John Carpenter – Lost Themes III: Alive After Death LP (Transparent Red Vinyl)
John Carpenter – 'Lost Themes III: Alive After Death' LP
Transparent Red Vinyl with poster
Renowned composer and director John Carpenter eturns with his first album of non-soundtrack music in nearly five years, Lost Themes III: Alive After Death. Underpinning Carpenter’s renaissance as a musician has been his collaboration with Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies. They’ve composed and performed as a trio throughout this entire run, on studio albums, on soundtracks, and onstage. Here, the trio reaches a new level of creative mind meld. Richly rendered worlds are built in the interplay between Davies’s guitar and the dueling synthesizers played by the Carpenters.
John called the first Lost Themes album “a soundtrack for the movies in your mind.” On Alive After Death, those movies are even more vivid. The song titles here are among his most evocative, too. Lead single “Weeping Ghost” thrillingly conjures its title figure in a wash of synthesizer, making the listener’s neck hairs stand on end as the aural specter stalks the halls of a dilapidated mansion. The pulsing “The Dead Walk” makes the zombie apocalypse feel like a rave. The gloomy, atmospheric closing track “Carpathian Darkness” casts shadow on the album with its strikingly effective minimal piano and splashes of twinkling synth. Each of the ten songs is a universe unto itself.
