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Herschell Gordon Lewis | THE EYE-POPPING SOUNDS OF HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS

A splatter-movie director who didn't have enough money to hire a decent composer for his movies.
CD, Birdman

Tekst: Martÿn ter Haar

Publicatiedatum: 28 mei 2002

Herschell Gordon Lewis is the inventor of the splatter film. His 1963 cult-classic Blood Feast lead to a revolution in the exploitation genre. Like all good exploitation film makers Lewis always was trying to find creative ways to save money. One of those ways was composing the scores for his films himself. The results of those attempts at composition are gathered on this CD, with extensive liner-notes by the man himself. There are even somehow liner notes for the music of films which did not make it on this CD (in one case because all of the copies of the film were lost), while there is nothing about the film Just For The Hell Of It, of which a track did make it on the album.
24 of the 37 on the disc are taken from Lewis most famous films: the aformentioned Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs. The score for Blood Feast consists entirely of short pieces of instrumental music. Lewis, who knows his limitations as a composer, creates a maximum of creepy atmosphere with some very simple motives. It probably worked in the film, but on CD it is probably only of use to those looking for interesting samples, if they don't insist on hi-fi. Most material was recorded in a hurry in cheap studios and the transfer from film to CD was done on an exploitation style budget. The tracks from 2000 Maniacs are more interesting. This is a film about a Confederate ghost town that appears once every 100 years to lure some Yankees in its trap as retaliation for a civil war massacre. To match the atmosphere Lewis wrote some country & western and bluegrass songs. And they turned out really well, not in the least because ot the contribution of banjo virtuoso Paul Champion.
The remaining tracks go from psychedelic rock to crooners, some of them bad, some of them quite good, but none of the quality that would warrant a release on CD if they were not written by a famous cult-director, who would later become an equally famous advertising guru. Because that's what happened to H.G. Lewis.

http://www.kindamuzik.net/recensie/herschell-gordon-lewis/the-eye-popping-sounds-of-herschell-gordon-lewis/1574/
Meer Herschell Gordon Lewis op KindaMuzik: http://www.kindamuzik.net/artiest/herschell-gordon-lewis