C. W. Stoneking

Last October the algorithm slid an album cover into my "suggested for you." A man in a white suit with a skull painted over his face. Then the title, Gon' Boogaloo, which sounds like a jump-scare line from an old Looney Tunes cartoon. I clicked expecting a costume-shop novelty act. I got a full conversion.

C.W. Stoneking was born in 1974 in Katherine, in Australia's Northern Territory. His father was an American-born poet, and Stoneking spent his childhood in Papunya, an Aboriginal community in the desert, before the move to Sydney. The blues reached him through his father's records, a few compilations with Blind Willie McTell in the mix. He never really came back from that.

He didn't learn those songs. He moved into them. Greased-back hair, a National resonator guitar, a drawl that sounds like it's coming off a turntable riddled with dust. He plays hokum, the rowdy, joke-loaded blues of the 1920s and '30s, and his own label is called King Hokum Records. He mixes in a little vaudeville novelty, all of it sung by a guy who has spent his whole life on the wrong continent for any of it and doesn't care.

"Gon' Boogaloo" won the 2015 ARIA for best blues and roots album. He and his band cut it live in two days, to a two-track tape machine, with two microphones for the whole room. No overdubs, no fixing it later. He put down the resonator for an electric guitar this time, and four backing singers stack up behind him like a church choir that wandered into the wrong juke joint and never left. It sounds haunted in the good way, the kind where the ghost just wants to dance.

"The Zombie" is the track that had me. It plays like an old dance-craze novelty with a horror movie leaking up through the floorboards. By Stoneking's own pitch, it's the song for people who like to dance slow and hear children scream.

The video came out in 2016, from Patrick McHale, the guy who created "Over the Garden Wall." Stoneking voiced a character on that show. The animation is pencil-drawn and it flickers, like a jack-o'-lantern candle about to give out. That flicker is what stopped my scroll last October, and it's the reason I'm writing this instead of just liking a post and moving on.

Dead Man's Bones already got its On Rotation drop and its Liner Notes. This one goes in the October lineup right behind it. Both records throw a party for the dead. Stoneking just shows up in a better suit.