The band without the singer | The Rewind Vol. 16

Halloween report, as promised. Carol's girls showed up on Arlington Avenue at 6:15 on Saturday, before it was fully dark, which the younger one says is cheating and the older one says is strategy. The older one, the one who told me she was too old for a costume, came as an aerobics instructor: headband, leg warmers, a leotard over a sweatshirt because it was 41 degrees out. The leg warmers were Carol's. From 1986. Carol kept them in a box for forty years and never told me, and I've been accused of being the one in this family who can't throw anything out.

Karl Casey's free record went on the little speaker by the front door, and when a dad walking two small Spider-Men asked what it was, I told him the name, and the label, and that it was free, and he wrote it down in his phone while the guitars chugged away behind him. That's one line of credit paid in full. Around eight a kid in a hockey mask asked if it was "from a video game," and I said close enough, because he had a pillowcase that weighed more than he did and I didn't want to keep him.

Here's the thing I learned on the porch, though. Songs with singing in them don't work out there. Kids talk over words. They shout "trick or treat" right through the chorus and nobody wins. The stuff with no vocals just sits under the whole night like a streetlight. Which is a long way of getting to the record I played most this week. It's a famous album with the singing taken out, and I couldn't stop.

The band without the singer

On Tuesday GUNSHIP put out Unicorn (Instrumentals), described in one line on Bandcamp: "the instrumental version of GUNSHIP's third album, UNICORN, with the vocals removed." The tags run darksynth, darkwave, outrun, score and cinematic, and that last pair is the honest part. Pull the voice out of a GUNSHIP song and what's left sounds like the music under a chase scene in a movie that never got made, big and dark and very expensive-sounding. Fourteen tracks, £9, digital only, on the band's own label, Horsie In The Hedge.

You'll remember that last week a GUNSHIP remix had Tim Cappello on it, the sax man from the boardwalk in The Lost Boys, and I spent three paragraphs losing my composure about it. Well. I read the credits on this one too, and at the bottom it says: "Featuring Dave Lombardo, Tyler Bates and Tim Cappello." So he was on the album all along. The remix wasn't a one-off favor. I'd just never looked.

Those other two names aren't small either. Dave Lombardo was Slayer's drummer, the guy a lot of metal drummers learned double bass from. Tyler Bates scores movies, and the John Wick pictures are his. That's the band you hear once the singer leaves the room, and with the voice gone you can hear every one of them, which I think is the whole point of putting this out. "DooM Dance" is the track with Carpenter Brut on it, and without the vocals it turns into a straight-up loud night, the kind Brut built his name on. "Ghost" features Power Glove, and the page notes it was in Netflix's Devil May Cry, so if you've heard it you heard it with demons on screen.

Written and produced by Alex Westaway, Dan Haigh and Alex Gingell. Mixed by Carl Bown, mastered by Stuart Hawkes, cover by Maciej Kuciara. Nobody's hiding.

Is a vocals-off version of a three-year-old album news? For most bands, no. I'd give it a line. But GUNSHIP's whole thing has always been the production, the way the synths stack up like a skyline, and a lot of people who'd never sit through the lyrics would put this on to drive, or write, or hand out candy. I'll admit I played "Tech Noir 2" four times on Wednesday night in the Civic, in a grocery store parking lot, with the engine off, because I didn't want it to end before I went in for milk.

Pull the singer out and you find out who was in the band. In this case, the man from the boardwalk.

Friday's arrivals

Friday the 30th was a pile-up. Everything I told you was coming out on the 30th came out on the 30th, which in this scene isn't a given, and I'll go through them in order of how fast my heart rate went up.

