Back in the mists of time in the primordial soup of the world before Joyzine (or 2002 as it’s more commonly known), I was starting out in the world of emptying my brain of thoughts about music onto the internet on my first blog, Kaytronika. I wrote endlessly (and occasionally coherently) about countless bands, pretty much all of whom have since disappeared into the ether. If you’d asked me back then to guess which of them would still be putting out new records twenty-three years later, I probably wouldn’t have put my life savings on a blood splattered, horror-themed power punk band, but the undead have an uncanny knack for longevity.
Don’t get me wrong, Zombina & The Skeletones debut LP Taste the Blood of… was and remains an absolute banger, but how many albums could a band whose songs are all based on monsters, murderers and the macabre get through before it all began to wear thin? Well, seven and counting is the answer so far, not to mention a dozen or so EPs and a crypt-full of blood curdling singles.
Their latest record, In Sinistereo, gives us the answer to their staying power (and no, it’s not the blood of naive teenagers blundering into their haunted castle, at least to our knowledge) – it’s packed with fantastic songs after fantastic song and has a poltergeist’s restlessness when it comes to sticking to a genre. This collection of re-recorded rarities from the past twenty-odd years takes in a huge range of musical styles but makes them all work; from the heads down punk blast of opener ‘(All I Wanna Do) Is Decompose With You’, through the art punk squonk of ‘Phantom With the X-Ray Mind’, and the 60s girl band strut of ‘Whatever You Do, Don’t Fall In Love’, to ‘Kill!!!’s deadpan electro which brings to mind The Pet Shop Boys mixed with a huge Europop chorus. It’s like a stagger through the past 60 years of musical history but with added zombies.
We asked guitarist/vocalist Doc Horror to hold our hand as we tiptoe through the haunted house of their new record.
(All I Wanna Do Is) Decompose (With You)
The impetus behind recording Zombina and the Skeletones in Sinistereo in the first place was the enormous backlog of unused songs that we’d amassed over the years. Old demos that we loved and always intended to eventually flesh out, but would get passed-over every time we would start recording a new record… “Decompose” was possibly the oldest of them all, going back at least as far as 2003 when we were just baby Skeletones! It’s a thrashy affair that owes a lot to The Damned’s “Love Song”, and it is a love song itself, a mushy one, literally. It’s about the romantic urge to be slowly eaten by maggots, alongside that special someone.
Phantom With The X-Ray Mind
This is the first of a few songs on In Sinistereo that were written when the band was living together in the shared house where we shot the “Counting On Your Suicide” video, and where we recorded the Out Of The Crypt And Into Your Heart vocal tracks in a jerry-rigged vocal booth made from soft toys stuffed into an under-stairs cupboard. It’s written around a novelty item we had at the time, called “The UFO Hat” which was a frisbee that doubled as a fashionable hat that had flashing lights and made irritating noises, and it’s all over this track! Many of the elements in the finished song, including my vocal, are lifted straight from the original demo we made in 2007.
Witch Mountain
“Witch Mountain” is a little younger, being written in 2011. I had just joined a garage rock/surf band called El Toro! and wanted to borrow some of their simplicity so we could just sit on a cycling riff, rather than our usual choppin’ and changin’ approach. When I was a kid I’d have recurring dreams about a witch-like entity that would show up and ruin everything. At times when I’ve been at my most paranoid I’ve entertained the idea that she is real and the puppet master behind all of my worst behaviours, and this song is about that stupid notion. I’d just got one of those KORG Monotron pocket sized synthesizers when I wrote this, and it broke not long after, but that layer of psychedelic wibbling that runs throughout was the one bit of use I was ever able to get out of it!
Warning, video contains flashing lights right from the start
I Hate Humans
Another punker. Its origins are a little mysterious. The oldest demo that I can find of this track is dated 2008, but I swear it’s older than that! I don’t seem to remember writing this but I’d guess I was aiming for a touch o’ The Sonics in the verse, Misfits in the chorus – but in order for the chorus to not drag, the Sonics needed to be sped up to match… so it ends up sounding pretty frantic. For clarity, we don’t really hate humans, at least generally speaking, but there are times when this song really rings true!
