AURELIO VOLTAIRE Ooky Spooky CD Digipack 2007

Ooky Spooky

CD Digipack

1.Land of the Dead 01:58
2.Zombie Prostitute 03:14
3.Cannibal Buffet 03:55
4.Day of the Dead 03:36
5.Blue-eyed Matador 04:43
6.Bomb New Jersey 03:20
7.Cantina 05:49
8.Stuck With You (with Amanda Palmer) 04:32
9.Dead 03:26
10.Reggae Mortis 03:26
11.Hell in a Handbasket 04:35

“It’s a Halloween party in a digipak,” Voltaire comments about Ooky Spooky, his most hilariously irreverent CD to date. Years in the making, Voltaire’s 5th album contains a duet with The Dresden Dolls’ Amanda Palmer, a track from a Cartoon Network movie plus his crowd-pleasing songs about zombies, devils and dancing skeletons. In fact necrophilia, cannibalism, prostitution, buggery, blasphemy, sacrilege, going to hell, bombing New Jersey and anal rape with a lightsaber are just a few of the charming topics covered on Ooky Spooky.

Back are the violins and cellos but new to the Voltaire sound is a horn section that brings to mind images of a mariachi skeleton band. But there is no doom and gloom here, mind you. The album bounces along with a mixture of klezmer, swing and ska that brings to mind such spooky-fun classics as Oingo Boingo’s “Dead Man’s Party” or “Hell” by the Squirrel Nut Zippers. Voltaire’s love for Cab Calloway is evident in the song “Cannibal Buffet” (which seems straight from a Betty Boop cartoon) and more so in “Land of the Dead” which Voltaire wrote for the opening credit sequence of the Cartoon Network movie “Billy and Mandy’s Big Boogie Adventure.”

As serious as it gets on Ooky Spooky is “Stuck With You,” a duet with The Dresden Dolls’ Amanda Palmer. It’s about a bickering married couple, but even on this one kittens are drowned, Korean bayonets are employed and skeletons sing to each other from side-by-side coffins. “I got all of the serious songs out of the way on Then And Again,” comments Voltaire, “specifically so that Ooky Spooky could be a non-stop party of fun songs about the undead and hell and devils and skeletons and all of the other fun stuff that’s so close to my heart.”