Terminal Amusements, by Drakulas, was released this past Friday, April 3. The band features members of Riverboat Gamblers and Rise Against, plus guest contributions from Mark Ryan (The Marked Men), and several other Texas-based musicians. SPB chatted with ringleader Mike Wiebe about the new record late last year.
The record is set in a fiction urban wasteland, depicted in a press release as:
We open on a wide-angle shot of what appears to be Times Square in the late-Seventies before Giuliani turned it into a Disneyland for tourists. The streets are teeming with back-alley deals, random acts of violence and seedy dive bars. This setting, which shall be known as The City, is the backdrop for Drakulas’ second full-length Terminal Amusements, titled after the illicit video game arcade where we find our protagonist. This isn’t a rock opera exactly, but it is a teenage wasteland. “It's a made-up world that’s an amalgam of old New York movies that I saw when I was a little kid,” Drakulas’ frontman Mike Wiebe (Riverboat Gamblers, High Tension Wires) explains. “I’d never been to New York so my perception of the place was influenced by everything from ‘The Warriors’ and ‘Taxi Driver’ to the opening credits of ‘Welcome Back, Kotter’.”
Terminal Amusements is released by Dine Alone Records.