Johan Agebjörn's Casablanca Nights 2: The Unveiled Chapter is finally here, and I've been watching the vinyl counter on this thing for weeks. The tags say italo disco, synth pop, retrowave, piano, and the guest list is the sound description all by itself: Little Boots, Sally Shapiro, Ryan Paris, Fred Ventura, NINA, Tom Hooker, Dana Jean Phoenix, Bunny X, R Missing, Yota. If you know even two of those names you know what this is: soft, glittery, European, slow dancing under a mirror ball at a hotel bar in a city you can't afford. The page quotes Juno's review, "Rich in pop hooks, wide-eyed vocals, colourful synth hooks and throbbing, arpeggio-driven electronic basslines," and I'm not going to improve on that.

Two things in the credits stopped me. One: "Waiting For Magic," with Dana Jean Phoenix and Mikael Ögren, is credited to Jonas Berggren and Ulf Ekberg, which is Ace of Base. A cover of an Ace of Base song on an italo record from Sweden, and if that sounds like a joke to you, you never ran sound at Ohio weddings in the 2000s. I did, for seven years, and Ace of Base never once left the DJ's crate. And two, right there under it: "Saxophone solo by Steve Moore." There's a sax solo. Of course there is.

There's also a song called "Will You Be Home For Christmas," a slow one with Dana Jean Phoenix again, which is a little early for me on November 1st, but I've seen the Christmas lights go up on Arlington Avenue already, so I'm outnumbered. Twelve tracks, two more on the Bandcamp version. €9 digital, the blue gatefold vinyl €24, edition of 500. Last week there were 54 left. This afternoon the page says "40 remaining." Fourteen in release week. I'm still not buying one.

The three I told you about last week as pre-orders are all out now, so here's where they landed. MASKED's BEAUTY HURTS is out, 15 tracks, $7, and the page's own description still sells it better than I can, darksynth "combined with metal and industrial." The cassette (you need a tape deck, which I assume you have if you're here) still doesn't ship until December 21st, and the page is now shouting "CASSETTE AVAILABLE TO BUY FOR THIS ALBUM FOR A SHORT TIME!" in capitals. The album ends on two tracks called "Corpus Aeternum (Finale)" and "Bunny Kill Wolf (True Ending)," and I love that a slasher record has a true ending, like a video game where you have to beat it twice.

Alpha Chrome Yayo's Midnight Sparkle is out at a "SPECIAL LAUNCH DAY PRICE" of £4, and the tags fill in the picture this time: city pop, jazz-funk, anime, game music, vaporwave. The translucent blue vinyl's dated January 31st, 2027. And jacket.'s Volume III: Human, 19 tracks, $7, the end of a trilogy. This week I went back for a different line than the one I quoted last time: "This album is about the experience of being human. Good, bad, ugly. Pain, joy, struggle." The tags call it post-synthwave and melodic house, which in practice means it sings, and somewhere in the back there's a dance floor. One warning if you go looking: the right page is jacketsynthwave on Bandcamp. There's a different artist at the plain jacket address, and I nearly bought the wrong record.

JESSY MACH's The Other Side of Justice, the courtroom slasher EP from last week, has its CD and cassette switched over to "ships out within 7 days," so if you ordered the tape for Halloween, it's on the way, a little late, like every good tape I ever ordered from the back of a magazine.

And the new one: ALEX put out a single called "GHOSTER" on Friday on NRW Records, NewRetroWave's own label. The label's blurb promises "a refined Darksynth sound" and that this is "The first of many from ALEX's upcoming vision with NRW." The tags lean softer than the word darksynth, though: darkpop, dreamwave, synthpop, even vaportrap. The lyric's posted in full, and it's about being ghosted, "You disappear like the sun," which is a better line than most breakups deserve. $1.50, mastered by Colin Leonard at SING Mastering, mixed by Matt Kennedy.

The counter list

Five songs. If you walked up to my counter today, this is what I'd put in your hand.

The rest of the pile

Low Beam, the new one from Seattle's Silver Night Operator, doesn't come with a sound description so much as a scene: "This isn't a race. This isn't a getaway." Then: "One hour parked in the brief silence between curves, the sound of a city in motion heard by the only one standing still." The tags are ambient, darksynth, darkwave, outrun, and, strangely, folk. I've done that hour. Most of my thirties were that hour, in a gray car, by a lake. Two tracks, $2.50, out Friday.

