Sneak of the Week: “Haunter of the Darkness,” Zuider Zee

Meet the ‘70s Memphis rockers who blended the tuneful and the terrifying.

Only in the ‘70s could one of the catchiest songs you never heard be inspired by horror’s literary lion, H.P. Lovecraft, and feature the term “polyhedron” in its first verse. “Haunter of the Darkness” comes from a band that went largely unnoticed in its lifetime but enjoyed a revivified rep more than 40 years later.

Zuider Zee started out in Lafayette, Louisiana, fronted by Richard Orange, whose fiery mane earned him his stage name. When Orange was just a teen, he led the punningly named ‘60s psych outfit Thomas Edisun’s Electric Light Bulb Band, which eventually evolved into Zuider Zee. Like countless other artists of their generation, ZZ were heavily influenced by The Beatles, but they were among the very few (Badfinger, ELO) who knew how to take that inspiration and bring it successfully into the ‘70s. (Orange’s occasionally McCartney-esque vocal tones didn’t hurt matters either).

Having gone as far as they could in Lafayette, the band moved to Memphis during the era when Memphians like Big Star were getting off the ground. They released one self-titled album on Columbia in 1975 but made little commercial headway and hung it up by the following year. Just enough of their legend lingered in the realms of record geekery over the decades to inspire the 2018 release Zeenith, featuring unreleased material from the band’s pre-Columbia sessions. The one composition it shares with the ‘75 LP is “Haunter of the Darkness.”

Orange has said that the lyrics were literally dashed off mid-session when the track’s original words weren’t working out. Fortunately for him, he had been diving into the strange, spooky realms of fearmeister H.P. Lovecraft, and he tossed in some elements from the 1935 story The Haunter of the Dark, dealing with Lovecraft’s now-legendary Cthulhu mythos. From there, he improvised a bit until he had his own tale of a menacing, unearthly creature.

That in itself doesn’t necessarily guarantee a great song, though. There are surely countless subpar heavy metal tunes based on Lovecraftian themes floating around out there. But when the band combined Orange’s creepy words with some majestic guitar riffs, an irresistibly churning rhythm, and a funky clavinet that could have fallen out of a contemporaneous Stevie Wonder track, something special emerged. As great as both Zuider Zee albums are, there’s nothing on either of them that sounds quite like it.

Between the attitudinal guitars, the stomping beat, and the serpentine undulations of the vocals, there’s a uniquely ‘70s sort of swagger to “Haunter of the Darkness.” And when you add those otherworldly, occult lyrics to the recipe, you end up with a song that walks tall but somehow still lurks in the shadows. At the track’s end, a series of electronic squiggles, savage drum hits, and a distorted guitar din seem to suggest that the ominous events being discussed are finally coming to fruition. It’s foreboding enough to make the most steely-eyed metal band cry, but it was merely another day on the job for Zuider Zee.

-Jim Allen

Publicity photo of Zuider Zee (public domain)