Category Archives: album

WTF Album Covers: The Oak Ridge Boys Murder Christmas

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This album cover tells a story. It’s the story of how the Oak Ridge Boys broke into your apartment, made love to your pets, ate all the barbecue, and then sat patiently waiting for you to come home from work so they could re-enact scenes from Bergman’s The Virgin Spring.

This is how they sat while they waited for you to come home from a long holiday shift you didn’t want to take, but had to at the last minute. Cue the scary music, because now, you’re putting the key into the lock of your apartment door and you’ll soon be face to face with The Men With The Sentient Facial Hair.

–Joe Wallace

Sun Ra Plays the Batman Theme?

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Of all the vinyl finds I’ve had lately, one of the most surreal has to be this French repressing of this Batman and Robin album, complete with the Batman theme.

Re-issued by Klimt Records years ago in France, this record brought in some serious firepower as session musicians, namely members of the Al Kooper Blues Project and the Sun Ra Arkestra including Sun Ra himself on the Hammond B3. The original album gives no clue to the super-session nature of the album, but Klimt sets the record straight with a complete roster of players on the back cover.

That roster included Sun Ra, Al Kooper, Steve Katz, Pat Patrick, Marshall Allan, Danny Kalb and others.

According to blogger Ryan Masteller at Critical Masses, at least one of those players truly hated doing the sessions. Maybe they were underpaid, or had an angry martinet type running the show, or perhaps they were forced to do the music wearing tights and cowls? We may never know.

I’d never heard of this until I spotted it in the bins a few weeks ago. I was so amazed that I had to grab one. The album is a cash-in, made during the Adam West Batman period.

What’s really funny about that to me, at least where the actual Batman theme song is concerned, is that when you watch the end credits of any Batman episode, when they get to the music portion, there is a LYRICS credit.

Yes, somebody actually got paid to come up with “Batmaaaan. Da-da da-da- da-da-da….(repeat until your face falls off)…BAT MAAAAAAANNNNNNN”

But back to the record. The musicians are credited on the cover as “Dan and Dale”. On the flip side, the French pressing reveals that it’s actually Sun Ra and various other names (something not found on the original, heh).

All things considered, this is one super-oddball find and while some uber-collectors are no doubt tapping their foot and clucking at me finding this only years after the fact, collectors be damned. You take the weirdness where you can find it. I was quite pleased to score this and nominate it for “most mind-bending vinyl find of the month”. Sun Ra and Batman. It doesn’t come any further out of left field than that.

(Side note–I do have a copy of the Sun Ra Plays Batman & Robin on auction at eBay. When it’s gone, it’s gone!)

–Joe Wallace

Electronic Sadism: A Chicago Compilation

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Turntabling Records is at it again–this time with a brain-shreddingly unusual compilation of Chicago electronic music projects by Paisley Babylon, Savior Noise, Thelema USA, Satan’s Tea Boy and other acts featured on Electronic Sadism: A Chicago Compilation.

That link takes you to the 20-track iTunes download version of the album, but there is also a limited edition 12-song sampler available for sale on compact disc. The CD version is limited to a run of 500 and is completely hand-assembled. No more than 500 will be made and sold.

The 12 tracks available on the CD sampler are a strange mixture of Coil, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and Skinny Puppy textures. There are vintage-era industrial and ambient sounds combined with soundtrack-esque interludes, mellow meanderings, and nearly hallucinatory side-trips. But the ghost of the Marquis de Sade is always lurking nearby to bring you back to attention with a sonic blast of fury and chaos.

The packaging for this CD special edition is deceptively LP-sized, right down to a poly outer sleeve.  But make no mistake, this is a compact disc full of electronics, evil and doubt (as Brian Eno would say). Going from wildly chaotic to strangely danceable, Electronic Sadism is a great birthday gift for the old-school industrial music fan in your life. Anybody who wishes for the good old days of Throbbing Gristle and Test Department should have a listen to this.

Have a free listen to the download-only track “Speaker Damage Guaranteed” from the digital version of Electronic Sadism or listen to the final track on the limited-edition Electronic Sadism CD by Thelema USA, “Robes Off”

Saying The Unthinkable! Vinyl Documentary Film

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This is a clip from Vinyl, the documentary film about record collectors, hoarders, miscreants, and music lovers in general. In this segment, filmmaker Alan Zweig talks about maybe packing it in, getting a life (huh?) and finding a girlfriend. The most insane moment in the clip is when he intimates that collecting vinyl and having a life are incompatible. What?



Fascinating, but the sentiment is a bit misguided. You don’t have to be a no-life cellar dweller to collect vinyl, but I DO understand the obsessive need to immerse yourself in something. What did you think of this clip? I haven’t seen the full documentary yet so it’s hard to say if he’s deadpan kidding here or if there’s a scary degree of seriousness to his idea that vinyl might be incompatible with life in general.

–Joe Wallace