Power Pop For Halloween

GUEST POST: Rex Broome (+ ⚡️💥 Video Premiere)

I've always been keenly interested in instances where the spooky stuff and sweet guitar pop sounds intersect.

If you've never had reason to think about this, I'll tell you how often it happens based on my years of study: very rarely indeed! I could posit numerous reasons for this, ranging from power pop's strong leaning away from the minor keys often associated with “scary” sonics to the fact that other genres like psychobilly, goth and metal sort of have it locked down.

This year, I've been living with Halloween music since well before Easter, as my Big Stir Records collaborators Christina Bulbenko, Michael Simmons and myself have tirelessly assembled Chilling, Thrilling Hooks And Haunted Harmonies: The Big Stir Records Halloween Grimoire. It’s a real labor of love featuring new themed tracks from over 20 of the label's artists.

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⚡️💥 VIDEO PREMIERE

Check out the spooky Librarians With Hickeys video for “Ghoul You Want” from Chilling, Thrilling Hooks And Haunted Harmonies.

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In a sense, it's been the culmination of a near-lifetime spent prepping for this singular project.

I'm well into my fourth decade of assembling elaborate, multi-genre Halloween mix tapes/discs/digital sound blobs, and for all that time I've counted power pop and its adjacent subgenres as one of my primary musical happy haunts.

As the submissions for the Big Stir Halloween record rolled in, they seemed to bear out my long-held suspicions: bands well known for their power pop acumen, when presented with the assignment of doing something spooky, created songs that pivoted away from power pop and towards the ancillary musical interests they all possess.

Rex and Christina’s band The Armoires covered this fitting 20/20 song for a tribute compilation.

So where does one find power pop for Halloween?

If we accept that when power pop artists go spooky, they often stray from the genre, we can also look to other artists not nominally classed as “power pop” whose explorations of eerie themes result in songs that fit the guitar pop bill surprisingly well.

I combed through my many, many hours of Halloween mixes to zero in on songs that tick both boxes, aiming to be uncharacteristically puritanical about the genre parameters, and picked a lucky 13 for you.

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🎃 🎸 Share Your Fav Power Pop Halloween Songs

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Trick or treat, kids!

Here’s your Halloween ear candy…

“Peter Pumpkinhead” by XTC

While assembling Chilling, Thrilling Hooks, co-producer Michael Simmons and I had a good-natured disagreement about this song. “It's not a Halloween song, it's an allegory about some kind of JFK or Jesus figure!” he said. My take is, every song that traffics in Halloween-related iconography is an allegory, because... well, that stuff doesn't exist. In ghosty or horror-adjacent songs, the imagery is always pointing toward something else, and that's why I love this stuff. This song, well, it's got a guy with a pumpkin for a head, so it counts, and more germane to the project at hand, it's about as straight-up power pop as XTC ever got.

“If You Have Ghosts” by John Wesley Harding

I'm endlessly fascinated by the post-13^th Floor Elevators recordings of Roky Erickson, which manage to showcase some Buddy Holly-level melodic hooks while also being, quite literally, a horror show. Why, then, am I featuring this John Wesley Harding cover rather than Roky's own version with The Aliens? Because Harding's entire mission here seems to be to push it over the line into power pop with big harmony backing vocals, handclaps, and other production touches. It's otherwise pretty faithful, but I'd say you have to have both versions of “Ghosts” to really have everything. Just an amazing song either way.

“Pride Of Frankenstein” by Too Much Joy

One of the places where the core concerns of historic power pop intersect with horror imagery is the “misunderstood monster” trope. Frankenstein's monster is just a great metaphor for awkward adolescence, which is in many ways ground zero for classic power pop. I'd be remiss for not mentioning Splitsville's “I Was A Teenage Frankenstein” from their 1996 debut album here, but as the lads recorded a completely reanimated version of that one for the Big Stir Halloween record, I'll go with this track from Too Much Joy which comes at it from another angle. In “Pride,” the band doesn't embody the monster, but rather takes the role of the “terrified villagers”—or more precisely, the grade school kids throwing rocks at the local oddball—before coming to understand that they themselves are the monsters in the scenario, and then belatedly celebrating the weirdo as the hero. It's movingly redemptive and totally rock and roll, and damned if it isn't power pop, too.

“Ghosts Of A Different Dream” by Guided By Voices

Robert Pollard is well-known for a lot of things: astonishing melodic dexterity, an unmatchably prolific flow of music, and a completely unique lyrical lexicon. A fair amount of his go-to imagery involves Halloween-friendly icons: witches, phantoms and aliens abound. I've singled this one out partly because it's from the band's heyday of visibility and because, well... look, the rough-edged production might stand out on this list of relatively genre-characteristically manicured recordings, but the hooks are so strong, and it's so brief and bracing, that you won't care—and to be honest, I expect some of you reading this go off and create your own playlists of GBV-only songs for the scary season, something I myself just may have done at some point along the line.

“Haunted People Go” by 20/20

I mentioned the potency of the supernatural as a metaphor above, and ghosts are probably the primary image used that way in lyrics. They're just very pliable ectoplasm, ideal surrogates for someone who's in the physical world but somehow absent as well: pointedly gone from your life, or moving through the world heedlessly and disengaged, or just simply broken. Here's a tune from some genuine Power Pop Hall Of Famers that takes that last tack, and while there's nothing supernatural in play here at all, it's my contention that you don't put the word “haunted” in your song title, and sing it a dozen times or more, without intending to evoke something otherworldly. The guys do use a rather unfortunate epithet for the woman who's the source of the heartbreak in this one, but as a character bit, it works; we'll address power pop's wider gender issues a little further down this list.

