DON'T DESECRATE THE DEAD

Now that it's October and the Halloween season is finally upon us, I've been thinking about spooky shit to listen to that falls outside of the norm.  I mean, I love the Misfits as much as anybody, but sometimes you just gotta give "Ghouls Night Out" a rest, ya know?  As my feeble brain began to swirl with thoughts of truly terrifying tunes, the one album that kept popping into my head was Megaptera's The Curse of the Scarecrow.

Formed in the early nineties, Megaptera were a Swedish death industrial trio that went on to become one of the genre's defining bands, alongside the likes of Brighter Death Now, MZ.412 and Atrax Morgue.  They released The Curse of the Scarecrow in 1998 via Release Entertainment, the sadly defunct experimental/noise sub-label of Relapse Records.  The album is an exercise in creepy, ominous atmosphere that continues to fill listeners with unending dread nearly two-and-a-half decades later.

The core sound of The Curse of the Scarecrow consists of glacially slow synth-work with industrial noise, clanking machine-like rhythms, film dialogue samples and other effects lurking in the background, buried under a haze of nigh-impenetrable electronics; it’s eerie and unnerving, but it’s also strangely hypnotic and often cinematic.  The album could very easily function as a soundtrack to some sort of hallucinatory, Lynch-ian supernatural horror film, like The Changeling dropping some bad acid with Eraserhead.

Of course, the horror movies in your head are often far worse than the ones you see on the screen, and The Curse of the Scarecrow is nothing if not good nightmare fuel.  It is the sound of evil lurking around every corner, death hiding in the depths of every shadow and the hairs on the back of your neck standing up for reasons unknown.  It's one of those rare albums that can inspire the imagination to run wild, although you may not like the places it chooses to run to while under the scarecrow's malevolent spell.

With The Curse of Scarecrow, Megaptera crafted a corroded symphony for ghosts trapped within barely-functioning machinery and shrouded in darkness, blindly searching the endless mechanical abyss for some semblance of their lost humanity. The more one listens, the easier it becomes to get lost in the album‘s gloomy, foreboding confines, so approach with extreme caution, if you dare.