Whatever You Do, Don’t Fall In Love
Now THIS one is a relic. “Whatever You Do…” is pre-Taste The Blood Of Zombina And The Skeletones. Possibly even pre-millennial. For it to have survived all this time without being recorded speaks to its earwormishness. It’s as power-pop as can be, I think, with some jingly jangly 90’s residue on it. I was obviously hammering Blondie and the Ramones at the turn of the century. Lyrically, this is the voice of your dead wife telling you to stay single.
Haunted House Of Love
Another super poppy one and another one from the 2007 band-house era, though elements of it had been floating around for longer still. I’m pretty sure that the chorus is as old as the hills. I can hear a bit of a nod to Groovie Ghoulies and Dr. Frank’s “Show Business Is My Life” in it, which would date it to the early 00’s. When we re-recorded this version of “Haunted House Of Love” for In Sinistereo we borrowed an old mechanical reed organ from Chris Double Echo to really bring out the Daniel Johnston key-bashing sound on the intro and outro. Zombina’s voice even sounds quite like him here.
Kill!!!
I first demoed “Kill!!!” in 2003 when I switched from writing with a 4-track and started using a DAW and tried to make something with a bit of a Euro-dance flavour. It is a little story where the protagonist witnesses a murder and instead of responding in any appropriate way they just find themselves fancying the killer. Speaking of killers, a few years ago I got a bit worried that I’d unconsciously ripped off that fucking “Somebody Told Me”, but I Googled it and that didn’t come out until a couple of years after I made my demo, so I think we both separately ripped off “Atomic” and “Big In Japan”. The last version we put out was longer and was bookended by this funny guitar melody, but I could never quite get it to sound the way I wanted, so I made the decision to focus in on the vocals and the synths and just turn it into a short dancefloor banger. Of all the songs on In Sinistereo it feels the most out of place, but I do love it.
Ramón
Did you ever see Alligator (1980)? Where the little baby alligator gets flushed down the loo and comes back for revenge when he growed up? This song is about that! Musically it’s 90% Rocket From The Crypt (I’m concerned that this is actually one of their riffs, but hopefully it’s just ‘in the spirit of’) and 10% it’s own thing. Gator based music. I’m not sure about this one, but we did meet a guy called BONES in London who said it was his all-time favourite ZATS song! As far as this album goes, I’ve noticed that everyone seems to pick a different fave. There’s no “main song” that everyone refers to, which is interesting. “Ramon” is a “relatively young” track from 2010.
The Wild
“The Wild” is also from 2010 and it’s all about looking back longingly at your childhood amongst wolves, living in the forest and not needing to brush your teeth. Sneaky quotes from The Remains “Don’t Look Back”, the B-52’s “Roam”, peppered with Pixies-isms… I like it! It’s a little sad.
The Crawling Love
A moody cowboy twanger from 2009. This one should have been on Charnel House Rock with all the other cowpunk-ish tracks. It captures a genuine sense of dread, I reckon, but kind of galloping along on a horse. “I don’t suppose you would know any way to reverse or prevent the changing of a man into a giant moth?” is quite an odd thing to say in a song. Feels good, though! I think I’d just read The Metamorphosis and wanted to do something about people turning into bugs.
The StakeOut
Madness style demi-ska in the first half, and a blues waltz ala “I Put A Spell On You” in the second half. The instrumental had been knocking about since forever but I finally got round to putting some “Black Christmas” inspired lyrics on it in 2014 – technically making “The StakeOut” the youngest song on In Sinistereo! Last time we released this track it felt very unfinished. Now it’s full of lovely pianos and shakers and a bouncy guest saxophone from Glowy Skullet. I’m pretty pleased with this one. It tells a fairly coherent story without too much brain juice leaking out and muddying the meaning.
