Music In October That’s All Treats And No Tricks!

Music fans can dip into a mixed bag of digital treats from haunting to otherworldly to playful as this year’s eeriest night takes on a new life. Premiering today, the Halloween & Chill playlist is a genre-spanning concoction for an enchanting season of pumpkin carving and dress-up, whether for an intimate at-home get-together or a Zooming party to connect with other pirates, princesses, super heroes and vampires. Also this month, spellbinding CD and LP releases, plus new videos, make the frightful truly delightful. Halloween & Chill begins here: https://ume.lnk.to/halloweenandchill.

Available now and a partial rundown below, the Halloween & Chill playlist brings together a diverse tracklist of beats, energy, inspiration and swing. Lighting a few candles and turning up the music is one way to enhance October 31 planning. Cream’s “Strange Brew,” Dusty Springfield’s sultry “Spooky” and Frank Sinatra’s “Witchcraft” are among the more than 50 tracks featured.

Halloween & Chill videos available today include “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)” by Concrete Blonde – watch here. Remastered in high-definition (HD), the video captures the foreboding goth-blues riffing, necromantic lyrics and gang-vocal chorus from the opening track on the band’s Bloodletting album. A brightly colored, animated video for Sheb Wooley’s “Purple People Eater” also makes its official video debut here today.

Last spring, The Cranberries “Zombie” video hit 1 billion views on YouTube, making them the first Irish band in history to achieve this milestone. Befitting the Halloween & Chill vibe, the track is included on the playlist and a new lyric video featuring remastered audio from the forthcoming No Need to Argue reissue (Island Records/UMe) premieres on Halloween & Chill YouTube playlist later this month.

For fans of vinyl, starting next Friday, October 9, The Sound of Vinyl will launch All Treats No Tricks Spin to Win. Customers can visit the site each Friday in October to spin the wheel for a special Halloween discount code to be used on any purchase, including the Halloween & Chill Collection here: https://thesoundofvinyl.us/collections/halloween.

Frank Zappa’s Halloween shows in New York were already legendary – a rock and roll bacchanalia of jaw-dropping musicianship, costume-clad revelry, spontaneous theatrical hijinks and of course a heavy dose of Zappa’s signature virtuosic guitar workouts. Today, Frank Zappa’s epic 1981 Halloween concert — immortalized with a king-size, 6CD Halloween ’81 costume box set, featuring more than 70 previously unreleased tracks with a Count Frankula mask and cape — is available today, here: https://frankzappa.lnk.to/Halloween81. Please click here for details.

Available exclusively at uDiscover Music and Sound of Vinyl on October 9, Halloween Hootenanny (UMe), ghoulishly curated by Rob Zombie for Halloween parties, will be reissued on orange vinyl with blue and pink splatter. Calling upon various surf and psychobilly acts like Los Straitjackets, Reverend Horton Heat, and Rocket From the Crypt, this is a loud, garish and downright fun collection of rip-roaring tunes to ignite your Halloween spirit.

Hailed by Rolling Stone as a “paranoid pop classic,” the official video for “Somebody’s Watching Me” (Motown/UMe) by Rockwell has over 95M views on YouTube and has been remastered in HD here.

The Halloween & Chill playlist is available across multiple digital services. In addition to the slate of releases and new video content, be on the lookout for Halloween-themed social media lenses for posts.

Sample track listing: