Did you know that the Double D boys released a new album a couple weeks ago? I sure didn’t! Luckily, a coworker mentioned it in passing yesterday. That was probably the best part of my entire day, if I’m honest.

So, how is it? Hmm.

I’m on record (as it were) stating that the previous album, 2021’s Future Past, is a solid DD outing and that opinion holds true a couple years onward. This one’s more of a weird beast, which is appropriate because while it’s not really much of a “concept album,” it’s certainly got a theme to it.

Danse Macabre is a Halloween record. What does that mean, actually? Who knows, who cares? If it inspired the band to throw some songs together, I’m certainly not going to complain. With that said, like plunging your hand into the plastic Jack-o-lantern candy bowl at that one weird neighbor’s house, what you get is kind of a mixed result.

The main reason for this? This is also partly (mostly?) a covers album, and that goes about as well as you might expect. They even cover themselves, three (and a half) times. One of the standouts, in fact, is the groovier rework of “Love Voodoo” (now “Love Voudou”) originally from the erstwhile Wedding Album. The other reworked back-catalog pieces don’t fare quite as well, to say nothing of the utterly bizarre melding of “Lonely In Your Nightmare” and, I kid you not, “Super Freak.” (I’d rather they’d just stuck with a full redo of “Lonely” but here we are.)

Another ill-advised cover is their take on the Rolling Stones staple, “Paint It Black.” Whoever suggested to Simon Le Bon that he could pull off a Mick Jagger should be smacked upside the head. If they’d tried to make the song their own it probably would have turned out much better, but instead (as with nearly all of the covers) the band decided to do the song in as close a style to the original version as they could manage. On the upside, their take on the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” is quite solid, as is the cover of Siouxsie And The Banshees’ “Spellbound.”

A few originals are strewn among the covers and whatnot, including the title track and “Black Midnight,” both of which help justify the cost of the album purchase. In the end, though, this is a weird, funny, surprising, and overall very mixed release from a band I wasn’t expecting to hear from this year in the first place, so… it is also definitely welcome.