On one fateful day in the mid-nineties, I found a record that stopped me dead in my tracks. The cover featured a horror scene in purples and fluorescent greens and yellows. The band was called Color Me Psycho and hailed from Calgary, Alberta. It was horror-themed garage rock. I instantly noticed they sounded a lot like Forbidden Dimension (another Calgary band I was/am obsessed with). It turned out that this band was the predecessor to FD. I always assumed they had only released one album and called it a day. It wasn’t until the internet age was in full swing when I realized they had released a cassette prior to their LP. This was also painfully out of reach until the fine folks at legendary Canadian garage/punk label Lance Rock decided to come out of hypersleep to lovingly reissue this lost gem (and on vinyl for the first time ever!). Fast riff rock with organ accompaniment is the order of the day, and you know damn well the lyrics are creepy and weird. Much like Forbidden Dimension, these songs come off like individual stories in a long-forgotten EC Comics collection. They’re always fun, but there’s something slightly menacing just under the surface to keep you on edge. When lurching through the swampland of horror-themed music, it’s easy to lean too hard into the schtick and sacrifice the music a bit. Color Me Psycho never falls into that trap. The rock always takes center stage and gets you moving, with the cobwebs and corpse paint being an added bonus. Fans of early Misfits, The Cramps, the Damned and Roky Erickson should already have this on their radar, but if not, you best get hunting. This is the perfect hunk of meat to tide me over until the next Forbidden Dimension record comes out. –Ty Stranglehold (Lance Rock)