The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets

[slang 1,532]

I'm not surprised there is no thread for this band here. So....SURPRISE!!!!?

 

THE DARKEST OF THE HILLSIDE THICKETS are a Canadian punk/metal band inspired by the horror/fantasy of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) and other wonderful absurdities from the weird-tales/pulp-fiction era of literature still flourishing today. Lovecraft's fiction often views humankind as vulnerable and insignificant relative to malevolent and timeless elder beings. Ordinarily these beings ignore us; however, Lovecraft's characters, being obsessed by eerie nostalgias for archaic and dangerous pasts, causes them to breach the gap between modern times and ancient and eternal horrors. It's Alien-Horror Sadcore, really. And while Nabokov (probably) wouldn't have considered Lovecraft a great writer, his definition of a good reader does seem to apply to reading him: "...the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense". Lovecraft is famous for sentences laden with obscure adjectives and for talking around the horror experienced. Given his indirect style, you really had to paint the situations in your head while you read. Nevertheless, his weirdness influenced generations of horror writers, and he made it into the "Library of America" catalog, along side Poe, Whitman, Nabokov, Dashiel Hammett, PK Dick, and many others, though you'd probably want to get his fiction on a cheaper venue (e.g., the kindle). 

 

"The Dukes of Alhazred" is the Thickets recent release. It is "crowdsourced", and as their last release was in 2007, I'd say these guys probably have day jobs and do the amazing thing they do as a labor of love. FYI, Abdul Alhazred, "the mad Arab", is a fictional character from HPL's "Cthulhu Mythos" stories. He is credited with writing the dreaded Necronomicon. While there's no song with the album's title, the cover art refers does refer to it. Tracks from the album (as of this writing, 9 out of 13!) are at the Thickets youtube channel. *WARNING*. these are *EXPLICIT* commercial videos. If you cannot stand seeing the words *BUY THE ALBUM*, or seeing a *BANDCAMP LINK*, proceed no further. 

 

The first track [You Fool, Warren is Dead], is an HPL story reduction (lyrics in the description). It's representative of (but does not exhaust) the Thickets style. However, wikipedia also labels them "powerpop", and there is something queerily poppish about their songs, if you let them sink in. 

 

An historical tragedy of careless industrialism is the topic of this song. "Sugar, there is something you don’t see every day" [The Great Molasses Disaster]. Lyrics in the description. 

 

Here's a track I bet LDR would appreciate, and I'm pretty sure mad scientists are currently working on this [Arachnotopia].

 

And since I just name-bombed LDR, consider this Black-Beauty style *anthem* expressing love for an evolutionary depressive [Coelacanthem].

 

And it just keeps coming. Nothing can keep this band down, except maybe the topic of this song [A little late].

 

Thickets songs can have a strange kind of déjà vu, or maybe they have songs like this in their past discog, idk; anyway still a great song for me [Welcome to the Island]. And a demo version would have been nice as a bonus track.

 

Just when you think you have them pigeonholed, they do an instrumental [Erich Zann]. "The Music of Erich Zann" (another HPL story) has generated story readings and video-play adaptations, and has inspired a modern classical piece for solo violin and a metal album by Mekong Delta (all on youtube). So the Thickets fascination with this material is hardly unique. The story involves unearthly music that can both beckon and ward off things we're better not knowing about. So it's good to have this band, and maybe another heavy hitter or two, to keep the abominations at bay.

 

And what about all those who wish they were dead already? Check out this short inspirational song about wanting to live [i want to live]. 

 

It's element-ary, my dear Watson [it must be the wind].

 

On youtube you can find fanmade Thickets videos using found footage from horror movies. Some of these are quite disturbing, so tread carefully. But if you're just hoary and have an eldritch itch to bop out with (pulp) literary pretensions, check out the rest of the album, and/or their earlier work, which has more narrative sequence. The two prior albums I'm thinking of are "Spaceship Zero: original motion picture soundtrack", and "The Shadow out of Tim", both classics, imo, and on spotify.  Bandcamp also allows you to play the entire Dukes album (and their earlier ones) and individual tracks therefrom, at least in the dimension I come from. 

 

Happy abyss gazing!

[expandableclitoris 9,091]

its your band tho

[slang 1,532]

its your band tho

yeah ... I mean I'm a fan and all, and posted a thread about them, but I'm not a member of the band; I'm not even Canadian.