Sounds of Darkness

If you enjoyed Spike Jones’ “A Spooktacular in Screaming Sound”, you should like this album from Goodman and Ramal. It has a few parodies on popular music from the period (“The Ghoul from Ipanema” and “Blood and Butter”), along with a few standard Halloween songs (“Monster Mash”, “Haunted House”, “Purple People Eater”).

There are also six original tunes penned by Dickie Goodman and/or Bill Ramal. Some are pretty fun … “Frankenstein Meets the Beetles” is an OK song composed entirely around the concept that the Monster’s haircut looks like the mop-tops sported by the Beatles. “Monster Talk” and “Werewolf Waltz” are little more than some spooky voice-overs with music (reminds me of a couple Bob McFadden tracks). “A Hard Days Night” is unchanged, except a Boris Karloff impersonator is voicing the lyrics.

The cover art is pretty good, and I do like “The Ghoul From Ipanema” simply because it is truly unique. But the rest of it is pretty middle-of-the-road as far as Halloween novelty music goes. It lacks the clever lyrics of my two favorite novelty albums by Spike Jones and Sheldon Allman. It lacks originality with so many standards like Monster Mash. There simply aren’t enough laughs … it all feels very pedestrian. I expected a little more from a couple of music producers who are mainly famous for their novelty records.

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