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Halloween Hits
Release Date: 1991-07-30
Sales rank: 1043
Leave it to Rhino Records to come up with the best party music for Halloween rave-ups. In contrast to New Wave Halloween, this set of 10 tunes is aimed squarely at the family listening environment. "Monster Mash," sung by Bobby Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, is a hoot decades after its origin. And Screamin' Jay Hawkins's "I Put a Spell on You" is aptly eerie, if not a tad funny in this setting--considering that "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" comes after and the Addams Family theme comes before. And lest you think this set of tunes is mired in the depths of Halloween tunes from generations ago, it also has "Ghostbusters"--which reeks of datedness anywhere but here. --Andrew Bartlett |
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Weird Al Yankovic - The Ultimate Video Collection
Release Date: 2003-11-04
Sales rank: 4549
No Description Available
No Track Information Available
Media Type: DVD
Artist: YANKOVIC,WEIRD AL
Title: ULTIMATE VIDEO COLLECTION
Street Release Date: 11/04/2003
Domestic
Genre: COMEDY |
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Straight Outta Lynwood
Release Date: 2006-09-26
Sales rank: 1765
No Description Available
No Track Information Available
Media Type: CD
Artist: YANKOVIC,WEIRD AL
Title: STRAIGHT OUTTA LYNWOOD
Street Release Date: 09/26/2006
Domestic
Genre: COMEDYAll hail the return of novelty music's reigning king! Straight Outta Lynwood easily bests 2003's Poodle Hat and shows that Yankovic does know what he does best. Part of the secret to Weird Al's success is that he's never been very weird at all, and very rarely are his satires in any way "biting"--or even satires, really. The 11-minute parody of R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet" is funny at least for the first listen, but it's hard to ridicule something so largely ridiculous in the first place (plus Jimmy Kimmel totally got the jump on him). The best thing Mr. Yankovic has always done is to take some decent pop tune, change a word or phrase, invent an entirely new premise for the tune, and make an inspired video to go along with it. He does that several times here; Green Day's "American Idiot" becomes the hockey-obsessed "Canadian Idiot," and "White & Nerdy" is a truly inspired take on Chamillionaire's "Ridin'." That song is breakneck-paced and so funny it's a disservice to quote from it at all. "Polkarama!" is a return to W.A.'s novelty roots: a handful of mildly dated hit songs (50 Cent to Modest Mouse!) delivered in straight-ahead, sped-up polka style. It's toe-tapping and sweet. Hopefully we'll not have to wait three years for another Weird Al record. --Mike McGonigal |
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Spooky Favorites
Release Date: 1999-08-17
Sales rank: 2416
If you want to scare the pants off your 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds, but then make them merrily sing along, this Halloween collection could be for you. A generous 18 tracks deep, Spooky Favorites covers the familiar creepy-crawly terrain of "Cockles and Mussels," "Spider on the Floor," and "There Was an Old Woman" with all the right affects. Favorites also trades in Christmas tunes, reworking "The 12 Days of Christmas" as "12 Days of Halloween," while "Green Gremlins" reprises the "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" theme in a halting tempo with a tasty rock guitar solo. And in another ironic twist, the players turn "Bring Back My Bonney" into "Bring Back My Neighbors to Me" and rewrite "If You're Happy and You Know It" as "You're Scary and You Know It." Highly theatrical and leaning on a good interplay of English folk melodies and music-hall styles, Spooky Favorites is proof that you can spoof just about any song for Halloween as long as you dress them up real spookylike. --Martin Keller |
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That Was the Year That Was
Release Date: 1990-04-12
Sales rank: 6939
Harvard-educated mathematician by trade and sociopolitical humorist and satirist by avocation, ivory tickler Tom Lehrer sang irreverent ditties that both outraged and delighted listeners during his on-again, off-again heyday of public performance in the late 1950s through the 1970s. Perhaps best known for his "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," Lehrer combined razor-sharp wit with dry delivery inspired by everything from vaudeville and ragtime to whimsical show tunes and faux folk. Though a tad dated, Lehrer's wickedly pointed That Was the Year That Was is as good a representation of the mid-'60s American social and political climate as any. Recorded live in 1965 and composed largely of songs from the contemporaneous NBC series That Was the Week That Was, the album takes on boho Americana ("The Folk Song Army"), censorship ("Smut"), and the atomic bomb ("Who's Next"). Devilishly funny as well are the outstanding "Vatican Rag" and the puzzle that is "New Math." --Paige La Grone |
