As is the tradition, the Monolith Cocktail once again provides a suitable soundtrack for the bewitching hour – the half-arsed “trick or treat” of yore, extended on the most tenuous of commercial grounds to become everything but a public holiday in recent times. Expect the usual variants and degrees of morose, fun and the unsettling (phantasmagoria Earthly dangers to fantastical deep space), with tracks by Bruce Haack, The Warlocks, Cinema Red And Blue, Luboš Fišer, Angelo Michajlov, Bowie, Bernard Szajner, Cut Hands, Scott Walker & Sunn O))).
We also have the “horror” of a shameless Halloween tie-in single from the miscreant partnership of Thomas Truax and Brian Viglione. Antifolk doyen of experimental instrumentation and model animation Truax joins Viglione of steampunk rocking theatre duo, The Dresden Dolls, for a lamentable eulogy to the progenitor of Vampirism; the king dick himself, Count Dracula.
Forked tongue firmly in cheek, ‘Feelin’ Bad For Dracula’ yearns (and howls) for a return to the finesse and Gothic beginnings of Bram Stoker’s original fanged reprobate; cheesed off at the modern teen phenomena of Twilight: “…those Twilight kids ain’t got your style.” A hammy video cut with clips from Nosferatu and a host of cultish and kitsch Dracula themed movies accompanies the duo’s sorrowful collaboration. A song essentially of two halves, the first being a swooning angulated thrasher, the second a “locked in syncopation” of Viglione’s infamous drums and Truax’s specially made noisenik ‘Hornicator’.
The single arrives as a teaser for the partnerships album, due to be released in early 2015.
“…eternal life ain’t what it used to be!”
Though hardly a ghoulish addition to this fiendish selection, we also feature an exclusive new single from Oxford psychedelic indie troupe, Flights Of Helios. The group is aiming high with lofty aspirations whilst integrating subtle blends of drone and shoe gaze into a pastel shaded form of halcyon indie pop, taking their band name from the titan sun god of Greek myth, who rode his chariot of light giving force across the horizon.
Released this week, the latest single ‘Succubus’ heads out on a twinkly, glowing soft peddled fuzz-y rich march towards psychedelic elevation; led by an illuminating vocal that rises towards a raspy falsetto and final crescendo. This is all played out to an accompanying video of a superimposed road trip, a twirling lost in the mists of time dancer, and the band themselves, performing in-between the layers of imagery.
Monolith Cocktail Blog 