The Palace Brothers - Idle Hands Are The Devil's Playthings

Back when I lived in Denver, I worked nights at a group home and met my friend Craig, another employee whose musical rabbit holes seemed to have no bottom. If there was an obscure label worth knowing, chances are Craig already owned everything they'd ever released. Sub Pop, Drag City, Scat Records, Estrus... he was my unofficial graduate school in underground music.

Craig didn't just collect records, he lived them. He even started his own label, Honeyman, released a Bassholes 45, and at one point owned one of only two known copies of an unreleased Jim Sheppard (V3) 45. A few years ago he sold it for serious collector money, proving once again that sometimes the weirdest records become the most valuable.

I'd spend entire days at his house listening to records, borrowing stacks to take home, and having my musical horizons stretched far beyond where they ever would have gone on their own. One day he put on this Palace Brothers LP he had just picked up. By the time it was over, I was heading straight to Wax Trax with my wallet already surrendering. My record collection is infinitely deeper, stranger, and better because of Craig.

These days I'm in North Carolina and Craig's in Maryland, but we still talk at least once a week. The last time we met up was in Norfolk about four years ago. That feels less like "recently" and more like a warning label that says: Road Trip Required.

As for Idle Hands Are the Devil's Playthings, the title still holds up. These days it's hard enough keeping your mind on the straight and narrow without the nonstop circus of news, social media, and general world chaos doing its best to drag your attention in twelve directions at once. Sometimes the best antidote is simple: put on a good record, drop the needle, and let the rest of the world wait its turn.

The Detergents - Igor's Cellar

I end Halloweenie week with The Detergents, one of those odd weird footnotes in pop history. Most people know Ron Dante as the voice behind a parade of fictional hitmakers like The Archies and The Cuff Links, and later as one of the people helping steer Barry Manilow toward superstardom. Yet here he is lurking in a parody group whose shelf life somehow stretched for two years, several TV appearances, and one delightfully unexpected B-side. While Ron Dante is known as the voice in those other fictional groups, the voice on this particular slab of vinyl wasn't Ron at all, but Danny Jordan, who sadly left us in 2024. Danny's name rang a bell because he was also a member of The Court Jesters, whose two excellent 45s on Roulette I posted years ago. Naturally, that realization triggered the familiar collector's curse: "I should really re-upload those MP3s, take better photos, and repost them." Just what I needed... another project. My growing pile of projects now has projects of its own.

Igor's Cellar was the B-side of the second-to-last Detergents 45 and, it’s part novelty record and part garage-rock basement experiment. It rattles around like something that escaped from a mad scientist's basement laboratory, complete with breaking beakers, flickering Tesla coils, and poor Igor dutifully sweeping up after another monster mishap. The song has enough raw garage energy to stand on its own, even if it arrives wrapped in the group's trademark sense of absurdity.

As for Igors’ Cellar, it's a reminder that sometimes the best surprises are hiding on the flip side of a novelty record, waiting in the shadows while Igor throws the switch and hopes this experiment works out better than the last one.

Hot Blood - Soul Dracula

I wrote that I’d invite Dracula in for coffee, but that’s not entirely true. The only coffee he’d be getting is the blood flowing through my veins, and I’m not exactly in a sharing mood.

I’ve never been much of a vampire fan. My wife, on the other hand, treats vampires as a year-round hobby. October just kicks things into overdrive. If it involves fangs, capes, ancient curses, or mysterious castles, she's watching it.

I picked this up last year and figured, why not? If Dracula is going to show up on my turntable, he might as well arrive aboard the Disco Soul Train. Somewhere between Transylvania and Studio 54, the Count apparently traded his coffin for platform shoes and decided eternal life needed a better dance beat. Maybe immortality isn't a curse. Maybe spending eternity promoting novelty disco records is.

Personally, if I’m inviting any vampire over for breakfast, it’s Count Chocula. At least he leaves cereal instead of bite marks and doesn't spend 400 years trying to launch a disco career.

One record! Ah-ah-ah! Two records! Ah-ah-ah!

Hugh Barrett and the Victors - There Was Fungus Among Us/Got The Bull By The Horns

My posts were absolutely exploding for about a week. We're talking nearly ten times the normal views. Then, just as suddenly, they dropped back to earth like a UFO whose parking meter expired. I have no clue what caused the temporary surge. Perhaps the Algorithmic Fungus Network detected my page and spread spores throughout the internet. Maybe a secret colony of music bots became obsessed with obscure 45s before wandering off in search of another digital mushroom patch. The truth remains hidden deep beneath the forest floor of social media.

I harbor no illusions that I'm doing anything revolutionary here. Mildly interesting? Perhaps. Worthy of a SiriusXM executive pounding on my door and offering me a once-a-month DJ slot? Highly doubtful, especially after hearing my voice, which has all the broadcast smoothness of a chainsaw being tuned by a raccoon.