Stalkin’
Now let’s go back to 2007 for a bit of “Dirty Water” esque garage/rockabilly stomping. I realized we didn’t have a “Do The ________” song that would instruct the listener on how to do the latest dance craze, so I wrote one. The dance in question is ‘being a massive stalker’. It does some cool switcheroos from a swung rhythm to a straight one and back again and I love how it gets so overblown towards the end with all that “baby in the midnight” stuff that it seems like it can hardly contain itself, only to pull back and give us two bars of bare-bones Cavern Club-ness to close it out. It sounds so daft and small after all that hullaballoo. I think that’s my favourite musical gag on the whole album.
Beware: Cosmic Plague!
Remaining in 2007, but switching to something almost approaching hardcore. This one would have sat well on Out Of The Crypt And Into Your Heart next to “Wolf Hands” and friends. It’s real fast, it’s got a “Hey! Hey! Hey!” bit and Zombina is talking about maggots and decay again. It’s also the first of three songs toward the end of the album with a mention of snakes, which is nice.
The Changeling
…makes for a great pair with “Cosmic Plague”. Another super short, double time, aggy kind of tune. I don’t know where the decision to use a supersaw synthesiser sound came from. That’s a bit techno for us. “The Changeling” is another from the 2007 batch that, again, wouldn’t have been out of place on OOTCAIYH. For years this song was called “Corpse Duty”. I don’t remember what prompted the change of title. We used to listen to the demo version in the van quite a lot and the band would always ask me “why don’t we do this one?”
You Swallow Spiders In Your Sleep
There used to be a ‘fact’ that people would quote at you that people passively swallow ‘hundreds’ of spiders every night while sleeping. Obviously this is 100% true, so Zombina and I wrote this song in 2008 to celebrate that fact. It’s got something NWOBHM about it to my ears. It rocks pretty hard overall. We’d just come back from a tour all full of beans after watching Blitzkid and The Other doing their somewhat metallized version of horror-punk every night for a month across Europe and we fancied having a bit of a foot-on-the-monitor moment of our own. Snakes get a second mention. There’s also a reference to “bad ghosts”, which is quite a chilling thought.
Satan Is Alive In You
The slowie! You’ve got to have a slowie on your album. It can’t all be movers. Like “The Crawling Love” this vintage 2007 rant at the devil probably should have been on Charnel House Rock. I was trying my darnedest to channel Roky Erickson (eighties bedraggled Roky, not 13th Floor Elevators Roky, mind you) and getting good and worried about locking Satan in a tower. In a dungeon with werewolves… and snakes! That’s three mentions of snakes. Four if you count alligators as snakes. Five if you count maggots. Six if you count worms. I think this is a genuinely pretty song, though. When we play it live it’s even slower and sounds fab.
“Satan Is Alive In You” is the official closer of Zombina and the Skeletones in Sinistereo BUT if you buy the CD version there’s actually another two tracks which I will tell you about now…
Last Party On Earth
So, the apocalypse has arrived. The asteroids are on a collision course with planet earth and nuclear war is closer than ever… so we asked “What would the B-52’s do?” … it’d probably go a little something like this! It’s another well old number (2002 or 2003 at a guess) re-recorded 2025 as a b-side to our “Witch Mountain” single, and we couldn’t be happier with the result!
The Flesh
The final track on the CD version of Zombina and the Skeletones in Sinistereo, AKA the b-side to our “Kill!!!” single AKA the weirdest track we’ve ever recorded… it’s 2003 again and we’re playing shows with Liverpool bands like Ricky Spontane and All Day Glow and “The Flesh” is basically ‘All Day Spontane’, which will mean nothing to anyone unless you happened to be going to gigs in Liverpool around 2003. There’s a great sound-collage/jump-scare bit at the end of the first verse, in which we slopped a load of meat on a table and ripped up a magazine. Zombina did a great job of layering vocal harmonies onto the “power ballad” section too, bringing “The Flesh” to a genuinely epic place… and then it fades out with a “Hey! Hey! Hey!” and that’s your lot!
In Sinistereo is out on Halloween via 9×9 Records – I mean, when else could it have been released? Order now on vinyl, CD or digital download via Bandcamp
Zombina & The Skeletones: Website / Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
Introduction by Paul Maps
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