Halloween Countdown: October 18 – the wolves are hungry tonight

It’s frustrating when a previously unremarkable band suddenly makes a creative quantum leap, then promptly breaks up. Given the number of acts that don’t know when to quit and continue to coast on the vapors of their past successes, these flashes of ephemeral brilliance shine all the brighter. They tease the listener with hints of what could have been had fate taken a different course.

The Dark started off as a factory-standard 80’s britpunk act, with the typical repertoire of anti-bomb, anti-war, and anti-police material. Their stuff wasn’t terrible, but apart from a decent cover of the Hawaii Five-O theme, there was little to differentiate the band from their peers. The a-side of their final single before the band split, “The Masque”, was an amazing piece of gothic-tinged punk unlike anything else The Dark ever recorded. It reminds me a little of the Damned’s work, but with the 60’s garage influences shorn in favor of heavier 80’s punk guitar riffs, and the horror movie elements (associated with the Damned, but really a Dave Vanian conceit) moved to the foreground.

I first came across the track in the early 1990’s when I bought a copy of the second Punk and Disorderly compilation at Disc Diggers in Davis Square. “The Masque” stood out among the uninspired later offerings by Vice Squad and the Abrasive Wheels (the reasons I picked up the record) and poor Discharge clones, and has become a Halloween season constant around Armagideon Time HQ.

The Dark – The Masque (from a 1982 single, collected on Punk and Disorderly: Further Charges, 1982)