Boo! Hello!

THE HUNCHES Two Ghosts

Given the fact that they’re signed to In the Red, The Hunches should be easy enough to pigeonhole, but on last year’s Hobo Sunrise, the sounds aren’t always coming from the garage. I can hear equal doses of new wave and indie rock, through a speaker screely: this is where the label affiliation comes into play, letting loose wraiths of white noise and scraping high frequency threshholds. Somewhere in the static, there’s a dark pop heart beating. I think that when they let the hooks coalesce into recognizable pop songs, like on “Droning Fades On” or “Two Ghosts,” they’re most successful, though also susceptible to lazy Archers of Loaf comparisons. Towards the end of the album they put forth their most propulsive rocker, “Frustration Rocket,” complete with fist-pumping rallying cry (“It’s hard when you’re so young!”), but instead of going out with a bang, they choose to close with “A Flower in the Ending,” which evokes the Pixies better than bands who’ve devoted their entire careers to the practice.

ROKY ERICKSON If You Have Ghosts

Recorded during Erickson’s post-breakdown, post-cred major label days, “If You Have Ghosts” is as good a song as any to represent the cartoony/scary Halloween formula. The sound is 80’s hard rock; the production, dinky (and so more acceptable to indie-trained ears). The psychedelic sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators are pretty well out of the mix, though the strange pinging sound the engineer puts on the guitar might count for something. For all the bluster the band puts up, there’s a palpable sense of disconnect between Erickson and his backing. It just makes his ghost story, seesawing as it does between bloody-minded imagery and poetic turns of phrase, even spookier. Coherence is a little much to ask from his narratives, but there are plenty of lines left deliciously open, beginning with the chorus, “If you have ghosts/Then you have everything.” Then there’s the incantation that he runs through really quickly, “The moon to the left of me is a part of me, is me/Forever is the wind, is a part of my thoughts, is a part of me, is me” which looks pretty intriguing written out; as sung, its complex structure’s obscured by a ranting delivery.

The going assumption is that cheap horror flicks now serve as Erickson’s muse, and lingering mental illness has almost totally obscured the guru. It’s hard to argue either way on this. As John Darnielle pointed out in his liners for the institution-recorded Never Say Goodbye, “Great poems have always been about trying to scare you out of your pants.” The haunted house he explores could just as easily be a haunted head; either way, a lonely road to tread. The wasteland of dissociative disorder could find its metaphor in sympathy for the ghost (“In the night, I am real”). But hell, even in the Elevators he sounded tortured by unseen forces; remember the blood-curdling shrieks in “Roller Coaster”. The previously-espoused mysticism wasn’t all Tommy Hall putting words in his mouth; in the chorus of his most famous composition, an accusatory “You didn’t realize” -- by dint of repetition made to sound like a call to mindfulness -- pointedly receives emphasis over the payoff, “You’re gonna miss me”.