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Jessica Hopper wrote about Lake of Dracula a few weeks ago in the print version of the Reader, but I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that the band’s less-than-two-year existence ended nearly a decade ago. The recently released Skeletal Remains (Savage Land) suggests that the band’s music hasn’t aged at all. Sort of a supergroup of the city’s so-called “now wave scene,” the band was fronted by soon-to-be-techno star Marlon Magas, with Weasel Walter of the Flying Luttenbachers on guitar and Heather Melowic of the Scissor Girls on drums. The bulk of the material on the new album comes from a live radio broadcast made in May of 1997 for KFJC in Los Altos, California, recorded about a month before the band threw in the towel. At that point the lineup had expanded to include bassist Jessica Ruffins (ex-Jaks and co-owner of Key Club Recording in Benton Harbor), who joined after Lake of Dracula’s sole studio effort—an eponymous album on Skin Graft—was recorded in the fall of 1996.
