Ah, and now it’s time for the Halloween post.  Should it visit once again the extraterrestrial fear of Arkham, the rural dread of MR James’s Suffolk or the crimson dreams of Lord Argento.  Well, that would be not unlike every day in the ash grey world of 20JFG.  For the brutal truth is that Halloween has, in the cellars that we dwell, lost all meaning.  We live in a perpetual horror state, the stabbing synths of our late nights now integrated into our purgatorial hours among the chain stores playing Goblin.  No longer a place to retreat to for the viscerally fantastical but a background to the endless parade of quasi-counter-cultural readings of banal zombi epics*.

We ask not for commercial mythologies, gore, violence and greed.  Our heroes constructed worlds for the sheer joy of it not waterproof canonisation.  Let the blood be let in unreal ways and let us never be troubled by affected realism.  But most of all, let fear be felt in the bone, not the gut.

The more we love the more we hate.

The appropriately named Xander Harris manages to embody our nascent ideals of 20JFG-certified-horror in just under 4 minutes.  A monstrous snippet of dialogue threatening some form of human sacrifice to an unknown ‘beast’ – unknown is good! – gorgeous synth melodies not unlike equally appropriately named antipodean gods Severed Heads and a second sample referencing, in a rather distant manner, new-age vampiric sex.  It’s really groovy!

Xander Harris – Hunting

This track’s taken from the, frankly incredible, album Urban Gothic which you can buy digitally direct at Xander Harris‘s Bandcamp here.  If anyone wants to do the right thing and stick this out on vinyl it would make all our Halloween dreams come true.

* as much as 20JFG is enjoying Undead Nightmare, please, no more zombies.  When there’s no more room on our screens maybe the dead will go back to hell.