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HorrorPops lead singer Patricia Day is pretty much what you’d get if Dr. Moreau cloned Gwen Stefani, cut her genes with a possessed Joan Jett, and then gave her a pair of monster-sized testicles. Consequently, her vocals are like messing around with the hot tattooed chick propping up the bar — it feels great, but you want to shower afterwards.
HorrorPops’ music, on the other hand, isn’t quite as endearing or freaky on the first or second listen, but by the third or fourth time you discover you’re actually looking forward to crawling into the metaphorical sack with them. Unfortunately, these Danish psychobilly revolutionaries — revolutionary simply because they dwell more on substance than supernatural themes and frigging monsters — suffer for their lack of initial catchiness, with songs obviously more at home onstage than in the studio.
Only a few tracks of this collection (produced by Bad Religion’s Brett Gurewitz) stand out right off the bat, such as “Undefeated” and “Caught in a Blonde” — both of which would’ve had an ’80s Jett strutting through the videos — and the album’s most contagious number, “Walk Like a Zombie.” It’s standard rockabilly fare with a wicked infusion of early-’60s doo-wop: “And you wanna hold hands in the cemetery/And you wanna be lost for all eternity.”
| Bring it on! HorrorPops (Hellcat Records) |
The opener, “Freaks in Uniforms,” is a big middle-finger salute to the scenesters who expect HorrorPops to play by some unspoken rules of conformity: “A zombified closed community/A brainwashed breed of hypocrisy/It’s misguided loyalty!” The rest of the album breathes new life into the dying genre of psychobilly, but it takes so long to kick in, many listeners will never notice.