Today's offering is the one-off single from Hugh Barrett And The Victors, There Was Fungus Among Us. I picked this up in a box lot last year where there happened to be two copies. The first was cracked, prompting a colorful stream of language that would have caused nearby mushrooms to curl up and die. A few records later, I discovered the second copy and was forced to issue a heartfelt apology to the universe for my verbal outburst.

When I hear "fungus," my mind doesn't go to biology. It goes straight to mutant spores, zombie outbreaks, and The Blob. That movie scared the living daylights out of me as a kid. There was something deeply unsettling about an unstoppable goo silently consuming everything in its path. Looking back, maybe that wasn't a movie. Maybe it was just a metaphor for record collecting.

Monks Of Doom - The Insect God

I'm not much of a horror movie fan. Give me vampires, werewolves, zombies, or any other supernatural creature that politely announces its arrival and I'm fine. But spiders? Bugs? Any creepy-crawly thing with more legs than common sense? Absolutely not. The very thought makes my skin start scheduling emergency evacuation procedures.

Every other year or so, our house becomes the filming location for a nature documentary called Me vs. Eight-Legged Terror.

For some reason, giant spiders decide our front yard is prime real estate. And when I say giant, I mean they're approximately the size of Cincinnati. Scientists may argue with that measurement, but scientists have never walked face-first into one of these monstrosities at 5 a.m.

These creepy little architects spend the night constructing enormous webs stretching from the tree to the ground right across our path. Not off to the side where sensible creatures would build them. No, directly where Cooper and I are guaranteed to walk the next morning.

Nothing gets the heart pumping quite like strolling through the yard in the dark and suddenly spotting a massive web suspended in front of you. It's the closest I've ever come to discovering a hidden superpower. If startled badly enough, I'm convinced I could clear a six-foot fence without touching it.

Of course, Cooper is no help. He just happily trots along while I'm scanning the horizon like a paranoid cryptid hunter searching for signs of arachnid invasion.

Thankfully, this was one of the years they skipped town. No webs. No eight-legged nightmare fuel. No impromptu cardiovascular stress tests before sunrise. I'm not saying the spiders hold conventions and only visit every other year. I'm just saying the evidence is starting to pile up, and I'm not brave enough to attend the next meeting.

The good news is I survived past encounters. The bad news is I probably used up ten years' worth of courage in a single early morning. If vampires ever show up at my door, I'll gladly invite them in for coffee. But if a spider the size of a nickel appears in my bathroom, expect to hear a grown man screaming from several counties away.

So here we have the "Insect God" and a poem that blurs the line between reality and the uncanny, I always loved how this one explodes out of the gate:

"What has become of Millicent Frastley? Is there any hope that she is still alive?"

Now that's how you open a record.

I bought this new back in the day because I was already a huge Camper Van Beethoven fan and knew about their side project. Back then I was happily throwing money at mail-order catalogs from every interesting Washington State label I could find: Sub Pop, Estrus, C/Z. Buying this was less a decision and more a reflex.

The 10-inch picture disc is absolutely gorgeous, but thankfully the music lives up to the packaging. Far too many records treat the artwork as the main attraction and the songs as an afterthought. Not this one.

Years later I discovered the song was adapted from an Edward Gorey poem of the same name. Gorey was still alive when this was released, which makes me wonder if he ever heard it. Did he smile approvingly? Did he raise a skeptical eyebrow? I'd like to imagine Gorey emerging briefly from a cloud of ravens and Victorian gloom, listening with perfect indifference, then pronouncing it “reasonably bleak” before disappearing back into the ether.

Because if you stop and think about it, this is a remarkably strange piece of writing. A missing girl, unanswered questions, lingering dread, and a uniquely piece of writing making the absurd feel unsettling and the unsettling feel oddly funny. It reads like a supernatural mystery narrated by someone who has seen entirely too much and plans to explain none of it. Looking at the illustrations online, I can imagine a parent flipping through the book in a bookstore in 1963 and thinking, "Oh, what charming drawings..." only to find themselves several pages later wondering, "Wait...this is for whom exactly?"

The Monks understood the assignment perfectly. They created a musical backdrop that feels like wandering through a foggy cemetery with a faulty flashlight while a distant voice calmly recounts events that are becoming increasingly impossible. The result is charming, creepy, intelligent, and just weird enough to linger in your brain long after the needle leaves the groove.

Much like poor Millicent Frastley herself.

R. Dean Taylor - There's A Ghost In My House/Don't Fool Around

I took a half day off yesterday to get my tire fixed. Thankfully it turned out I had just run over something that punctured it, so the shop patched it up quickly. For once, automotive drama arrived as a short story instead of a full-length novel.

