Sydney songwriter and author Lo Carmen has been busy of late, on the promo trail for her excellent book Lovers Dreamers Fighters and a run of live shows with her band The Great Beyond. Now the recorded fruits of their labour has arrived with the new single ‘Half Girl Half Beast‘ which slithers from the swamp in a sultry and ghostly crawl – a long overdue followup to 2015’s wonderful album Everyone You Ever Knew (Is Coming Back To Haunt You).

Part CCR, part Gun Club and Screaming Jay Hawkins, there’s a snaking blues mist running through the psych garage song with its ominous backbeat and some superb exotica Hammond organ courtesy of the legendary Peter Head. Draped in reverb, the song dials perfectly into a kind of Halloween noir, with Carmen seeking to balance the internal forces of good and evil, prim and primal.