For just this moment, I thought it would help to take a peek behind the curtain. The question often comes down to: what inspires you to write about the media that you select on any given week? To be totally honest, it’s more of an instinctual thing most of the time. I get to Friday or Saturday the week before and begin to outline the next week. Sometimes I have some clear targets I want to hit, whether related to current events or themes that resonate with a given time period. A lot of what I’m writing about now focuses on Halloween and various forms of horror. While I am by no means a conventional horror fan, I have an affection for its history and I hope that my effort throughout this past month has allowed you to understand what makes this time so special for me.
Sure, Monday Melodies has been less focused on horror-themed music than other columns, but it felt right that I would go out on something that embraced the B-Movie aesthetic, bringing my month full circle after starting with Rob Zombie’s solo debut “Hellbilly Deluxe.” In this case, I’ve decided to be a bit coy and focus on something that only kind of sounds similar from around the same time. I started with hellbilly, but now it’s time to end with psychobilly with HorrorPops and their debut album, aptly titled “Hell Yeah!”
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| They also have an awesome logo |
To be totally honest, HorrorPops was one of those bands I knew about because I spent a lot of time collecting compilations like “Punk-O-Rama” and “Give ‘Em the Boot” just to see how far I could expand my taste. They were the trendy labels for Early-2000s punk and punk-adjacent bands, and somehow I had a passing familiarity with 80% of the acting labels on Epitaph Records. Sure, I never got into The Locusts or Converge, but I’ve come to admire The Locusts for at least sounding like they’re being eaten alive for 30 seconds straight. Still, HorrorPops was on there and I heard songs like “Miss Take” and “Thelma and Louise” by osmosis. Otherwise, I couldn’t tell you much about them and I barely know more about psychobilly.
As anyone with a few etymology courses will tell you, the root word here is rockabilly, itself a music genre dating back to the 1950s and played by artists like Carl Perkins. Then, in a move reminiscent of the great peanut butter/chocolate collision, they decided to join forces with punk rock and made some wild, hell-bent sound that I always wanted to believe was awesome but frankly never got too deep into. I was familiar with bands like Tiger Army, but again it was mostly to save face. But I knew people who dressed like these macabre variations of greasers. I was in high school during the height of emo music and websites like Suicide Girls. So much of that culture felt omnipresent even if I never actually engaged with it.
Which makes discovering HorrorPops something exciting. Like most of these bands, they take me back to a moment in time and make me feel like I’m uncovering more secrets to the past that I didn’t appreciate at the time. I’m aware that some of my interest in it is gone because, frankly, I’m an old guy now and not as drawn to the sloppy sound as I once was. I look for nuance a bit too often and I’m sure most of you would whack me with a newspaper for doing so. Just sit back and enjoy the album. Better yet, get up and dance. Psychobilly almost demands that you dance out five pounds of sweat by the end of a performance.
That is to say that this initially was a difficult album for me to love. It’s not because they’re by any means bad musicians, but there’s clearly an amateur quality to the first half. According to Wikipedia, the first seven songs on “Hell Yeah!” were recorded in 1999, five years before the record. Some of the other songs became hits in their Danish hometown years ago. It definitely has that young eagerness to it that made me worry that I was listening to a youthful album before the vision set in before they realize the potential of experimenting with their sound and making something much more definitive.
What I came to realize by the end was that “Hell Yeah!” was a miracle of an album, mostly because HorrorPops started as a lark, a side project where they got to experiment with their sound. By the end, I find a band that is something more tangible and lasting, moving from straightforward psychobilly to melodies that incorporate ska and even ends the whole shebang with a surf track. If this is an immature album, it’s one that at least reflects where the band could go, and it’s what made me want to listen to more.
Like most psychobilly, one of the draws of the style comes from B-Movie iconography. Everyone is dressed like they’re about to get mauled in a 50s horror movie print that’s being scratched to pieces. The band hired two piercing artists to serve as their go-go dancers and would include an album full of great horror titles like “Ghouls” and “Psychobitches Outta Hell.” Of course, their most direct rockabilly-inspired song itself is an ode to the hairstyle of the time with “Kool Flattop.” It’s like Goth music if it had a sense of humor, willing to look at death and snort every now and then.
