Spooky happenings caught on record.
Here's a common question which I don't have an answer to: What was the first album you ever bought?
I've never bought an album. Of course, I still listened to full albums (or at least, several songs in a row) from my parents' CD collection as a kid, but by the time I was old enough to start buying my own, buying albums – or even listening to full albums – wasn't really the best option anymore. Any song was available for single purchase or, better yet, available to stream on Youtube, Grooveshark, and later Spotify. Why listen to twelve songs in a row by the same artist? Even if you really liked that artist, why listen to every song from one album? Just pick your favourites.
One notable exception to this, however – at least as far as I'm concerned – is concept albums. I love concept albums, and they really don't have the same effect if you don't listen to the whole thing at least once. It's like watching a season of television and skipping an episode; sure, you can still follow what's going on, and every episode should stand on its own to some extent, but you're missing a piece of the story, and the larger world building.
Naturally, my favourite band throughout my first couple years of high school was one with a discography full of (dark and creepy) concept albums – namely, My Chemical Romance. There's some debate as to whether their first album, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, can be considered a concept album or not. It certainly has some high concept songs, including Early Sunsets Over Monroeville (which is about Dawn of the Dead) and Vampires Will Never Hurt You (apparently inspired by a vampire comic Gerard Way was working on at the time), but the album overall doesn't seem to have a continuous story, at least not one confirmed by the band. Their third and fourth albums, The Black Parade and Danger Days, respectively, are definitely concept albums with clearly outlined characters and premises – Danger Days even became a comic. However, their creepiest album is their second album, Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge.
Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge tells the story of a man making a deal with the devil following the death of his partner. She will be brought back from the dead, but first he must kill a thousand evil souls. However, when he has killed 999 souls, he learns that the last person he must kill is himself, and he will spend eternity in Hell, unable to see the woman he loves ever again.
Or, at least, I think that's what the album is about. I've heard tons of people talk about the concept behind this album over the years, or attribute meaning to the individual songs and lyrics, not to mention I've listened to all the songs countless times. However, when I went to find a summary of what it was about for this post, this was the quote from Gerard Way about it: "The concept for the record Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge was the story of a man and a woman who are separated by death in a gunfight, and he goes to hell only to realize by the devil telling him that she’s still alive. The devil says, 'You can be with her again if you bring me the souls of a thousand evil men', and so he hands him a gun and he says, 'I’ll go do it'. That was the idea behind the concept, the record ended up being much more about loss and real life than anything, so I would say it’s a good split." The ending, where he finds out he'll be separated from the woman forever, is never mentioned – did Way talk about it somewhere else, or is it just a piece of fan interpretation that has now become ubiquitous? I don't know.
This is the last track from Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge. It's one of the most clearly concept-related songs from the album, apparently telling the story of the album's main character losing his grip as he seeks out and kills the first 999 evil souls.
While my days of listening to My Chemical Romance are mostly behind me, I thought it would be worth learning about some other creepy concept albums. After all, given that there's entire bands devoted to writing lyrics about horror movies, I figured it would be easy to find more. Surely The Misfits or Oingo Boingo would have a concept album that I could write about. But no – lots of high concept songs, and at least one fan theory about a uniting story for Oingo Boingo's Dead Man's Party, but no obvious concept albums. In fact, I had a hard time coming up with anything at all when I looked for horror themed concept albums.
One thing I did come across was the album Nuada by the band Candidate, inspired by the movie The Wicker Man. However, the band doesn't consider the album a "concept album". In fact, they "really wanted to avoid that Iron Maiden thing of singing the story to a film or book ... (and went for) sound and themes, rather than doing a song about riding in a seaplane." The album sets out to capture the vibe of the movie, but not to retell the plot – you have to watch the movie for that.
This is the second song from Nuada. The title and lyrics call to mind a harvest on a farm, and the rhythmic sound and harmonies make it easy to visualize a group of people singing as they work. I haven't seen The Wicker Man, so I can't say if this song captures the feeling of the film or not – if you've seen it, let me know what you think.
So, maybe directly horror inspired concept albums aren't a big thing. What about just generally concept albums with a dark or macabre story, even if they might fall into a genre other than "horror"?
Well, one example comes to mind immediately: A Murder In The Glee Club, a 1997 album by the band Sandbox which I've been listening to on repeat for the last few months. The album tells the story of a man who murders someone, and then is haunted by regret. It's not a horror album – more like a murder mystery, if anything – but it definitely has a creepy vibe to it. The album starts off with a short titular track, which directly addresses the audience and invites them to "tune out the world and everyone, and step inside A Murder In The Glee Club". According to the album's liner notes, this is not an original piece; it was "recorded as in introduction to a play in 1932 by Freddie Corn and the Ohioans... (and) has sat dormant on a shelf for the past 65 years. Shortly after it was recorded, the production was cancelled and the song was never released or published. The version you hear on this record is the original recording, sonically enhanced and embellished using mordern technology."
If that seems a little fishy to you, you're right. I asked Paul Murray, the band's lead singer, about this liner note, and he confirmed that it has no basis in reality – just something the band thought was funny. However, establishing the first song as the "intro to a play" does add to the whole concept album thing. Even if many or most of the songs are unrelated to each other or the main concept, once you have this idea that there's some storyline to go along with them, you start wanting to connect the dots yourself.
I also asked Murray about musical influences on this album, and he mentioned two – that Jason Archibald was a fan of "90s Seattle bands", and Mike Smith (who came up with the idea to create a concept album) liked The Beatles. Both Archibald and Smith acted as guitarists and lyricists for Sandbox, and these influences are definitely apparent in the band's sound and lyrics. Interestingly, The Beatles are often credited with creating the first concept album in the form of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band – an album that also cites a fictional band for its introductory track – although whether it is actually the first album of this type has been disputed.
It has now been almost a quarter of a century since Sandbox called it quits, and aside from bassist Scott McFarlane's work with the band Crush, all the members have since been pursuing careers outside of music. However, A Murder In The Glee Club remains an interesting album, particularly if you're a fan of ghost stories and/or fictional bands from the 1930s.
This song tells the story of the victim of the titular murder being discovered. While it's not necessarily the best or most interesting song off the album (personally, I'm a fan of this one but I'd recommend listening to the whole album if you've got the time), it definitely does a lot of lifting as far as the concept goes. The lyrics tell us of a corpse surrounded in crystals being found in a garden on a "cold October afternoon" – a spooky visual if I ever heard one.
All in all, my search for horror-related concept albums wasn't quite as fruitful as I was expecting. However, I'm still hopeful – I'm sure there's horror albums out there that I just haven't stumbled across yet. Until then, there's plenty of other macabre music to tide me over.