A big thank-you to the lovely Fireangel from the wonderful Finland-based Night Elves blog for her e-mail alerting me to this serving of Saturday awesomeness-ness.
Ghoultown is a Texas-based “hellbilly” band whose music is a metal-tinged, ghoul-themed amalgam of cowpunk and rockabilly. I don’t claim to be an expert on the band’s lengthy discography, but I do like the catchy bit of cautionary storytelling embodied in their song “Drink With the Living Dead”, which appears on the Life After Sundown album. And I especially like the brand new animated video produced for the song.
The artwork in the video was entirely created by Finnish artist Juha Vuorma, who is both a comic-book artist and a creator of album covers, including the art for the first three Kalmah albums as well as covers for records by Usurper and Altars of Destruction, among others. The video’s storyline (and the song) were written by Ghoultown frontman Count Lyle, and the final animation and directing for the video were completed by LA-based Laume Conroy.
Regardless of whether the music sounds like your kinda thing, the video is absolutely worth watching. After the jump, I’ve got a few more thoughts and then the video.
Watching the video brought back some long-submerged memories. Juha Vuorma’s artwork reminded me of a comic-book series I read long ago, back when I read comics a lot more often than I do nowadays, called Nocturnals, which featured painted art by Dan Brereton. I was especially reminded of a great character called The Gunwitch:
The song and the story in the video also brought to mind the fabulous movie Near Dark, which is probably the most original and humorously entertaining take on the vampire mythos I’ve ever seen and includes memorable (and over-the-top) performances by Bill Paxton and Lance Henrikson. Anything that can unearth cool memories like these gets five stars in my book. So, check out the video, and then I’ve got a few more pieces of info for you.
If you liked that as much as I did, then you’ll want to read Fireangel’s interview of Juha Vuorma about the creation of the video artwork, which you can find HERE. And for more info about the band and the video’s creators, check out the links accompanying Fireangel’s interview.
As always, enjoy the rest of your fucking day.
5 Responses to “DRINK WITH THE LIVING DEAD!”
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I made mention of Ghoultown in an earlier comment (specifically their song “Dirty Sanchez”) and I’m happy to see that it has come back around. Also I am a HUGE fan of Nocturnals and Dan Brereton – he has a few other series out there if you like his stuff. I got to meet him at a nerd convention and he is an awesome guy – there aren’t too many graphic novelists who PAINT their panels.
I remember that! (How could I forget a song called “Dirty Sanchez”.) I used to follow all of Brereton’s comics series because I loved the artwork so much, though I haven’t kept track of what he’s been doing since about 10 years ago.
GOOD. FUCKING. PANCAKE.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d like it at first, but I gave it a shot anyway.
Now I have another band whose music I need to familiarize myself with.
Ironically, Dan Brereton does some of Ghoultown’s album covers. See the covers at: http://www.ghoultown.com/music.htm