Halloween Party

Take two members of Ministry playing an FM radio, patchbay, and delay pedals and what you get is one seriously weird album — not that one should expect any less from Mike Patton's Ipecac label. Recorded live in Austin, Texas on Halloween in 2001, Pink Anvil's Halloween Party is just that — a cousin to Eno and Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts which, in terms of genre, should be filed along with those old "spooky sounds" records. Paul Barker and Max Brody do it brilliantly, though, turning what could be simply a novelty record into an ambient masterpiece of sound collage. Maybe tracks like "Rubber Suit" tend towards the campy in their B-movie soundtrack quality, but it's the camp of Rob Zombie as opposed to that of Herman Munster. Something like "'Cause I Told You So" could stand alone as the sound of a nightmare any season of the year and "Desert" is magnificently sprawling in an eerie, David Lynch sort of way. It's an album that might only work at a Halloween party or goth gathering, but in critical terms, it's a composition that could easily sit beside Black Dice's Cold Hands, and if Pink Anvil apply this strategy to other moods, they may establish an entirely new branch of experimental music.