t opens with scraping strings, mangled keys, and bassy vibrations. It’s everything spooky a friend once warned me about the Kid A album his brother had just bought; Don’t listen to it while you’re sleeping. It’s something I learned with Pink Floyd’s “Careful With That Axe Eugene.” But it’s both nothing and everything like either of those storied works at once. Acoustic guitar strums race into the picture, egged on by electronically produced hi-hats and bass drums.

“I’m gonna be your pink Dracula.” The opening line is an odd enough statement on its own, but this is a love song. And that verse breaks down to a bridge of more spacey instrumentalism and a bass drum keeping time to spastically bending strings. When the chorus comes in, it’s with a fat synthesizer bloating under a keyboard vibrato that evokes Transylvanian paranoia, and finally the song catches: “They say I’m no good for you / Just in it for the blood / But they’re just player hatin’.”

This is “Pink Dracula” from Oklahoma duo Elliott the Letter Ostrich’s sophomore album Blood Cape, and the haunted house of creepy craziness doesn’t stop there. It does sort of take a break though, as this album moves schizophrenically between Elvis rockabilly, “Shake It in the Uh-Huh,” Rentals low-fi, “My Baroness,” and the controlling jealousy of a cracked out pimp. It also recalls the infectious keyboard hits of the 80’s with “Love Song for the Walking Dead,” and that’s just the first four songs.

All said, Elliott the Letter Ostrich, which I won’t take the liberty of paraphrasing “ELO,” has the spice of influential variety of a band like TV on the Radio, if you excuse their ignorance of anything ever put out by a black performer and not appropriated for white audiences. They even exhibit a good deal of the New York fad-wavers’ pop structure experimentalism. From the sprawling epic of the opener, with its off-key chorus, to the jarring, reverberated pounds that lead into “My Baroness”’s Summerteeth banjo pop, which fades out to industrial interpretations of sine tones, laser-beams, and monster garble talk, to “Pink Dracula”’s reprise “Pink Dracula Returns, Get Plenty of Sleep, You’ll Need It To Keep Your Eyes Open,” Elliot is fearless in experimenting with the tried and true formulas they pastiche. There’s even disc scratching on the intro to “Knife Fight Baby (Get Stabbed, Get Stabbed),” which features what is possibly the most disturbing of any statements I’ve heard in a love song “Gonna keep the wolves at your door / Gonna keep haunting your house / Until / You admit that you’ll be mine.” Eminem never sounded so sociopathic.

The reprise is a sleeper favorite. It takes time to warm up to through the first listen after the “Dracula” bit blends into an independent song. The beat/keyboard/guitar combo is beginning to feel tired, and it’s questionable how much diversity there is between the three or so types of songs on the album, but a synth break carves tension into the bridge, which grows with well placed beats and a monster speed-core break, springing the rest of the song off on a mellow tangent with the line “Everybody here is going to die / Nobody here will make it out alive.” Cut right to “Reign in Blood,” with the psychobilly mantra “Come on baby donch’a wana reign in blood?” and pinball effects under the solo, the Ostrich’s done a good job to keep this album interesting beyond its overly cheeky theme.

This kind of quirky low-fi pop is commonplace for the small CDR label that supports it, Asaurus Records, and it’s sometimes subject to not enough self consciousness, as fewer stigmas follows the lower profile of an internet based retailer. It remains, though, that there is indeed a conscious message to all of these scare tactics and blood-lust: enjoy the time you have and all that liberal sentimentality is expository in the second to last track, “Eat Yourself So You Can Become Invisible (Ryan 88).” It’s a worthwhile message, but sparingly made for the length and depth of the apocalyptic imagery preceding it. A deeper knowledge of innovative electronic principles is present throughout the album, although it’s rarely expanded upon, something that future albums could benefit from, especially given the homogeneity of many beats on the album.

I hate to play the race card, but after listening to the album through and through, it’s clear that the three or so throwaways on the album, the ones that hold it just short of nuanced brilliance, would have been sweeter than Willy Wonka personified in a sweet-n-lo if they’d been revisited with some Motown or funky soul. The case could be made that it’s all that’s missing on Blood Cape—that same deeper understanding of a vital piece of the puzzle we know as the North American experience, the black perspective. It’s possibly that ignorance, with so much diversity otherwise saturating the album, which is most creepy of all.