Good Bait

With an album title that riffs off Wes Craven’s early cult clunker and a map of the Holy Cross Cemetery and Mausoleum superimposed under the track listings, not to mention Eugene Chadbourne’s name attached to the project, I was expecting something, well, a little scary. And like any good horror flick, I was startled. No, nothing jumps out from behind blind corners. Quite the opposite, this is just a mild-mannered jazz album with some trepidacious atmospheres, spooky harmonica playing, and a few grotesque notes thrown in to hatchet things up a bit. Of course, the down-home style of the album is frighteningly infectious.

—RN