to wash my mouth out with soap. This band swears. A lot. The other records wear their explicit label proudly and it’s staying there. But this one is so anyone fits: the kid covering his ears at the party, the mom looking for a Halloween that won’t make him cry, the grown-up who flaps in secret. The E is the one from the video games we grew up with: everyone. Even my mom.
Clean doesn’t mean tame. The guitars are still dirty, the bass still walks around like it lives there, and the voice still has its cracks. It’s grunge in costume; this time the costume just happens to be a nice guy. Don’t get used to it.
The record is on its way; the first video is already up: Flap-Flap, It’s Alive!, eight-bit coin included. Insert the coin. Press play. And if it asks CONTINUE? at the end, you know: next Halloween there’s more. Of course there is.
— Chrnx