Happy Dead Man – ‘Vines Grown Between My Eyes’ (2020)

A mind-numbingly twisted nightmare featuring a collaboration between industrial/dark ambient musician W. David Oliphant (Maybe Mental, Life Garden), Sun City Girl Alan Bishop and Fat Gray Cat vocalist Michael Pistrui, Happy Dead Man gathered in the brain-frying expanse of the sun-drenched mining town of Bisbee, Arizona and emerged after two days with this unique collection of TUNES with the eerie air of a haunted concept album.

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Titles like “Dead Gardens”, “Empty Trees Of Anger”, “The Killer”, and “Unmarked Grave” suggest some dirty business going down in the desert.

Using only Oliphant’s prepared computer, Bishop’s acoustic guitars and Pistrui and Bishop’s quivering, ghostly vocals, early comparisons with Martyn Bates and Eyeless In Gaza spring to mind as “Uranium Eyes” stealthily stalks from your speakers, like a funereal dirge approaching sacred burial grounds. “I Civilized You” feels like Sun Ra just returned from a Saturn watering hole where he picked Mick Farrenup off the floor and bought him a few more rounds. “The Boy King” (Tutankhamen?) is a sparse and dreamy tale of resurrection, like a scene from a lost Sergio Leone western, complete with ghostly disembodied backing vocals for added goosepimply effect.

“Dead Gardens” is accompanied by the sounds of someone digging a grave and supplies the band and album with their titles. There’s something out there in the cold, black desert, but you don’t want to go investigating after dark. The happy dead men see dead gardens. Perhaps, there’s room for one more? “A Memory” feels like something that fell off a David Lynch soundtrack (sung by Lynch himself), with tinkling wind chimes and lyrics like “The drip in your head/Is wetting the bed” and “I squeezed off my face/To hang up over the door”. Imagine Frank Zappa directing a Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake narrated by inmates from the local insane asylum. Tuck this one away to be revived at Halloween to scare the little brats ringing your doorbell and begging for free treats. This’ll fix ‘em!

Side 2 continues in the same vein, with echoes of Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Einstürzende Neubauten, the inherent source bands (Sun City Girls, Maybe Mental, Life Garden, Fat Gray Cat, et. al.), and assorted industrialised cadaverous music projects from Nine Inch Nails to Faust, Swans, Coil, and Throbbing Gristle. A lot of spoken word pieces create an ominous setting like old-fashioned horror comics (from Creepy, Eerie, and Weird to Tales From The Cryptand Sandman) and it wouldn’t hurt the ambience to have a compendium of Lovecraft and Poe close to hand (in fact, “Head” sounds like something Poe might’ve dreamed up, complete with its sloshing, dragging, and other horror sound effects, and lyrics like: “And when I bounce it on the floor/It always rolls right out the door.”)

A singularly harrowing experience that may be best experienced alone in the dark. If you dare!

Jeff Penczak

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Happy Dead Man – ‘Vines Grown Between My Eyes’ (Gatefold album released on Unrock on 21 August 2020)