Halloween 2026 Vol. 4 FIENDS Flesh Eaters BOMBORAS Cramps & MORE!

HALLOWEEN 2026 Volume 4 (POST)

I honestly feel this fourth volume of my HALLOWEEN comps has something for everyone in the (Manson) family.

There are at least two great garage groups named THE FIENDS.  One is from Los Angeles California, & the one that starts us off with Stake Through My Heart, from Vancouver Canada.  (No less a garage god than Rudi Protrudi designed the cover art for their entry in the TEEN TRASH series.)

Thanks to psychobilly bands like The Cramps, & The Brains there are plenty of twangy songs to choose from on All Hallow’s Eve.  But more of the bands on Volume 4 are full fledged rockabilly bands; The Leroi Brothers, The Paladins, The Delta Bombers, & Vince Ray.

Speaking of stylistic departures, The Cranberries’ Zombie is a song about “The Troubles” in Ireland, but that’s easy to forget when Bambi Thug puts in creepy contact lenses and runs it through their Spookometer.  I suspect Harley Poe borrowed their unit to inject some spooky into his version of that old chestnut The Hearse Song.  Gary Stewart is known mainly for honky tonk weepers like She’s Acting Single (I’m Drinking’ Double), but he must have gotten a wild (werewolf) hair up his butt before he recorded Morbid The Great!  

KC & The Moonshine Band may have been included just for their name—but their Zombiefied became a favorite as I listened to Volume 4 over & over to make sure it passed our 14-point quality inspection.

This volume breaks one of my cardinal rules regarding compilations: “Never have two tracks by the same band.”  It was an oversight on my part—because the offending tracks are by an instrumental group; The Bomboras &—I didn’t catch it until I had done all the artwork.  C’est la mort.

There’s another gaffe; In Dreams by Roy Orbison is mistitled Candy Colored Clown.  If David Lynch hadn’t shown the darker side of the song in Blue Velvet, I probably wouldn’t have considered including it at all.  Any song about a clown tip-toeing into someone’s room at night is perfect for any Halloween collection.

I can say that I love the cover art—because I didn’t design it—I co-opted a meme I found on the (spider) web.