Calabrese is a horror-punk band from Phoenix, AZ, featuring three brothers - of the blood variety, obviously. So, they’re kinda like Van Halen, only with more murder and mayhem. Oh, and better haircuts. Musically, they follow the same thorny, twisted path as their whoa-oh-ing forebears, mixing the Munsters theme and old Halloween sound effect records with the Sex Pistols and Eddie Cochran, and then watching with bloody rictus grins as all the flowers around them wilt and die. Crazy girls love ‘em. So do the Fango kids. You, you might need a little convincing – they do have a song called “Backseat of My Hearse”, after all – but beyond the goofy-ghouly stuff, there’s a tight, lethal punk band with a knack for great glammy choruses with foot-stomps and hand-claps and meaty Dracula-driving biker-fuzz riffs that’d make Davie Allen pop right out of his coffin to say “Outtasight!”, if he was dead. Or Undead. Dig the expansive freak n’ roll of “Death of Me”, the neo-hardcore rager “One of Us” or the bleached cowskull epic “Every Day is a Funeral” for three sterling examples of their bitchin’ creep rock, and be sure to stick around for the hidden bit at the end, where they hypnotize you in sending them 13 dollars.

I get the feeling I may have heard some of these songs in a prior incarnation, like an EP or something, but since I pretty much live the same nightmare everyday, it’s hard to say for sure. All I really know is that, although I have never fucked Linnea Quigley in a graveyard while the Wolfbane bloomed, I have often thought about it, and Calabrese would just be, like, wicked for such an event.