Perhaps it’s result of being zapped by Zombina and her skin ‘n’ bones skeletal family, perhaps there’s been a rash (caused by a radiation leak of course) of old Misfits records doing the charity shop rounds but whatever it is there does seem to be a growing outbreak of horrorpunk and ghoul bands skulking about nowadays. Nothing essentially wrong with that especially if they lure you into a web of lurid lycanthropy like Eve Elle and her cohorts of the West Yorkshire catacombs do on ‘Demon Show’ – which could be a diabolical Doberman from ‘The Omen’ (yup, I know…it was a Rottweiler, sshhhh) crossed with the mass-morphing alien amoeba from ‘The Thing’ let loose in a noxious nitrogen-deficient universe as a ‘Nashville Nightmare’ that spawns a ‘Death Becomes Her’ triple-headed gorgon of Connie Francis, Kim Wilde and Peggy Lee. These characteristics lead the Cryptkeepers through their own unchartered waters on a canal boat helmed by a cloven-hoofed coxswain. The morbidly muddy mix on ‘Brains’ actually lends it the severed hand from ‘Evil Dead’ to seem like it’s breaking through a suffocating tangle of cobwebs, lichen and creeping vines, the playfully coquettish ‘Kiss My Undead Ass’ could be the B-52’s cannonballing on the loose in labyrinths of luscious groves of ungratified grave-shy goths and ‘Crash’ is a lovely stygian Shangri-La’s  / Crystals doo-wop ballad from a film as yet unscripted that could have the working title of ‘Zombies of Little Italy’ starring ‘Grave Robber Bob’ de Niro and ‘Pallid Al’ Pacino. Scrape away the rotting flowers and weeds spreading over the CD like tendrils that are the stodgy plodding blues pad-outs that have none of the voodoo va-voom that would raise them out of their limbo of school-lunch semolina grunge (‘Silhouette’) and awful cod-piece guitar sounds straight out of ‘Whitesnake 1987’ (‘You Need Nightmares’). Unfortunately this makes the title track a tad unnecessary as well as the fetching fetish of ‘Elvis Is Dead’ – tho’ I’d concur with the Mary Chain on that one. Their strengths are already as plain as a peasant maid in a Hammer Horror film, they just need to stand up their apparent blues-bore fixations, yes, at the cemetery gates, dispatch them with some brutal and groovy gore, crawl into the kitsch and sink into that coffin like a blood-sated vampire. Given their affection for all things horror they shouldn’t be averse to chopping and hacking seven veils of sin from them, or cutting and stitching their own Connie Francis Frankenstein cryptkeeping carnival number that they display the tendency for elsewhere.

Ghoul rock – the garden of delight where Goths go to grow grimacingly old.
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- Stu Gibson