Eldritch is as eldritch does

The Arkham Hillbilly juggernaut rolls on: his most recent release, Love Theme from ‘Bone Tomahawk’ is the second one not to feature vocals by AH himself (real name Darcy Sullivan): Tentacles and Tumbleweeds was voiced by his son Finnian and the new track was sung by his sister-in-law Susy Firth. Susy’s a professional singer and cabaret artist, so her vocal recording sounded pretty polished from the word go. If you haven’t seen the movie Bone Tomahawk (2015) do give it a watch, assuming you like western horror and have a strong stomach for cannibalism. From this description you can see the joke in the idea of this film having a love theme (although there is love in it). But what I think is interesting is that this is probably the first AH tune where the title is pretty much the only humour in it—the lyrics themselves are not played for laughs. I have long maintained that Darcy is a good songwriter per se, even if you take out the gimmickry of the AH character and the idea of comic songs about H.P. Lovecraft (a genre Darcy calls “eldritch country” in case you needed a term for it), and perhaps this marks a conscious experiment with writing serious songs. In the meantime, however, I have a backlog of four more AH songs that Darcy has already written and for which he has recorded his vocal and guitar parts: Pickman’s Model, The Grand Old Ones Opry, The Great Mold Rush and If This is Armageddon (Then I’m Getting One More Drink)—a song that I suspect might be written to please his sponsor, Gibbous Moonshine… Watch this space.

Check out the whole Arkham Hillbilly oeuvre on Bandcamp.

The Arkham Hillbilly was, of course, keen to sell out at the earliest opportunity. His sponsor Gibbous Moonshine bears the slogan “well brewed in Arkham since 1927” and AH seems contractually obliged to point that this does not mean “brewed well” but “brewed in a well”, specifically the Gardener well—you know the one that glows at night..?