Hello there, readers!  Hope your day is going well — or at least, as well as a Monday can be expected. Even though I’m at work, I’m not in a terrible mood, which is pretty unusual for me. Maybe because I feel like I actually got some stuff accomplished over the weekend. More likely, I’m just (still) not awake enough to really feel anything yet. Well anyway, I don’t know about you, but I need some music while I work. Today (just like I do every Monday) I’m heading over to the “Sign Me to Roadrunner Records” website to look for something good, and then I’ll share whatever I find with you!

A short while ago, I got a message from a Canadian band called Patron Saint of Plagues, who describe themselves as “a twisted concoction of ominous tones and eerie melodies melded into dark story-tale like songwriting that touches on the very essence of the darkside of humanity and the terrifying thoughts that plague the mind of a psychopath.”

That, coupled with the photos of the quartet (guitarist Dead Boy, bassist Robbie Graves, drummer Bonez, and founder/frontman/vocalist/songwriter/guitarist Opi Saint) looking like a cross between The Spooky Kids and The Misfits on Halloween, definitely let me know that we’re in for a fun ride today.

The band’s history extends back about six years now, and they’ve had a number of releases during that time. The material found on their Signmeto artist page includes a couple songs from a full-length that was released last year, as well as a single that they put out a few months ago, but by visiting their Bandcamp page, you can get access to the full discography.

The first song is “Betelgeuse,” which was released as a single on 29 February 2012, and is available to download for free from Reverbnation or Bandcamp. In case you couldn’t guess from the title, this song is based on Tim Burton‘s movie Beetlejuice. Musically it draws heavily from Danny Elfman‘s score for that film (except with a much more punk/metal feel), and lyrically it is told from the point of view of the titular character. In fact, compared with some of the band’s earlier songs, the vocals here have a pretty gruff quality to them that even recalls the voice used for that character by actor Michael Keaton. For your watching pleasure, I am embedding the official video for the song (which is made from a compilation of clips from the movie) here.

 

The other two songs, “The Distortion Blues” and “Land of the Dead,” are both taken from the Things Arn’t Always What They Seem album, which was released 13 May 2011. The first song is a bit of a punkabilly shuffle, and tells a ghost story, sort of reminiscent of a song like Deceased‘s “A Very Familiar Stranger.” The second song here is a more of a melodic metal/horror punk hybrid; when the poppy-sounding vocals deliver lines such as “the walls are caked with blood” and “dead corpses litter the streets” the ironic vibe is pretty amusing.

This full-length album is available to listen to and then download for whatever price you choose, using the Bandcamp widget below. Enjoy!

 

If you like what you’ve heard so far, don’t forget to visit Patron Saint of Plagues’ Bandcamp page because there are two more LPs and an EP to be discovered there!

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More info: website, Facebook, Myspace, Reverbnation, Youtube, Bandcamp, Signmeto

I hope you enjoyed this post – please feel free to share your opinion in the comments below!  Until next week… if you happen to stumble across something you’d like to share (or if you are in a band and are trying to get your music heard), just write to me at my Signmeto “scout” page.  Thanks for reading!