“Ghost Town” by The Windbreakers

A languid lament from underrated (and admittedly unfortunately named) '80s jangle pop outfit The Windbreakers, this dropped onto my Halloween playlist about two decades ago via a questionable vinyl rip. Owing partly to the dubious fidelity of the file, for most of that time, I thought the chorus went “You're living in a ghost town, you're living in a dream now... materialize! Materialize!” I've only recently discovered I was mishearing the last two lines, which are really “Don't you realize?” In other words, I thought the band was more committed to the ghost bit than they actually were. Still, it's a solid example of the “absent person as ghost” metaphor, and it is, yep, hauntingly beautiful.

“The Creature From The Black Lagoon” by Dave Edmunds

A prime example of an artist not normally associated with power pop who happened to deliver a monster song that's more power pop than their normal fare, “Creature From The Black Lagoon” is pretty much right on the money for the genre. I first came across this tune on the Halloween edition of Rhino's Just Can't Get Enough New Wave collections, and it caught my attention as a “misunderstood monster” tune that wades a little deeper into the Universal Monsters swamp than namedropping Frank or Drac. As bouncy as the tune is, it's actually a pretty harsh indictment of a serial predator; in this case, the monster is a metaphor for “normal” person who's actually... a monster. It's a lot more comfortable to picture the amphibious Gill Man himself than the probably-human guy described here! Unless Edmunds is being more literal than I assume, which would be kind of cool as well.

“The Witch” by The Primitives

I've always thought that the power pop cognoscenti, who often try to work out why there aren't more women working in the genre, have missed both a trick and a treat by not claiming The Primitives as one of our own. All bubblegum melodies and crunchy-jangly guitars, they fit the bill at least as consistently as anyone, with “Crash” and “Way Behind Me” standing as unassailable classics of the form. They've reformed in the 21^st Century and their new work may be even better than their first run. Their first reunion record was Echoes & Rhymes, an album of covers of ‘60s obscurities including this one, a psychedelic outlier by German bubblegum duo Adam & Eve. It's worth hearing the original in its own oddball right, but The Primitives' reading of this stomper is quite spooky and, to my ears, counts as power pop.

“The Witches' Stand” by Redd Kross

From their amazingly great 2024 self-titled album, this was an instant add to last year's edition of my (and now my kids’) ongoing Halloween playlist, which just happened to be extremely witch-themed this time around. I have no idea what's actually going on in this song, and I love that; the title phrase just cycles around, sometimes as “just broken toys left from the witches’ stand,” while the name-dropping lyrics seem to detail rock stars in decline. Strangely, this felt like it dovetailed with certain plot elements of the nearly-contemporaneous witch-centric Marvel TV series Agatha All Along, a show that sort of defined the 2024 Halloween season for my family. Definitely a moment in time, but a song for the ages from a band firing on more cylinders than I'd even realized they had.

“Ghost Singer” by Librarians With Hickeys

I'll abandon any pretense of impartiality here and feature a cut from the crypt at Big Stir Records, while still staying away from our new compilation. This is from the Librarians' 2022 album Handclaps & Tambourines, whose title indicates the power pop mission at hand. A “ghost singer” is an early sound film term akin to “ghost writer,” a vocalist providing a singing voice for a non-singing actor, and LWH uses it to get at the ironic challenges of human communication in a tech-saturated world, couching it in mid-century imagery with a spooky tinge.

“Ghosts Of American Astronauts” by Mekons

One more example of a not-pop artist whose ghost-themed song goes more “pop” than their usual fare, this gorgeous, jangly portrait of cultural decline is one of the most radio-friendly things Mekons have ever released. It's also good to hear another woman singing here; it's always an unfortunate challenge to offer female representation within the power pop realm, and doubly so when limiting the selection to spooky subject matter. That's a bit of a contrast to the wider rock world, where women tend to offer up more and better takes on the supernatural than the dudes. Christina and I have some theories on why that might be, but it's a discussion for another time!

“Chain Saw” by Ramones

It's glaringly obvious that power pop's close cousin, first wave punk rock, hits horror themes harder and more often (hands up if you only spin the Misfits catalog in October). But there's a lot of pre-hardcore punk that's so close to power pop as to be indistinguishable, and the Ramones blur that line like no other US band. They're also well known for making some pretty grotesque imagery sound like goofy fun, which is Halloween in a pumpkin shell, right? “Chain Saw” from their classic first album has been in my Halloween mix for so long that I'd forgotten it wasn't actually called “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”... or “Massacree” as Joey would have it.

“Halloween” by Kirsty MacColl

If the Ramones tune takes us to the punkiest edge of the power pop spectrum, this one resets us back to the ‘60s pure-pop roots of the form. It's a lovely lyric and of course a lovely performance from the much-missed MacColl, and it's good to have another woman's voice on this list. My biggest excuse for giving this bit of not-so-powerful pop the final slot is that it's the closest genre fit I've found that actually has the word “Halloween” in its title. The runner-up, Dream Syndicate's tune by the same name, is absolutely wonderful and a personal favorite, but it's six minutes long and mostly guitar solos... so I'm letting Kirsty have the final word, sadly from beyond the veil.

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Rex Broome is the co-founder (with Christina Bulbenko) of Big Stir Records and a singer/guitarist/songwriter with LA band The Armoires (also with Bulbenko). Beyond its physical and digital releases of records for key artists on the globals pop rock scene, Big Stir is a multimedia entity dedicated to musical community building.

Interview: The Armoires

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