The evolving revolving entity Beauty In Chaos present their latest sonic offering – ‘God’s Gonna Cut You Down / Get Down Moses’, released via 33.3 Music Collective and produced by Grammy-nominated producer Michael Rozon (Ministry, Jarboe, Wayne Hussey, The Melvins).
Beauty In Chaos has come a long way since launching in 2018 by Los Angeles-based guitarist Michael Ciravolo (formerly of Human Drama and Gene Loves Jezebel and current President of Schecter Guitars) but his musical road often finds him circling back to visit his roots, celebrating them with new renditions.
The new two-song digital EP single features an enveloping, smokey rendition of the traditional gospel hymn ‘God’s Gonna Cut You Down’, popularized by The Man in Black himself – Mr. Johnny Cash (who also happens to be a distant cousin to BIC’s own Tish Ciravolo), along with the B-side showcasing Beauty In Chaos’ own take on Joe Strummer’s ‘Get Down Moses’.
In addition to very familiar territory (guitars and textures), BIC curator Michael Ciravolo contributes vocals on both tracks, joined by Michael Rozon (lap steel guitar, snare drum, voices), as well as Tish Ciravolo, Whitney Tai, Set Miller, Anthony Love and Tim Perry (background vocals and foot stomps).
“While both of these songs have certainly been covered before, I think we have injected BIC into them … even if we have stretched, what some have come to expect from us sonically,” says Michael Ciravolo.
While eponymous debuts are commonplace, apart from artists who name all of their albums eponymously, it also seems to be a thing for long-established bands to release a self-titled album well into their career, and, to my mind, it seems somewhat strange. Nevertheless, Killing Joke have in fact done both, and Interpol have also managed two eponymous albums (if you count album number five, the anagrammatic El Pintor). Have you run out of ideas or something?
The Awakening has been a thing for a good quarter century now, during which time Ashton Nyte has also released a number of solo albums, a brace of books, and been a constant feature in the lineup of industrial / goth collective Beauty in Chaos. He’s a busy man.
The twelve tracks on The Awakening represent something of a revisiting of the classic goth template, and in this context, the title makes perfect sense. It’s a return to the beginning, treading the ground where it all began, and feeling that spark once again: an awakening, indeed.
‘Shimmer’ creates the atmosphere with dolorous bell chimes and slow, deliberate, ceremonial percussion, before single cut ‘Mirror Midnight’ thumps in with a sturdy bass groove melded tight to a relentless, solid drum machine beat. Laced with delicate traces of brittle, chorus-laden guitar, it provides the backdrop to a crooning baritone vocal delivery. Lyrically, it’s rich in esoteric imagery and it’s classic goth – mid-80s in style, md-90s in production. And this is essentially The Awakening: it’s dark, brooding, espousing the doomed romanticism that was central to The Sister of Mercy’s genre-defining debut album, First and Last and Always.
‘Through the Veil’ goes epic, and if its arena aspirations seem somewhat removed from the claustrophobic confines of the first phase of goth, it likely owes something of a debt to Floodland, while the acoustic-led ‘Your Vampire’ evokes The Mission circa Children (I’m thinking ‘Heaven on Earth’, but perhaps a little less bombastic), although ‘Island in a Stream’ is an equally valid reference point.
‘Haunting’ – also a single – and an obvious choice, it has to be said, is a burly burst of muscle-flexing guitar propelled – again – by a throbbing bass and pumping drum beat, draped with cool Cure-esque synths, culminating in a climactic rush of a finale. ‘See You Fall’ stands out as another quintessential goth banger: the instrumentation again is reminiscent of early Mission songs, and the drumming, with its dominant snare is absolutely cut from the same cloth as The First Chapter, although Nyte’s vocal reminds me – quite happily – of Andrew Eldritch demoing vocals on ‘Garden of Delight’.
Things take a turn for the heavy – and the political – on ‘Fallout’. It’s a reminder that the music of the 80s emerged from a time of terror, a political lurch to the right, and living under the shadow of the bomb. And here we are again. We can never escape history: it simply repeats. And so, it stands to reason that music is also cyclical.
‘Not Here’ hints at Bauhaus, while the thunderous ‘Cabaret’ – which seems to take certain cues from ‘Dead Pop Stars’ by Altered Images and The Psychedelic Furs’ ‘Soap Commercial’ in terms of its spindly lead guitar line – is a modern goth classic.