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Halloween
Release Date: 2003-09-23
Sales rank: 693
No Description Available
No Track Information Available
Media Type: CD
Artist: MANNHEIM STEAMROLLER
Title: HALLOWEEN
Street Release Date: 09/14/2004
Domestic
Genre: HALLOWEEN |
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Songs & More Songs by Tom Lehrer
Release Date: 1997-05-06
Sales rank: 2542
In the wake of the '80s comedy boom that made casual obscenity and bodily functions safe for TV, a listen to these '50s classics from a piano-playing Harvard grad student with a thin singing voice sounds tame if not quaint. Yet Lehrer's first two self-produced albums, among the first generation of comedy LPs, remain beloved gems of musical parody, and noteworthy for their original success in an era when their topics were strictly taboo for broadcast media. He kids cold war paranoia ("We Will All Go Together When We Go"), sends up then-hip folk revivalists with a cheerful murder ballad ("The Irish Ballad"), and gets laughs out of incest ("Oedipus Rex"), drugs ("The Old Dope Peddler"), and racism ("I Wanna Go Back to Dixie"). Closer to Gilbert & Sullivan (whom he in fact raids for one melody) than Def Comedy Jams, Lehrer can still raise a modern frisson when he plays necrophilia as romance ("I hold your hand in mine dear, I press it to my lips/ I take a healthy bite from your dainty fingertips..."). --Sam Sutherland |
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Dr. Demento 20th Anniversary Collection: The Greatest Novelty Records of All Time
Release Date: 1991-05-21
Sales rank: 2010
Pop has a good time eating itself on this collection of Doctor Demento favorites. The tunes on this stylistically varied double CD send up a plethora of pop culture phenomena. The perpetrators come from every imaginable entertainment background. Pro wrestlers, folk singers, comedians, actors, garage bands--you never know who's liable to produce a novelty song. Here it doesn't matter if a respected composer or a one-hit wonder recorded the ditty; all sorts of tracks jostle each other on this funny collection. The material covers quite a time span, ranging from Spike Jones's "Der Fuehrer's Face," released in 1942, to "Wappin'," an unreleased track by Darrell Hammond and Christopher Snell which was a hit on Demento's radio show at the tail end of the 1980s. The 20th Anniversary Collection is quite an assortment of the corny, goofy, wacky, and wild. --Fred Cisterna |
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Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks
Release Date: 1996-04-09
Sales rank: 7021
No Description Available
No Track Information Available
Media Type: CD
Artist: SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK! ROCKS
Title: SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK! ROCKS
Street Release Date: 04/09/1996
Domestic
Genre: ROCK/POP COLLECTIONSThe beauty of Schoolhouse Rock in its original Saturday morning run (1973-85) was that kids watching couldn't tell whether the catchy three-minute cartoon jingles were meant to be commercials, shows, or something else entirely. That enabled overexposed TV youth to learn without realizing it between episodes of Scooby Doo and Fat Albert. Then the Brady Bunch generation became the alternative nation, and the innocence with which they took in these grammar, history, and math lessons was lost. Now comes the obligatory tribute album, Schoolhouse Rock Rocks--pleasant enough, but full of postmodern yuks and missed-the-point nostalgia that aim to celebrate but instead drain the joy from childhood memories. Though it's somewhat interesting to hear Pavement turn "Mo More Kings" into lo-fi krautrock or Moby make "Verb: That's What's Happening" into industrial techno-pop, the performers who most successfully preserve Schoolhouse Rock's edutainment viability are those who are most cartoonish to begin with: Ween ("The Shot Heard 'round the World"), Biz Markie ("The Energy Blues"), and Daniel Johnston ("Unpack Your Adjectives"). The problem remains, nonetheless: Any revamping of these songs implies Schoolhouse Rock somehow needed to be made hipper. That none of these songs is better than its original proves how very unhip '70s kids have grown up to be. --Roni Sarig |
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Drunk in Public
Release Date: 2003-11-11
Sales rank: 9704
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