Rad Razer left the about box empty on The Wheeled Warrior III, so the sound's down to the tags (darksynth, retrowave, synthpop) and the titles, which are a movie poster by themselves: "Justice on Four Wheels," "Biscayne Bay Sunset Cruise," "+7000 Go like Hell." Part three of a series about a warrior on wheels, out of Angoulême in France, 13 tracks, €12. I'm not asking questions.

If you know metal, Björn "Speed" Strid is the voice from Soilwork, a very loud Swedish band, and he's singing on a new single from New York's THE RUNAWAY WILD. The tags say darksynth, metalcore, horror synth, synthmetal, and simply "soilwork," which settles it: the heavy end of the shop, where the guitars live. "From Shadows Into Bright Lights," $2.50, the song plus an instrumental.

Two small ones. A.L.I.S.O.N, from Bordeaux, put out the soundtrack to a Steam game called Probably Stolen, which the page calls "a cyberpunk shopkeeper simulator," seven tracks, €7, tagged chillsynth and retrowave. A whole game about running a shop and dealing with customers. I did that for nine years, I'd like to see a game handle the guy who returned Aliens with the tape pulled out. And Restrictor, out of Warsaw, has a single called "Midnight Haunt," €1.50, "Inspired by the eerie soundtracks of 1980s horror cinema and John Carpenter's signature synth-driven sound." Restrictor's honest about the influence, and on Halloween week I'll allow it.

Friday the 6th

Bandcamp Friday is this Friday, November 6th, the day Bandcamp skips its share of every sale so the artist keeps more of what you pay. If you've been sitting on a wish list, that's the day.

The one I'm most curious about is Neon Odin's Fólkvangr, eight tracks, €9, out on the 6th. Here's the whole description, because it's two sentences and both of them are great: "Worshipping 80s synths, the Vanir and the Æsir. Dark norsewave sounds with shards of northern folk music, played on self built folk instruments." Norse gods on a synthesizer. The credits list one person, vvildr, out of Hungary, on synths, guitars, bass, talharpa and nyckelharpa. I had to look those last two up. They're old Scandinavian string instruments, the talharpa a bowed lyre and the nyckelharpa a fiddle with keys. vvildr built them by hand, and I still haven't fixed the dome light in the Civic.

Also on the 6th: Jon Franz's Scorched Earth, 11 tracks, £4, tagged darkwave, industrial and synthpunk. The credits are my favorite of the week: "Recorded July - Oct 26," all written, mixed and mastered by Jon Franz, and then, "Painted the cover on canvas." And LukHash's Neon Airlines, which I've already told you about, lands the same day with the Amiga MOD and the little C64 synth program in the bonus. That one's on my list already.

Out of the house

Cold Cave played Cremations solo in San Francisco on Friday night, at the Great American Music Hall, the last night of Substance, and somebody already put the whole setlist up. Twenty-one songs, started at 11:05 and ran past midnight, opened with "Sex Ads," closed with "Confetti" for the encore, and "Heavenly Metals," "Hummingbirds" and "Love You Forever" in the middle. "Mag Dreams" is listed twice, at 11 and again at 20, which is almost certainly a typo by the person entering it and not Wesley Eisold playing the same song twice. Though on Halloween eve I wouldn't rule anything out. Desire played the night before, and nobody's logged that set yet, and I haven't found a review of either night, so if you were there, the mailbox is open.

Cold Cave's going straight from there to Darker Waves in Huntington Beach on November 14th, per setlist.fm. That's a different scale of thing entirely: Morrissey and The Smashing Pumpkins on top, and Gary Numan, Soft Cell, Simple Minds and Adam Ant under them. The site has a "LESS THAN A MONTH OUT!" banner and still no set times.