The Awakening mines a seam of trad goth which straddles the first wave and the 90s revival, or second wave – which is precisely the starting point of The Awakening. This album feels rather like time travel, in the best possible sense, and, in context, it’s less a case of homage as revisitation and renewal.
Gothic Rock / Darkwave act THE AWAKENING presents ‘Haunting’, the latest taster of their eponymous album, out now on vinyl, CD, digitally and various limited-edition formats via Intervention Arts. With a music video in classic black-and-white format, ‘Haunting’ follows ‘Mirror Midnight’, which has amassed over 1.1 million views, establishing The Awakening’s return to its dark roots.
Now US-based, The Awakening was formed in Johannesburg, South Africa in the late ’90s as the creative expression of vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter ASHTON NYTE, anointed as ‘Johannesburg’s Bowie’ for his widely varying musical styles and theatrical performances. He calls this single “a celebration of old-school Gothic Rock, with a suitable dose of Post-Punk swagger and a wink at the camera. It’s probably the most whimsical song on the album. I wanted the video to capture some campy Horror B-Movie goodness, and I am very happy with the result”.
It doesn’t seem like five minutes since Beauty in Chaos emerged with their debut album, and here, in the blink of an eye, we are looking at a twenty-nine track ‘reimagined’ version of the fourth album from this ever-expanding collective, curated by Michael Ciravolo (formerly of Human Drama and Gene Loves Jezebel. I’m not even going to start on the roll-call of personnel who have featured on these releases: I’d still be going by the time I’d finished listening to all twenty-nine tracks.
It’s certainly quite an expansion on the original eight songs which made up Dancing with Angels, which notably featured Wayne Hussey and Ashton Nyte among its guest vocalists. There is, as one might anticipate, an abundance of remixes – no fewer than five versions of ‘Holy Ground’, for example, and four of ‘Hollow’. Some are better than others, some are pretty radical, others less so, with the standard examples of slapping a big beat and some effects tossed into the mix with variable results, but Combichrist and Bellwether Syndicate are noteworthy for their contributions.
The ’almost acoustic version’ of ‘Made of Rain’ stands out not only by virtue of not being a remix, but also being a really good take on the song. But the selling point here are the songs which didn’t appear on the original album, which appear right at the very end of the monumental track-listing.
Their take on T-Rex’s ‘Children of the Revolution’ harks back to the early 90s when Al Jurgensen was arguably at his peak and dropping leftfield covers of ‘Lay Lady Lay’ and ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’, accompanied as it is by a video which finds the band performing behind a mesh fence, as Ministry did while touring Psalm 69 (as much for their safety as for effect). It also calls to mind the club scene in The Hunger where Bauhaus play ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, and I don’t doubt that this is also intentional: Bauhaus – and Bowie – can both be heard waving influence through Beauty in Chaos’ songs. “The revolution will be televised”, Al announces through a loudhailer, and well, if you’ve seen any news in the last fortnight, you’ll know this to be a fact. However, the issue isn’t that anyone’s being fooled here, but that no-one seems willing or able to stop it: just as the world watched on as Israel perpetuated genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza, so it gawps, motionless, as Trump and Musk undertake a coup, and not just making a grab for absolute control over the United States, but world domination. It’s absolutely fucking terrifying – unlike this recording. It’s a solid enough cover, but perhaps lacks the bite and heft it deserves, being more straight-up than cranked-up.
‘Open Your Eyes’, originally by Lords of the New Church, also feels apposite – indeed, lyrically, it’s never been more relevant, and while this cover, again, is almost entirely faithful to the original and is accompanied by a video clearly shot during the same session as ‘Children of the Revolution’, it hits home to wrap up the album in fine style.
Beauty In Chaos, the evolving revolving worldwide aural entity, presents the closing track on their Dancing With Angels album – their fourth record to date, recently released via 33.3 Music Collective.
Introduced by a vibrant video, filmed and directed by Fernando Cordero / Industrialism Films, ‘Made of Rain’ features the brooding baritone of Ashton Nyte of legacy goth rock outfit The Awakening, who will also release their twelfth album in mid-October.
“It is no coincidence that we chose a release date of September 10th, as it is six years to the day that we introduced Beauty In Chaos to the world with ‘Storm’, which also featured Ashton. It is a true blessing to have Ashton back for our fifth song together. As we have come to expect from BIC, this new video is visually and conceptionally very different from the latest BIC single ‘Holy Ground’,” says Michael Ciravolo.
