For 30 years now WEDNESDAY 13 has been cutting a path across the musical landscape. A Rock & Roll Crypt Keeper, putting the laughter in to slaughter walking the same bloodied road paved by acts such as ALICE COOPER, ROB ZOMBIE, and KISS.
Horrifier is the ninth album under his self-titled moniker and arguably one of his heaviest. As with everything, over time his music and themes have gone from schlocky carnival haunted house vibes to more deliciously dark fare.
Insides Out is a sinister little ditty. A serial killer manifesto with a grinding industrial beat. It sets the tone of the album up nicely. Exhume And Devour and Good Day To Be A Bad Guy have some of that old school WEDNESDAY 13 feel to them. Big, swaggering B-Movie anthems.
Hell Is Coming has a doomy blues feel to it. Creeping and crawling it’s way through the listeners ear like a Romero Zombie, sinister, lurching and utterly unstoppable. Halfway To The Grave is pure 80s hair metal, albeit through the WEDNESDAY 13 filter. It is immensely catchy and will burrow it’s way into your brain and set up shop for a while to come.
Horrifier boasts two tributes to horror maestro John Carpenter, with Return To Haddonfield based on his legendary Halloween. Christine: Fury In The Night, sees him tackle Carpenter‘s Stephen King adaptation of Christine. Both tracks are a hoot and hardcore horror fans will get a kick out of them.
The Other Side is a tribute to friend and MURDERDOLLS band mate Joey Jordison. It’s a deeply personal track. Showcasing an entirely different side to WEDNESDAY 13, allowing the listener a peak behind the mask. Ending the album on a heavy and sombre note, with a fitting eulogy for a fallen brother, who many of us still miss terribly.
Horrifier is pretty much a perfect WEDNESDAY 13 album. If you’ve been following his career over the years in his many guises, this will yield little in the way of surprises. He is not a man known for wanting to reinvent the wheel, sometimes he doesn’t even want to change a tyre. What we have here is an album that plays to all of his strengths, showing off all the colours in his pallette. This album is proof once again that there is still some life left in the old corpse after all.
Horrifier is available now via Napalm Records.
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