By Jonny Bakes
It’s not often that you find an album that promises to be every horror geek’s wet dream so when that does happen it would be rude not to give it a little listen! But, for a band that has been active for a quarter of a century, I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of them before… so I guess they live up to their name and have been The Lurking Corpses. With a Judas Priest inspired album name, I was looking forward to finding out what this band gets up to when they’re ‘Lurking After Midnight’.
From my first play through of the album, it was immediately clear where their influences have been drawn from. The Misfits are an immediately obvious one with a good handful of punky tracks with a vocal style that really seeks to emulate that of Danzig himself but this isn’t the only influence at play. There’s also slightly more subtle nods to Type O Negative and The 69 Eyes to cover off the horror/goth angle. Yet there’s even more with some serious old school death metal influence complete with death growls, slow riffs and buckets of heavy! It wouldn’t be a horror album without soundbites from classic horror films, and that’s something that ‘Lurking After Midnight’ has in spades.
What makes this album somewhat jarring at times is that these influences aren’t all at play at the same time meaning that the album jumps from a Misfits-like horror punk track to a death metal banger and back again immediately resulting in some aural whiplash. It makes the album feel disjointed to me which is a shame as both angles of attack are pretty decent, but it feels like they belong on separate albums. You could play two different tracks from ‘Lurking After Midnight’ and invoke a completely different reaction in the same person which for some people might be exactly what you’re looking for, but I imagine others would prefer that The Lurking Corpses pick a lane and stick to it.
Frustratingly, there are some great examples of both distinct styles on this album. From the horror punk style there’s the romantic ‘When You’re Dead’ that describes what would be done to a woman when she’s dead (I’ll give you a clue – it rhyme’s with duck..). The chorus is catchy and bound to raise a few eyebrows if you’re caught singing it in the office, and it’s bound to give you a bit of a boost in the morning, I know it’s one that will probably make its way into my playlist of doom to be caught on perpetual rotation when I can’t decide what else to listen to!
Taking a hard swing in a heavier direction, there’s ‘Satan Is Real’ which is a not-particularly-original title but it does pack a bit of a surprise. On your first listen I guarantee you’ll be knocked back by the King Diamond style wails in the chorus that seem to appear only for this one track on the album. It’s naturally slower and heavier than some of the other songs and even incorporates a bit of latin chanting as well to try and reel in the Ghost fans. Again, ‘Satan is Real’ is another track that in isolation could find its way into my regular rotation for sure.
So where do I stand with ‘Lurking After Midnight’? It’s hard to say really… As an album heard from cover to cover, I struggled to enjoy it as it kept switching direction like one of those shitty fairground rides at a festival, but many of the songs in isolation were really enjoyable. So if you have a bit of an eclectic music taste and like to take hard swings between death metal and horror punk then ‘Lurking After Midnight’ could be perfect for you. Likewise, if you like to pick a few tracks from an album to mix in with everything else in your music collection there are some crackers the The Lurking Corpses have to offer that may well scratch that itch!
For me, I can see myself listening to more offerings from The Lurking Corpses and will probably dive back through their back catalogue, but listening to ‘Lurking After Midnight’ in its entirety is likely to be a rare event!
- ‘Lurking After Midnight’ is released tomorrow (Friday 24 May).
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