Same day, other side of the ocean: Synthrave Live in Sheffield. I told you last week the lineup had eight acts. The festival's own site now lists twelve names, and the extra four are the DJs: DJ Max Speed, Aeronexus, Neon Paradise and Calida J. The bands are the same as before, and the site's added a line I like, "Limited Capacity," which is festival for "don't wait." Doors at 1, last entry at 10, 14 and up.

And Monterrey. Still nothing. The setlist.fm page for The Midnight's last night of the tour still has no songs on it, two weeks later, so I still don't know if "Avalanche" got played. There's a second entry on the site for the same day, called VIP soundchecks, also empty. I'll stop asking about it every week, though I'm obviously still going to look.

Who's listening

The interesting court news this week is about counting. Universal, which is suing Suno, sent DistroKid a subpoena asking for its AI-detection numbers: how many of the uploads DistroKid flags as AI, how much those tracks get streamed and paid, and how many were made with Suno. Digital Music News had it on Thursday. DistroKid's deadline to answer moved from November 4th to the 6th, and the two sides told the court they're "working on a resolution." A few weeks ago I wrote that a court filing put DistroKid at close to 12 million tracks delivered to a single streaming service between March and September, and that I didn't know how many of them came out of a machine. Somebody's about to ask DistroKid to put a number on it in front of a judge, and I'd very much like to see that number.

Separately, Suno wants the outfit that collects US songwriters' royalties to hand over streaming data going back to 2021, and per DMN's Friday piece there's a schedule for the fight about it, though the judge hasn't signed off yet. Reservoir's two suits from last week, against Suno and Anthropic, had no news I could find. That's the short version, and that's the right length for it.

Pixels and polygons

A quick catch-up if you're new: MiSTer is a small hobbyist computer whose main chip can be rewired, over and over, to behave like an old console or arcade board, and each of those personalities is called a core. A developer called alphanu1 has been rebuilding Sega's Model 2 arcade board on it, the one Daytona USA ran on. Two weeks ago it was one core, three games. Last week it was two cores and eleven more games, including Sega Rally. This week there are three.

The new one is Model 2C, for the last version of the board, in beta with three games: The House of the Dead, Over Rev and Sega Touring Car Championship. The 2C board used a different 3D chip, and the developer rebuilt it from scratch. House of the Dead "Plays at full speed, with guns from a mouse or stick." Over Rev plays with wheel and pedals. Touring Car races but has "No music yet."

House of the Dead. The zombie gun game. The bowling alley on Brookpark Road had one by the bathrooms, with the two plastic guns on cords, and I've seen grown men in Browns jackets scream at that machine. Somebody in 2026 rebuilt it in a chip so you can scream at it at home with a mouse.

What you need: a MiSTer, your own MAME 0.289 ROM sets ("Nothing here contains ROM data"), and for House of the Dead and Touring Car the 128 MB memory module, same as half of last week's list. The release also has MRA files for a 15 kHz CRT, which is the question every light gun owner is about to ask. Manual install, rename the core file yourself.

Then the one I didn't see coming. The original Model 2 core got force feedback for Daytona USA. If you've got a steering wheel with a motor in it, the core now reads what the game tells the cabinet's wheel to do and passes it on, and the README lists it the way you'd describe an old friend: "the centring spring, heavier steering on grass and sand, and the kicks from walls and other cars." The kick from the wall. I hit that wall a lot in 1994. The catch: you need a USB force feedback wheel and a MiSTer main program that isn't out yet. The support went into MiSTer's main code on October 28th and ships with the first main release after the October 10th one. So the core's ready and the rest of the box is a release behind. There's a test script in the release folder for your wheel.

And this is the one that got me. Sega Rally's music got fixed this week, and the way they fixed it is a story. The README: "Checked against a recording of a real Sega Rally cabinet: the music plays at exactly the same pitch, but the arcade's sequencer runs 2.2% slower than MAME's." Which means for years, on emulators, the hi-hats in that soundtrack have been drifting ahead of the rest of the band, "by about 240 ms over 11 seconds." The core now plays it at the real cabinet's speed by default, and there's a menu switch if you want the MAME timing back.

