## Nightlife

  
  
Rob Zombie won't be playing any songs from his almost-completed new CD on his fall tour with Marilyn Manson.  
  
"We're doing a bunch of songs that are older songs. Not a bunch, but some songs I haven't played in a long time that people will recognize," Zombie said in a mid-September phone interview. "But we're not doing anything new just because nobody wants to hear new songs off a record that isn't out yet. That is just wasted concert time."  
  
Don't take Zombie's decision to hold off on playing new songs as an indication that he lacks enthusiasm for the new CD. In fact, the Woodbury resident is pretty amped about his latest musical work.  
  
"It seems to happen every couple of years or every 10 years or every five years or whatever, you have a moment when it all comes together," Zombie said. "Not that the other records are bad, but not every record can be like the most inspired event in your life. But for some reason, this one feels like it is. The songwriting, the sound of it, the vibe, the production, it's special, I think."  
  
The album, which is being produced by Bob Marlette, is essentially finished and will be out in early 2013, according to Zombie. Fans can expect an album that touches quite a few bases.  
  
"It's stylistically sort of a little bit of everything," Zombie said. "I think fans of my really old stuff will love it because there's a certain aspect of it that's very reminiscent of that. But it also is very looking to the future. It's hard to describe music to somebody if they haven't heard it, but I feel like it's the best of all of the things I've done. I've finally found a perfect match between the old stuff I did and the new stuff. That's the way it sounds to me anyway."  
  
The old stuff to which Zombie (real name Robert Cummings) refers to is White Zombie, the band he formed in 1985 and led through a 13-year run that included four albums, including the 1992 release, "La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1." Featuring the single "Thunder Kiss '65," the album topped 1 million copies sold and introduced Zombie to the rock mainstream.  
  
But by the end of touring behind that album, Zombie and his then-girlfriend and White Zombie co-founder, Sean Yseult, had broken up. White Zombie kept things together long enough to release one more album, "Astro Creep: 2000," in 1995, before the band called it a day in 1998.  
  
Zombie then went solo, and his 1999 album, "Hellbilly Deluxe," was a significant success, selling more than 3 million copies worldwide. He went on to release two more studio CDs, "The Sinister Urge" in 2001 and "Educated Horses" in 2006, before doing a sequel to his first solo effort, "Hellbilly Deluxe 2," which was released in 2010.  
  
His newest album is a remix CD, "Mondo Sex Head," released this past summer. It features songs from throughout his career (ranging from "Thunder Kiss '65" through a pair of tracks off of "Hellbilly Deluxe 2" - "Burn" and "Mars Needs Women") remixed and re-imagined by a host of artist/producers, including Jonathan Davis of Korn (under his DJ name JDevil), the Bloody Beetroots, Big Black Delta (aka Jonathan Bates of Mellowdrone) and Chino Moreno of the Deftones.  
  
Remix albums are nothing new to Zombie.  
  
While in White Zombie, he released his first one, "Supersexy Swingin' Sounds," in 1996, which was followed three years later by a second such CD, "American Made Music to Strip By."  
  
Considering the current exploding popularity of electronic dance music, "Mondo Sex Head" is well-timed, and press materials for the album tout Zombie as a trailblazer for the electronic genre.  
  
Zombie, though, sings a different - and more modest - tune about his influence on electronica.  
  
"I don't really feel in any way that I'm any kind of forefather of electronic in any way at all," he said. "I do think that I was very, very early, or maybe one of the earliest people to use that stuff in conjunction with like a heavy metal band situation. So having remixers remix heavy metal songs, I do think I was pretty early on in that thing. I've been doing that since the early '90s. But I don't feel a connection, l mean, sometimes I do because sometimes I'll see the concerts, some of the DJs, and I'll see that they've taken some of my old songs and they're spinning the beats off of those. So I feel a little bit of a connection, but I don't feel like I necessarily had any influence on anything."  
  
And fans who come out to see Zombie on his tour with Marilyn Manson will find that Zombie and his band (guitarist John 5, bassist Piggy D and drummer Ginger Fish) are very much in a rock mode.  
  
They'll also see a visually spectacular show complete with everything from pyro to video to a giant flame-shooting robot.  
  
"Oh yeah, it's going to be spectacular. We're going to have some things on stage that no one's ever seen," Zombie said of the show. "It's going to be from the moment the curtain drops until the house lights come on, it's going to be a non-stop visual assault. If you're epileptic, take your medicine. You're going to need it."  
  
Zombie's affinity for the visual world is well established. In fact, he spends a large amount of his time working on his other passion, writing and directing movies.  
  
He began his career as a writer/director with several low budget horror films, including the 2003 horror flick "House Of 1000 Corpses" and a sequel of sorts to that film, "The Devil's Rejects."  
  
His breakthrough on the film scene came in 2007, when he directed a re-make of John Carpenter's horror classic, "Halloween."  
  
Zombie went on to do a re-make of "Halloween 2," which of course, was the second film in the original series of "Halloween" movies.  
  
His next film, which is expected to open in theaters in early 2013, is "Lords Of Salem," a movie based on the witch trials of the late 1600s that made that Massachusetts town world famous.  
  
"I don't think of this movie necessarily as a horror movie," he said. "It's not violent and it's not bloody. It's not any of those things. It's sort of like a psychological type film. It's very bizarre.  
  
"I wanted the person watching it to really fall into the rhythm of the film," Zombie said. "And when the movie is over, it almost seems like you just had this bad dream for two hours - not that the movie doesn't make sense and it's just this surreal thing. But there's just a weird aspect to it, the same way I feel sometimes when I watch a David Lynch film or a Stanley Kubrick movie sometimes, or Roman Polanski. There's just a weird quality to it that makes you feel like you were just transported somewhere else. You're watching weird events, but they're just created in a way that seems slightly off, and that was the intention with the movie."