Nekromantix

Here’s a fun project for the kiddies: Take all the Nekromantix albums that are lying around and make a flip-book out of the covers. Then watch the three disembodied heads grimace and squirm like a badly drawn Hanna-Barbera cartoon (as if there was any other kind). Well, actually, you may run into a slight kink with that. When Kim Nekroman left his native Denmark for the United States of California a few years back, he added a couple of new heads. The new lineup accounts for the sudden shift in focus from the campy, Crampy Return of the Loving Dead and the spaghetti-Western Dead Girls Don’t Cry to Life Is a Grave & I Dig It!, the band’s latest, in which guitarist Tröy Deströy and drummer Andy Demize help Nekroman further stretch the denim fabric of psychobilly, adding a touch of Minutemen jazz here and a bit of film noir there. The band’s blackness has faded to a charcoal hue, but there’s a fresh load of tricks, thanks to Deströy’s Nugent-meets-Robert-Gordon licks. Mmm…Danish.