Somebody went and recorded a real Sega Rally machine, measured the drums, and found a 2.2% mistake everyone else had lived with. I told you last week about Ricky, the fifteen-year-old at the bowling alley who took me apart in 1996, race after race. I don't think Ricky could have told you the hi-hats were early. But I'd bet money he'd have felt it in his hands, because that kid drove to the music. Still no link play for Sega Rally, the README says. Still "yet."

One more arcade core while we're here: Atari's Race Drivin', from 1990, got its "First hardware release" on Tuesday, from a different developer. It's the sequel to Hard Drivin', the cabinet with a real clutch and a stick shift, and the Parmatown Mall arcade had one, and I stalled it in front of a girl I was trying to impress. I was eleven. It's the cockpit version only, and the README is honest: sound, the force feedback wheel and the cabinet's I/O board are "untested on hardware. Expect rough edges." You bring a MiSTer and your own racedriv.zip from MAME.

A strange new one: ReNFS, a MiSTer port of The Need for Speed Special Edition. The game's program was rewritten by hand and runs on the MiSTer's little ARM processor, and the chip handles the picture, sound and controls. You need the exact disc, the 1996 Special Edition for DOS and Windows 95; the 3DO version won't do. It's marked beta, and the README says something I'm going to start quoting the way I quote the no-AI lines: "AI is being extensively used to speed up development." I count the no-AI lines out loud in this magazine, so when somebody writes down that they did use it, I'll print that too.

Speaking of which. I went looking for new synthwave games on itch.io this week, the way I do, and I counted the 25 newest games under the synthwave tag. Twenty-three of them have the "AI Assisted" box filled in on their page. Code, graphics, sounds, text, in various combinations. Twenty-three of 25. I'm glad the box exists, because I can know before I click. But it's a big number for a genre built by people who spent a whole summer getting one gradient right, and I'm writing it down so we can see if it moves.

On Steam, Synapse Grid came out Wednesday, $4.79 in early access, Windows and Linux, and the pitch is pure Tron: "A neon light-cycle combat racer where the wall you leave behind becomes the arena." Its AI disclosure is one of the most specific I've read, and I'll give it to you whole: "AI-assisted concept references, music, voice-over and short video clips; gameplay, levels and code are hand-made. Nothing is generated while playing." So the music is AI-assisted. In a synthwave game. I'll let you decide how you feel about that one; I already know how I feel.

Evercade's new handheld, the Nexus, is out now, per the company's own site, with a day-one patch they'd like you to install "before using your new console." $199.99 in the US. Ownership: it plays Evercade's own cartridges, which are licensed emulation collections, not original carts, and RetroHandhelds' review lists the ports as a headphone jack, the cartridge slot and USB-C, so don't plan on plugging it into the TV. The day-one patch adds The Last Ninja and James Pond collections. I had a friend with The Last Ninja on a Commodore, and I watched more of it than I played.

Two smaller ones. Martin Donlon has a lag tester for MiSTer called Laggy, $12 plus shipping, per RetroRGB on Monday. It's a little light sensor that plugs into the MiSTer's user port (the SNAC port, which only borrows a USB 3 connector, so not a regular USB socket) and runs as a utility core, so you can measure how far behind your TV is. Twelve dollars to find out your TV's been lying to you since 2014. And Retro Remake teased a handheld called the SuperStation Pocket that plays original Game Boy, Color and Advance cartridges in an FPGA, with a dock for HDMI, "under $200," no date. Teaser only, so that's all it gets until there's a box I can hold.

Rewind culture

I returned the movie. Way Cool Video, Tuesday, on time, which is a thing I used to beg people to do for nine years and it turns out it feels great from the other side. I'm still not telling you what it was. I stood at the counter and didn't straighten a single box this time, which I count as progress. Full disclosure, because they sign my checks: I wore the shop's T-120 sneakers to a video store, which is either very cool or the most on-the-nose thing a man has ever done in Lakewood. Nobody at the counter said which. That's November's one mention, spent on my own feet.