Which is to say that I’m not the biggest fan of the first half of the album. “Julia” opens the album well-enough, having nice female lead and male backing vocals over the chorus in ways that go down smooth. They understand how to make a conventionally pleasant sound. The issue is that it’s not memorable enough for me, making me feel like the whole experience may be a borderline novelty. “Drama Queen” and “Ghouls” also didn’t permeate with me, serving more as this friendly forms of sadism that I might’ve loved as a teenager.
It could just as well be that it feels like a lark for that first half. Listening to “Miss Take” all these years later is delightful, but I realize why I never got into this genre. The overlapping vocals are a bit too goofy for me. The opening guitar is fun, but I feel like singer Patricia Day is too emphatic on vocals. While I can notice the clever way that the melody swings even as the guitar plays loud and fast, it feels like a culture that was never for me. Watching the music video of people at a drive-in, it looks like it’s a ton of fun. It’s a performative genre, whose fashion is very expressive. I can get why people like it, but I think I’m too distracted by how weird it is and questioning if it’s really as cool as they want to be.
Don’t get me wrong. I really like the back half of the album, which sounds like a band that began to find confidence and grow into something more substantial. I will always have some admiration for psychobilly (and of course rockabilly) for its use of a stand-up bass. The sound is very distinct and I think is the key to its uniqueness. I love how the guitars manage to have the familiar clang even as the drums play fast and you feel like shimmying. As individual songs, I think that I can grow to appreciate their place in the genre. As an album, it feels like a collage of ideas that range on my overall enjoyment of them.
Starting with “Kool Flattop,” it sounds like a band who understands what they’re trying to go for. You feel like they’re some house band in a remake of Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), and you just want to swing your arms as they perform at the local diner. It’s a world that never existed, and it’s fun to imagine what HorrorPops was thinking when they came up with any of this. Still, you look at songs like “Dotted With Hearts” and “Baby Lou Tattoo” and you get a band who knows how to add traces of sentimentality into their rocking sound without totally dropping out. By the final stretch, it’s time to groove again with “What’s Under My Bed” and “Horrorbeach,” the latter of which feels like it has as many traces of Dick Dale as it does Ennio Morricone.
My big takeaway from this album is that psychobilly is a genre that I don’t know if I could ever fully appreciate. While I think “Hell Yeah!” has moments that are downright brilliant, such as when they mix rockabilly and ska on “Psychobitches Outta Hell,” this still seems like a world that never existed. It’s fun to peruse and ogle at the craft, but I still don’t fully get it. I like it, but maybe I’m just too old and square to ever love it. I’m sure I’ll enjoy their subsequent albums more, but for now, I’m here to shrug.
Of course this band ended up on Hellcat Records. Even if they weren’t as distinct in their label as Epitaph, its owner Tim Armstrong of Rancid definitely had a style that you can argue every band he hired vaguely sounded like them (Time Again, while good, was essentially Rancid Jr.). It makes sense that they were touring with almost every other band, like Rancid side project Lars Fredericksen and the Bastards. Oh, how hearing those names take me back to random nights of discovering these records of bands who probably weren’t that great, but sounded like they had so much to say. This is a rabbit hole that I visit with as much affection as I do remorse.
I guess that I can imagine myself loving Tiger Army’s sound more, especially since they strike me as more polished and focused. Their albums were essentially concept albums that also played with supernatural imagery. HorrorPops was always about having a good time, and I think if you judge them solely off of that, they succeeded. “Hell Yeah!” doesn’t set out to change the world, but instead make for a fun touring band that gets the crowd moving. Every time they shout, you feel some joy inside of you. Their quest to be something more than riffing on one style suggested that they had more to say.
The only thing that’s noteworthy from here is that apparently, Patricia Day sued Hard Rock Casino for selling a Barbie with her likeness. Considering that you probably started this column by asking “Who?” it’s more amusing to think that this ever was a plausible case. Still, her rockabilly fashion choices definitely were singular, reflecting an archetype of wild outsiders from that time, tatted up and ready to rock your face off. It’s another amusing detail even if I don’t know that I side with her argument in the case. Was she ever significant enough to be the poster child for a Barbie? She's good, I wouldn’t say “Hell Yeah!”
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