Reality is stranger than fiction these days. “In the grasslands, the fire is tall and proud,” sings Phil Jacob, known professionally as Psychic Lines. The eerie soundscape throbs with raindrops of synths and mourning. “In the Grasslands” shimmers beneath a cataclysmic collision of manmade forces, dark and twisted, and serves as a thematic backbone to his new album, Horror Comedy. 12 songs erupt from his wicked soul, so to speak, with an affinity for horror films and how they often directly mirror what’s going on in society in any given moment. The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man, The Creature from the Black Lagoon—and vampires. It’s almost always about vampires.
With “Talkin’ About Vampires,” Jacob flips through a historical photo album of horror’s long lineage of vampires, from Bela Lugosi in 1931’s Dracula to the many Hammer films starring Christopher Lee, even The Count from Sesame Street gets a mention! Fictional bloodsuckers are not so dissimilar to their modern counterparts that you’ll find in positions of power all across the U.S. He returns to that carnivorous well with the 33-second closer, “Vampires 2: Slight Return,” in which he reminds us that he’s “still talking about vampires.” No matter what we do, vampires in reality can never be killed. If one “dies,” another takes its form, prowling for the very next victim.
“Burn” lights up with distorted sax, licking the proverbial heels of Jacob’s reedy, dusty vocals. “I burn day and night,” he whispers over cruncy production. It’s that warped aesthetic that characterizes much of Horror Comedy, as though he’s flicking through static-y channels of old school, pre-1960 horror movies on a vintage boxed TV set. The moody setpiece “I Took a Nap Today” captures our primary coping mechanism in dealing with the onslaught of bad news on our social feeds (“Sinking into the bed, I was out just like a light,” he sighs), whereas the guitar-fuzzy “Katie Bar the Door!” shreds the skin like a cheese grater in Evil Dead Rise. “They’re going to save us, I’m sure,” he scoffs on the latter.
Psychic Lines sinks into the rising waters of toxic waste that seem to consume us every single day. There’s a reason we’re all stressed out and depressed. Reality sucks. This timeline sucks. And Psychic Lines shakes us awake with a horror so horrifying that we don’t really need to watch actual horror movies (but we will, there’s comfort films to calm us down!). Horror Comedy is akin to Vincent Price’s skeleton dance in 1959’s House on Haunted Hill—it’s cheeky, yet irresistibly and bizarrely bone-rattling.
Horror Comedy is out now on all digital platforms.
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sink. your. teeth.
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