The disc I'd have put in the window at the Vault this week is a box set Warner put out on Amazon in October, five 80s horror movies as 4K SteelBooks, packed in a case that looks like an old VHS library case. A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, The Shining, Little Shop of Horrors, and The Lost Boys. The Lost Boys, again. HD Report says the box comes with five mini rental-store posters, five mini VHS covers and a little shelf sign, $144.99. Each film is 4K plus Blu-ray plus digital; HD Report doesn't list regions or an edition size. I can't afford it and I spent ten minutes looking at the pictures of the shelf sign anyway, because I made a lot of shelf signs.

Arrow has Clash of the Titans, the 1981 one with Ray Harryhausen's monsters, on 4K on November 16th in the UK, and the page spells it out the way I like. A new 4K restoration from the original 35mm negative, Dolby Vision, the original stereo restored plus a new Atmos mix, a new feature-length documentary called "Courage & Imagination," old BFI audio interviews with Harryhausen, a poster, a booklet, and new cover art by Richey Beckett. £30 on pre-order. What you're buying: two discs. The film is on the 4K disc, and 4K discs aren't region locked. The new documentary is on Disc 2, a Blu-ray, and Arrow's region line for the set reads "Region B / Free," so if you're in Ohio like me with a Region A Blu-ray player, check before you count on the extras.

Clash of the Titans was a two-copy title at the Vault and both copies had the same scratch at the Medusa scene, because every kid in Parma rewound that part. I could tell you the exact frame. I'm not proud of it.

Also coming November 17th, from Shout: The Transformers: The Movie for its 40th birthday, in a 4K SteelBook. That's the 1986 one that killed Optimus Prime and broke a generation of seven-year-olds, me included. I was in the second grade. Two discs, 4K and Blu-ray, Dolby Vision, both aspect ratios. JoBlo says the 4K disc is region free and the Blu-ray is Region A, and the extras haven't been announced. That soundtrack, by the way, is half the reason I like synthesizers. Vince DiCola. I'll write that column someday.

Two birthdays. The People Under the Stairs, Wes Craven's 1991 picture, turns 35 today, and it was a rental the horror regulars came back for. And Something Wild, Jonathan Demme's 1986 movie with Melanie Griffith, Jeff Daniels and Ray Liotta, turns 40 on Saturday. That one was in drama, which is where we put the movies we couldn't explain.

Static

Bandcamp's counter on Sunday afternoon said fans "yesterday alone bought" 108,567 records. That's Saturday, Halloween, and it's 20,000 more than the 88,540 I gave you last week. People bought records on Halloween. I'd like to think some of them were for porch speakers.

Highlander II also turns 35 today in the US. I have nothing nice to say about it, so I'll say we had three copies and they mostly came back early.

Spotify's reportedly working on an AI tool that would let people make covers and remixes of songs, launching in early 2027, according to DMN on Friday. "Reportedly" is the key word. If it happens, I've got questions about whose name goes in the credits.

Vidiots in Los Angeles is showing Pee-wee's Big Adventure on Saturday the 7th. The page doesn't say if it's film or digital. Tequila.

Something I found this week and can't use yet: two people who post as IlluminatiFlamingo put a new acrylic painting on r/outrun on Sunday, "Meet me at the Saturn Gas Sation" (their spelling), 50 by 40 centimeters, by hand. I couldn't find a portfolio I could link you to, and the Art Desk has rules, so it's a mention, not a column. If you're them, write in.

It's November, which means the attic's about to go from too hot to too cold with no stop in between, and the leg warmers are back in Carol's box until 2066. The older girl gave them back at the end of the night. I asked if she'd had fun. She said "it was fine," which from a teenager is a five-star review, and then she asked what the porch music was so she could find it. I wrote it down for her on the back of a candy wrapper. Karl Casey. One line of credit, paid twice.

And somebody recorded a real Sega Rally cabinet to fix a drum part, thirty years late, for nobody in particular. That one's going to stay with me all week.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty