Metal
“Shapes of Midnight”, the seventh album by Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, came out on 18 September through Killer Candy Records, Kevin Starrs’s own label. It is the first time since “Blood Lust” that the band has put a record out on its own: the last few went through Rise Above, Lee Dorrian’s label.
Starrs tells Blabbermouth that going fully DIY again was always the plan, and that it has nothing to do with his time with Dorrian: “That was the good thing about Rise Above: they never interfered with the music.” What has cost him is the logistics: the vinyl pressing slipped by a couple of weeks, right before a North American tour, and on top of that came the new rules on shipping into the European Union. “It’s not the best time to be starting a label.”
Starrs says the record was cut at Abbey Road a few years ago, in three days, on the old desks and with the old microphones the studios keep. The analogue synthesisers from “Nell’ Ora Blu” — the 2024 album that walked part of the audience out of the shows — are back, as is Rachel Burnett’s saxophone, which plays the line under the verses of “I Won’t Sleep” and the solo at the end. On another track Starrs took a discarded sax take, reversed it and stuck it on the end of the song.
The plot is a plague descending on humanity while the ruling class seals itself off and dies anyway. Starrs says he got there on his own and only afterwards saw Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” in it: “It wasn’t directly influenced by it, but I realized I needed to show it respect.” “Sleep No More”, the closing track, ends on a spoken passage in a distorted voice.
After the North American tour come a European festival, a UK tour and Australia and New Zealand, and in 2027 they return to Europe. Uncle Acid opened for Black Sabbath in 2013.
Text by Roger Estivill