Sounds of Darkness

I don’t recall where I found this little gem. It features pretty solid retellings of contemporary scary tales with musical accompaniment. It opens and closes with Edgar Allen Poe poems, and in between are urban legends you are probably already familiar with in some form or another.

Stories include variations on the kidney removal, the killer’s hook on the car, the downed telephone line in the cemetery, the “have you checked the children” story, even the tried-and-true vanishing hitchhiker. Pretty standard fare, but the scripts are all good. The narration isn’t bad, but at times it sounds as if it were played back at a speed slower than what it was recorded … it isn’t a very good effect. Maybe next time find narrators with deeper voices?

The music is, from what I can tell, all borrowed from the realm of classical music. I hear music from “Pictures at an Exhibition”, “Neptune” from Holst’s “The Planets”, and some piano and organ music. No points for originality, and sometimes the mood of the music utterly fails to match the mood of the story.

Then again, this album isn’t out to win any awards for “Best Original Score” … it is just telling some ghost stories. And it does an excellent job of it. There aren’t many “modern” collections of ghost stories that I like more than this one, but I am still left with the feeling that it could’ve been done better.
Tales from the Tomb