Hands up who likes ‘Monster Mash.’ Hands up who likes Nick Cave and his darkly impressive Bad Seeds. You guys will probably love this album, which is the product of one Jeff Wagner’s Halloween-stained imagination. He recorded every single sound that you hear on ‘2AM…’ so you know whom to blame. The 50s Hammer horror schlock theme runs throughout, replete with supposedly scary sounds that wouldn’t be out of place at a fun-fair’s Haunted House.
The fact that this album had been released at all shows that there is, behind all the crap that regularly flows from the mouths of various record companies, a few people with a sense of humour who don’t want to listen to the same regurgitated stuff over and over. No, they want to dip back into the 40s and 50s for their influences, mixing bluesy chord sequences (‘Midnight (At The Beach)’) with Wagner’s distinctively unsettling vocal presence. The press release, usually the location of much hyperbolic overstatement nails it when by stating, “he sounds both utterly trustworthy and immediately suspect.†Returning to the Nick Cave comparison, his Murder Ballads album is tonally similar to ‘2AM…’ since the meandering atmospheres of ‘It Wants In’ and ‘Russia’ succeed in telling their respective stories while retaining the trademark black qualities of the genuinely sinister.
The trouble that Wagner faces is that if he was to release an album of tracks that were simply carbon copies of their original influences he would be rightly lambasted as a rip off merchant, and so he has been forced to try and update the genre. At times he appears to be overly reliant on synthesised sounds (‘Stupefied’) and this only serves as a desultory exercise due to the fact that ‘2AM’ feels too contrived for its own good. It’s clear that Wagner is not out to be taken seriously but did he really want to stray this closely to parody?
It’s true that ‘2AM…’ is an impressive attempt to revive the flagging halloweencore genre, but you have to question whether it’s enough. Yes, as the soundtrack for a themed party ‘2AM…’ would be ideal but no more; Wagner has backed himself into a corner, and no amount of inventively looped samples like those on ‘Russia’ will be able to rescue this album from its unfortunate novelty status. A shame, because if he had chosen a more expansive motif then his evidently potent imagination may have had more success.
Ben