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Chron Goblin with Forbidden Dimension & Witch Stone
Palomino
Saturday, January 28 - Saturday, January 28

More in: Rock / Pop

Within the last three decades, anyone who’s spent time in Calgary is surely familiar with Jackson Phibes, a.k.a. Tom Bagley. As an illustrator, his work has graced Chixdiggit! and Huevos Rancheros album covers, Fubar books and movie posters and the pages of just about every local publication (including this one). As a teacher, he’s been a cartooning instructor for the last five years. And as a musician, he first earned local ears with Colour Me Psycho, collaborated with Appalachian macabre-folk act Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir and, of course, is the ringleader of local cult staples Forbidden Dimension — a ghoulish garage-punk-metal trio soon celebrating its quarter-century anniversary.

For an instant, we consider labelling him Western Canada’s horror-punk godfather. But Phibes is quick to correct that assumption.

“We always get lumped into the horror-punk thing, or people try to lump us in with psychobilly,” he says. “A lot of the horror bands end up sounding like a Danzig tribute act, and it’s easy to write a zombie song or something generic. But those bands didn’t listen to what we listened to: when I was a teenager, I grew up loving punk — the Cramps, the Stranglers. Then I got into metal, like Blue Oyster Cult. And then I got the Nuggets record, so for Forbidden Dimension, it’s a mix of everything. That way, people can’t tell what you’re ripping off.”

He laughs. “Here’s a better way to describe it: It’s a total adolescent nerd freakout.”

That’s apparent if you spend any time with Forbidden Dimension’s new album, Golden Age of Lasers, released by Saved by Radio, which is their first recording since 2007’s vinyl-only A Cool Sound Outta Hell. Note the vintage garage keyboards, fit to soundtrack an abandoned roadside wax museum. Or the teen-slasher stalker-romances built in Phibes’s narratives. Or the swagged-out metal — something like Kiss meets Maiden — that makes Lasers feel like that campy-awesome-terrible horror VHS you found in Bird Dog’s basement. (No, and we’re not talking about the Ozzy- and Gene Simmons-starring abomination Trick or Treat.)

Indeed, if this all sounds a tad cinematic, how could it not? Beyond Phibes’s penchant for the theatric — witness the sunglasses and corpse paint he wears during performances — he’s an illustrator by trade, after all.

“We spent as much time on the album art as we did the music,” laughs Phibes, who notes that Laser’s artwork was inspired by the grotesque, antiquated dinosaur sculptures of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. “The cover was designed to look like a black-light poster — it’s basically comic-nerd rock. I remember being a teenager, when they first got the LRT going into downtown. You’d go to all these head shops that would sell underground comics and psych paraphernalia, and they’d smell like incense and be blasting T-Rex and Motörhead records.”

And was that experience — a quintessentially teenage one, whether you were 16 in 1977 or 2007 — one Phibes tried to re-create on the Lasers artwork? “Yeah. Like Grandpa Takes a Trip, which was a comic store in Kensington. They’d have crazy comic poster art with naked chicks and axes — it was like Heavy Metal magazine.”

Phibes’s fangoria is precisely what makes his band so lovable; it’s a genuine snapshot into the nerdiest tendencies of one of Calgary’s most successful illustrators. It’s a project that Phibes follows at his leisure, and that has been bound by few time or financial constraints — the guitar riff for “Oculus Cursus” was written 15 years ago and several of Lasers’ songs were penned for his last album. It’s a change from the ’90s when Forbidden Dimension was signed to then punk powerhouse Cargo Records, which asked for records at a two-year clip.

And the result? It’s pure, gleeful, dare we say, kitschy teenage horror trash. And when we ask if Phibes’s soon-to-be adolescent sons relate, we’re glad to hear the response: They do.

“Both my kids are musicians, and my younger one has perfect pitch,” he says. “And every year for my birthday, they draw a 10- to 12-page comic book called Morbid World. My older guy’s fearless at drawing, and my younger guy drew a really sweet scene of a guy being ripped apart.”

Adorable.