Chicago Reader - November 9, 2006
LAKE OF DRACULA | Skeletal Remains | Savage Land
by Jessica Hopper
"We apologize to all you rockabilly listeners out there -- sorry, our music is better," says front man Jim "Marlon" Magas breathlessly on this live recording, taped for a California college radio station in 1997. That sentiment is probably as polite as Lake of Dracula ever got about their destroy-all-music party line. These menacing, atonal party songs -- augmented by a few hard-to-find compilation and single tracks -- fall somewhere between a Germs bootleg and death threat carved into side B of a DNA record. A sort of all-star band drawn from the midwestern now-wave scene, Lake of Dracula also included Weasel Walter of the Flying Luttenbachers and Heather Melowic of the Scissor Girls; they burned bright and fast, leaving behind one classic LP as testimony to their two-year run.