The Martian Graverobbers

Back once more to the Red Planet, but this time it's red with BLOOD! The Martian Graverobbers started out in 1999 playing a rough-edged brand of horror punk mixed with a taste of psychobilly. Over the course of a few years they changed a couple of members and evolved into a straightforward, fairly brutal horror metal sound. The first CD Die Today... Rise Tomorrow captures them about halfway into their metal transmogrification. Classic hits like Hacked Up For Barbecue, Fight The Evil Dead and Highway Of Violence are heavier than I remember them being played live and feature hoarse metal-style vocals. Unfortunately I don't believe they ever recorded their great homage to Abel Salazar's cinematic classic, The Brainiac. The second CD Kings Of Horror was 100% metal, a style I don't usually care much for, but the solid, catchy songwriting on this album managed to win me over. They called it quits somewhere around 2005, unfortunately without completing their magnum opus, an album length musical adaptation of Frankenstein replete with anatomically detailed surgical descriptions researched in medical texts. I did 3 drawings for them over the years. The one at the top of this post was used on T-shirts in their early days. The cover of their first CD actually came to me in a dream, wherein I encountered a bunch of local punk rockers having a party in the foyer of my sister's apartment building. One of them showed me a Martian Graverobbers CD (which did not exist in real life at the time) and later back in the real world I convinced the band to let me recreate that dreamworld album cover for use on their first release. The Chainsaw Martian was used on the tray card of the Die Today... CD. I've recently been in touch with Graverobbers guitarist Murderhouse and will hopefully be doing some work for his new band Zombie Assault!! pretty soon. More on that in the near future. Stay tuned for MORE ACTION!