8 Ball Shifter

Hanson (Clamarama)
by Nik Rainey

Break out your zircon-studded crucifixes if you must, but there’s no way to prevent the sideburn-scarred nightcrawlers of 8-Ball Shifter from creepy-crawling out of the snowiest reaches of the late-night UHF imagination to pull the unsuspecting into the black-as-leather depths of darkest hipsterror. Three is their number, wolfmanic mid-fi is their method, and doomabilly Stoogicide is their madness. I defy you to resist the long crawling king snake moan of Ian Adams, the tell-tale black heart throb of Jim, and the (Tura) Satanic pectoral pound of Rick as they rise from their place in the nightsoil to stalk and roll. Hanson is their dark testament, their Audiobook of the Dead, and it seethes with hellhound hiss and blood sickness, all in high-contrast black-and-white with sanguinary splashes that’d give Herschell Gordon Lewis pause. Oh, yes, they lose themselves in semi-fi production limbo at times (French’s thwack occasionally slips into echo-wobble, belying the bootstomp thunder of his live offensive), but it rights itself as it slinks along, knocking the post-apocalyptic love song “Necron ’69” and the toxic-surf-into-half-speed-swamp instrumental “Haunted Beach” right into the corner pocket of necrotic aphasia, where sweetness and light is swallowed whole and astro-zombies do the twist ’til their legs snap off in the nightspot of the damned. No more AB negative for me, thanks – I’m driving.