The Green Lady Killers

It's either fortuitous psychic planning or just plain dumb luck that The Green Lady Killers released an EP that opens with a song called "Psycho Ellen" in the same week Ellen DeGeneres cuckooed up the airwaves weeping about a troublesome doggy she couldn't handle with some kind of Michael Vick finality. "Psycho Ellen, she is sick in the head; psycho Ellen, she's better off dead" fits the TMZ gossip blotter perfectly, although the rest of the song, with its accounts of serial stalking and warrantless wiretapping, does not. If only there were a morning zoo worth its oats in this town, this would be prime drive-time music. Who couldn't use a shot of Lady Van Buren first thing in the morning, elocutin' like Glenn Danzig after an estrogen shake? Or a bone-bashing horror-pop rhythm section pummeling behind her? Or GLK secret weapon D.F. Jimenez, who peels off the tastiest 20-second guitar solos this side of a séance for James Honeyman-Scott and brings the talk box back from the dead on the crackling good "Spooky"? This six-song sampler amply demonstrates that the GLK can play three-chord Fangoria-based rock and roll as efficiently as the rest of the gravediggers mining this vein. But a minor-key masterpiece like "Whips and Chains" has the added potential of crossing over into whatever is left of the divided pop audience and staying there with a memorable melody you could play on a theremin and still have the same number of chills up the spine. If Kelly Clarkson had even a minute as convincing as this on her failed goth girl album, she wouldn't be singing duets with Reba McEntire now.