WEDNESDAY 13

In a stunted little cul-de-sac of the music world, occupied exclusively by zaftig, Myspace-addicted Goth chicks, overly-pierced zombie greasers and cowboy-hat-wearing ex-glammers gone horror punk, people like WEDNESDAY 13 reign supreme. This is a scene where third-string footnotes to history like BILE and LOLLIPOP LUST KILL are considered minor deities, and where the basic recipe for industrial-tinged, highly produced, ghoulish monster-mash rock and roll hasn't been updated since ROB ZOMBIE took the ALICE COOPER formula and cyborged it for the 1990s.

The MURDERDOLLS frontman doesn't do much to update the style either — note the record title, which was a hack joke when URGE OVERKILL used it in 1993. But you get the feeling WEDNESDAY knows it's all a big gag, as he keeps the groaners coming ("a corpse is a corpse/of course of course", "I'm damned if I voodoo and I'm dead if I don't") and infuses "Transylvania 90210" with a sense of campy fun. His voice is pure ALICE and there's enough Munsters keyboards, MISFITS-lite vibe and shticky punk-o-metal guitar to rock out a whole high school full of fishnet-wearing Hot Topic customers.

WEDNESDAY has the sense to keep things simple and the energy level amped up, making "Transylvania 90210" a fun little graveyard romp. This'd be almost a 7, really, if it wasn't so disposable and tacky, and if all the choruses stuck as well as highlights "I Walked With a Zombie" and "Buried By Christmas" (containing the immortal line "all I want for Christmas is a custom-fit casket… black velvet interior… oh yeah… and a bucket of chicken").

"Transylvania 90210" pushes all the right buttons, goes down smooth as the leftover milk from a bowl of Franken Berry, and contains all the hokey ghost-story ambience of an episode of Scooby-Doo. Most of the world will gag on its sugar-coated Pop-Rocks-and-Pixi-Stix aftertaste, but those dying for a new MURDERDOLLS fix will be in heaven… er… hell… you get the idea.