I mean, don’t get me wrong: nothing experimental or aggressive or even furtively intellectual is happening on this '70s reissue of a soundtrack for a movie that never was. The kraut-collaborators here
(jazz session player Heribert Thusek and songwriter / radio comedian Horst Ackermann) combine lounge-exotica clichés with gag-worthy gags for an album length exploitation equivalent of a bunch of dogs barking their way through "Jingle Bells."

Certainly, there are moments to like here if you appreciate the lounge/film genre: the weird shuffle-with-aggressive-sproing on “Tanz Der Vampires” is probably the goofy highlight. But for the most part, the decent grooves are all stalked, brought down, and then hideously butchered by fiendishly hoaky sound effects. “Die Wasserleiche (The Soaked Body)” has a nice down-and-dirty chase scene roll, which keeps clumsily fading down so we can hear the sounds of water running, wind blowing, and somebody yelling “yaaaaaaaa!” with only moderate conviction. “Mord Im Ohio Express (Murder on the Ohio Express)” is an itchy, cheesy bounce drowned out by train noises — and, yeah, the inevitable half-hearted yawps. On “Eine Handvoll Nitro (A Handfull of Nitro)” you keep hearing explosions. And so on and so forth. It’s like trying to listen to a record while you’re socially challenged, inebriated uncle screams hoary vaudeville punch lines in your ear.

Which is exactly how you’re meant to appreciate it, I think. You’re supposed to snicker at the disastrous schlockiness and awfulness of it all. You enjoy yourself being irritated by it, the same way you enjoy yourself being impressed by, say, a Sonic Youth album...or, perhaps more precisely, the way you enjoy yourself being irritated by the Boredoms.

We usually think of highbrow or artsy music as being more self-conscious and less visceral than lowbrow. But do you really need to be an intellectual to appreciate conceptual art? My wife was horrified recently when her mother (whose interaction with art more or less stops at William Wegman catalogs) forwarded her images of an elderly women, totally nude, covered in tattoos and (ahem) explicit piercings. Is this cheesy schlock or is it avant-garde? How can you even tell the difference? Maybe Dracula’s Music Cabaret really is just monstrous meta for the masses. Which doesn’t change the fact that, after finishing this review, I don’t know that I ever need to hear this album again.

Recommended Tracks: "Tanz Der Vampires" "Die Wasserleiche" "Mord Im Ohio Express"

-Noah Berlatsky