However, they informed me they "couldn't" get the spare tire back under the truck because the fastener was "stuck." Being a longtime student of learning how to muddle through either repairing things correctly or mucking them up, I pulled into a large parking lot afterward and decided to investigate. Having never lowered or raised the spare before Sunday, I fully expected an engineering nightmare. Instead, I gave it a little tug, the cable came down smoothly, and I was able to get the tire slipped right back into place. Amazing what can be accomplished when someone actually tries.

The day's second battle involved the washing machine repair company. Apparently the replacement part being shipped directly to me instead of them created some level of cosmic disturbance (and probably impacted their reimbursement). After a bit of discussion, interpretation, negotiation, and what might qualify as hostage diplomacy, they finally agreed to come out Wednesday. With any luck, my washing machine will once again be an appliance rather than a large decorative monument to unfulfilled potential.

Knowing the roofing crew may start work today, I spent part of the evening recording songs before several days of mandatory silence arrive courtesy of hammers, compressors, and gravity. At this point, this blog has become part music page and part therapy session where I process minor disasters through obscure records. That'll be fifty dollars please.

As for today's selection, does "Ghosts" count as a Halloween song if it's really a metaphor for lost love? I say yes. Heartbreak can be terrifying. Especially when your evening plans involve eating cold SpaghettiOs straight from the can while staring into the middle distance and wondering where things went wrong.

Two years ago, I posted the version by The Fall. In a confession that may cost me my Record Collector License, I never paid much attention to the songwriting credit and had absolutely no idea it was a cover version until I picked up this copy earlier this year. Then the dots connected.

R. Dean Taylor is primarily remembered for "Indiana Wants Me," although someday I hope to own the red vinyl promo copy with the picture sleeve because apparently I enjoy expensive, unnecessary quests. But this double-sided soul monster deserved to be a massive hit. Instead, it followed the familiar path of many great records: ignored by the masses, adored by collectors, and eventually priced high enough to make grown adults mutter obscenities at record shows.

Naturally, I paired it with one of the classic Motown Hitsville sleeves because sometimes the music, the label, and the artwork line up so perfectly it feels like destiny.

Or maybe the ghosts made me do it.

The Phantom Five - Graveyard/Cool-It

Yesterday was one of those "the universe giveth and the universe immediately demandeth payment" kind of days.

The good news? I spent the day digging and found a 45 I'd been forced to part with about 25 years ago when my wife went out on disability and bills had priority over vinyl dreams. I paid more than I wanted to, naturally, but still managed to get it for less than current market insanity, so I'll call that a win.

The bad news? On the way home, one of my tires decided it had reached an early retirement age and blew out on a busy freeway.

Now, despite owning this truck for years, I had never actually changed one of its tires. This led to an educational roadside seminar titled "How the Hell do I get the Spare Tire out from under the Truck?" After much crawling around, creative vocabulary, studying page 301 of my owners manual and several negotiations with gravity, I finally got the spare down.

Unfortunately, the tire appeared to weigh roughly the same as a small moon.

By the end of the ordeal my hands looked like I'd been wrestling barbed wire, my shoulders were filing formal complaints, and my old bones were questioning every life choice that led me to that shoulder of the freeway. But somehow I got the tire changed and made it home.

What makes this even weirder is that I bought a full set of expensive new tires for the Colorado back in May. In June, the right rear tire got impaled by a metal pipe and had to be replaced. Thankfully warranty softened the blow. Now, just a few months later, it's the exact same tire causing trouble again. Either that corner of the truck is cursed or it has developed a taste for roadside debris.

So yes, I reunited with a long-lost record yesterday as well as 88 other's that will grace my turntable. But apparently the crate-digging gods charged a flat tire, several layers of skin, and half my remaining youth as the admission fee.

Back to Halloweenie week.  Who can resist a label that looks this cool and surf instrumentals that hit with all the subtlety of a rogue wave? Everything about this 45 screams Halloween. You've got a band called The Phantom Five, which immediately raises important questions. Were there actually four previous Phantoms? Did those "Phantoms" vanish before the photo shoot? Or were there five band members and they figured nobody was going to conduct a paranormal headcount on what happened to the previous Phantoms? I'm far too lazy to investigate, and frankly, the mystery is part of the charm.

The artwork alone looks like the band just finished a leisurely stroll through a graveyard, stopping only to admire how impossibly cool they are. In my mind they're all wearing sunglasses despite the fact that they're ghosts and it is probably midnight.

I picked this one up from my friend Jesse last year, proving once again that some records don't need a famous name, a hit single, or a Discogs essay the length of a doctoral thesis. Sometimes a killer label, a wonderfully ridiculous band name, and enough reverb to wake the dead are more than enough.