The World Is A Vampire

Aunt Dracula returns to Philly with visions of a dark, demented future.

by A.D. Amorosi

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Published: Nov 23, 2010

Aunt Dracula

[ rock/psych/folk ]

Last year, Philly band Aunt Dracula announced it was moving to California to find fortune, fame and any and all weirdness. Farewell gigs were booked, and all you could think was how the good ones always leave to make the most out of what they got.

So what the hell is Scott Daly doing in Philly with a new Aunt Dracula, playing a massive post-Thanksgiving show at Johnny Brenda's?

"We never ended up actually moving to L.A.," laughs Daly. "However, we did total our van on the 101 in Los Angeles on the way to a gig."

No one was hurt during the crash, but one man's highway horror is another's prosaic revelation. Daly went back to school in Philadelphia and put together a five-piece band (previous incarnations were of the duo and trio variety).

"I started writing the songs for Aunt Dracula back in 2005 at a practice space out by 69th Street, but we didn't play our first show until 2007," says Daly. "I grew up listening to and loving the kinds of records that seemed to be magical." Aunt Dracula Mach 1 wanted to be a magical band, one that could exist comfortably outside the box, avant-garde yet still be fun and exciting to listen to.

The band's debut, Face Peel, had a campy horror-film lilt to its melodies and a sandblasted psychedelic edge to its guitars, while the rhythms tinkled with a Brazilian kick. Their oddball character-strewn lyrics and scale-shifting vocal arrangements made them more dramatic still.

"It's a 45-minute episodic sonic exploration of the connection between beauty and darkness," Daly said at the time. "Some of it came from a pretty strange place in my life. I guess to me, it's kinda the sound of death and rebirth, if that makes sense."

It made some sense, but Aunt Dracula's unflinching eccentricity and mystery surely kept some audiences at bay. Take "Evo Tito," which breaks down from its metal machine roots to borrow the melody from Billy Joel's "You May Be Right."

This Aunt Dracula wants you to like them. The increased membership was intended to give the live show a full, lustrous sound, even on the old tunes. The new album they're presently recording with Jeff Ziegler (of local shoe-gazers Relay) is still psychedelic, but in a whole different way than Face Peel. "These new ones go further. But the roads that they take to get there are a little more familiar. They explore melody in a more symphonic way. More psychedelic, but also more accessible."

In particular Daly wants audiences to listen up for new songs such as "Mummy Dust" and "The Beach Song."

"They are definitely something different than anything we've done before," he claims. "'Mummy Dust' is like a dark pop hit that Marty McFly might have heard if he turned on the radio when he went back to the wrong 1985 in Back to the Future 2, you know, when Biff stole the sports almanac and everyone was buggin'."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Sat., Nov. 27, 9 p.m., $10, with Soars, Johnny Brenda's, 1201 N. Frankford Ave., 877-435-9849, johnnybrendas.com.

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