Ashton Nyte adds, “I am delighted with how the ‘Made Of Rain’ video came out. I think Industrialism Films have captured the sense of isolation and the desire for connection I was writing about. The dreamlike quality of the video reflects the inner struggle beautifully.”
Beauty In Chaos formed in 2018 by guitarist Michael Ciravolo (formerly of Human Drama and Gene Loves Jezebel and current President of Schecter Guitars) with Grammy-nominated producer Michael Rozon (Ministry, Jarboe, Wayne Hussey, The Melvins).
Since their inception and debut album Finding Beauty in Chaos in 2018, the project helmed by Human Drama and Gene Loves Jezebel guitarist Michael Ciravolo has presented a staggering array of collaborators and contributors. Not so much a band as an open music collective, they return with Dancing With Angels, which promises appearances by ‘luminaries from The Mission, The Bellwether Syndicate, Holy Wars, Kommunity FK, The Awakening & Strangelove.’ Indeed, Wayne Hussey has been a regular contributor, and he, and wife, Cynthia return this time around to appear on the dreamy, Cure-esque single cut ‘Diving for Pearls’, with chiming guitars and bulbous bass sound reminiscent of ‘Pictures of You’.
Each of the album’s eight atmospheric gothy post-punk hued songs features a different vocalist or vocalists, with duties shared by William Faith and Sarah Rose Faith of The Bellwether Syndicate on opener ‘Present Tense’, a cut that harks back to the sound of the alternative scene circa 1986, when The Mission were taking their first steps and Gene Loves Jezebel were at their commercial peak. Given Ciravolo’s other work, this isn’t entirely surprising – but what is welcome, and impressive, is the extent to which the sonic blueprint is expanded to incorporate a broad range of styles, stretching out to the shimmery shoegaze dream pop of ‘The Devil You Know’ at one end of the spectrum, and the brooding anthem that is ‘Echoes and the Angels’ via the crackling guitar-driven indie of ‘Kiss Me (Goodbye)’.
With its rippling piano and swooning vocals, courtesy of Cynthia Isabella of Lost Gems (and formerly of Silence in the Snow’, ‘Hollow’ is delicate and emotive, while ‘Holy Ground’ brings soaring lead guitars to a solid rockin’ tune. It may be because it’s sandwiched between ‘Hollow’ and the slow-burning closer, ‘Made of Rain’ (featuring Ashton Nyte making a fifth appearance with Beauty in Chaos), but it feels like the weakest of the songs here.
Whether or not Ciravolo wrote the songs with the singers in mind, or if they evolved around them once they were on board, the fact each guest brought their own lyrics means they feel like they’re in their natural environment, and each songs sounds like it belongs to them. The end result has something of a mixtape feel to it, while retaining that essential coherence.
Nevermore has the project’s moniker felt more apposite: conjured from a whirlwind, an effervescent creative froth of a diverse range of creative minds, Dancing With Angels stands as testament to the power of collaboration.
Beauty in Chaos’ ever-shifting lineup sees more evolution for the fourth single of their latest album, Out of Chaos Comes… a set of remixes with even more guest artists contributing. Originally featured on The Storm Before the Calm in summer of 2020, the track, composed by Michael Ciravolo – who’s credited not as the core member but the curator of the Beauty in Chaos project – with The Mission’s Wayne Hussey.
The story goes that ‘Along with BIC producer Michael Rozon, Ciravolo set out to strip down the ominous tone of the original especially for this remix release. After hearing Wayne’s wife Cinthya’s rendition of The Smith’s ‘Everyday Is Like Sunday’, the idea emerged for her to sing this new version along with Wayne’. This is actually one of three versions of the song which feature on the album, and it very much does date the dark, brooding vibe out and replace it with something altogether more smoky and sultry.
And so we have six minutes of sedate – and sedated – seduction, stripped back and slowly blossoming into a melodic chorus. The accompanying video highlights the low-level lighting mod it evokes, and finds Mr and Mrs Hussey showing off some quality rugs as well as some nicely contrasting outfits.
Quippy comments aside, this is a subtle explorations of contrasts which also tips a nod to the lyrics, and very much highlights the light and dark and shadowy hues evoked by the song. Rendered as more of a pop ballad by the remixing, the chaos is very much calmed to emphasise the beauty, and it works well.
Aural Aggravation 