Musician and actor, Eric Oberto has just unveiled his new video and single release for the song, Closer Than Ever Before. The song appears in the forthcoming Hollywood theatrical film, Malibu Horror Story due out in late 2022.
‘Closer Than Ever Before’ paints the dark picture of a man running from himself and racing against his own mortality. While being stalked by “Death” himself, he encounters memories from his past and startling entities that chase him closer to that final closing door.
The music video for ‘Closer Than Ever Before’ will mark the second collaboration between Eric Oberto and Erik Gustafson of the band, Adoration Destroyed!
Both Eric and Erik co-directed the music video shoot. Eric Oberto also took on the role of Producer with the invaluable help of Video Shoot Production Manager, Micha Marie Stevens. Erik Gustafson Cinematography brilliantly handled all of the post-production and editing work. Watch the video here:
Darkwave act VVMPYRE begins a new reign in blood in 2022 with a horrific new single ‘Offering’. Inspired by vampire cults and 70’s cult horror films, ‘Offering’ is a track that personifies the leaders of these cults in an alluring anthem. VVMPYRE creates a modernized sound with a rekindled inspiration from artists like The Sisters Of Mercy and Inkubus Sukkubus.
In a search for the right voice, VVMPYRE reached out to CORLYX singer Caitlin Stokes. VVMPYRE’s twisted imagination is met with a set of lyrics as if the chant to a ceremony against the backdrop of increasingly massive and infectious melodies.
Together with VVMPYRE’s production, ‘Offering’ is a monstrous mix of classic electrogoth, 70’s horror scores, and modern darkwave to form a bloody anthem that unleashes a barrage of hooks. Brandon Ashley of DTuned Brighton Productions and The Dark adds a gripping guitar to the mix, building the track up further in the chorus and bridge, only equally met by VVMPYRE’s haunting organ melodies.
Dark alternative innovators GGGOLDDD have revealed an impactful new single from their upcoming release album This Shame Should Not Be Mine. Entitled ‘Invisible’, the track is about feeling alone and unseen after experiencing sexual assault. It’s about keeping it all to yourself. Which makes it impossible to process the trauma. This makes you feel isolated and alone – as is laid bare in the filming of the video, which features vocalist Milena Eva positioned in an isolated frame of nothing but black.
Milena elaborates: “I’ve struggled to say out loud that I was hurting. You can hear this vulnerability in the super intimate electronic parts. And you can hear the overwhelming effect of such trauma in the huge, bombastic choruses… The assault happened to me years ago and I kept it a secret out of shame and guilt. Every time I met somebody new or if I felt insecure I got really paranoid. I was so scared people could tell from my face I wasn’t doing alright. I tried to keep it all together. Faking my way through everything. Now I know that this was really toxic for my mind and body. It literally made me sick. The shame and the fear really take their toll. I think we should all take a good look at ourselves. How can we make sure that the assault doesn’t happen any more? But also how do we evolve into a world where people can live without shame?"
The band’s most ambitious and masterful work to date, This Shame Should Not Be Mine was conceived in the silence of 2020’s pandemic lockdown, partly as a way for GGGOLDDD lead singer Milena Eva to confront parts of her past and partly in response to the Roadburn Festival’s invitation to propose a commissioned piece for its 2021 online edition.
This Shame Should Not Be Mine is out on April 1st via Artoffact Records.
Postpunk-darkwave-electro trio VONAMOR presents their pulsating and enthralling new single ‘You the People’. Recalling the best dark pop of the ‘80s, this is the second taste of their impending debut VONAMOR album, an 8-track collection produced by Lucio Leoni and being released via Time To Kill Records (TTK).
The hypnotic fast-paced videoclip features dystopian imagery depicting the messed-up and borderline world in which we live. The sound weaves together stories of men, power and protest worldwide to sharp dialogue between male and female, voiced in English and Italian. Colours and pounding images mesh with archive footage of clashes between people and power, men and progress, technology and freedom, as flashes of our modern world strike your retina.
“Through our darkwave music and words, we search for the question, the ambiguity, the multiform influence of a variety of demons. We feel the urgency of questioning ourselves, our fellow human beings and the reality around us," says Giulia Bottaro.
“At first it may seem you are watching the videoclip for ‘You the People’, but the more you go on, you may feel that the video itself is watching you – and you are there, at the very intersection between we and you, between past and present, between desire and fear, between sound and colour.”
‘You The People’ underlines VONAMOR’s dialecticism and style, as well as their will to convey originality and sensuality, even when menacing, with passion and intensity. Eternally playing with words and sounds, they never lose sight of the rhythmic, Dyonisian and captivating soul of their electro dark, post-punk vision.
This single follows the lead track ‘Take Your Heart’, which has been met with international acclaim, and its intriguing video, directed and edited by Fabio Santomauro. Last year, the trio released the singles ‘Never Betray Us’ and ‘Fast-Forward Girl’.
VONAMOR is made up of sisters Giulia Bottaro, Francesca Bottaro and Luca Guidobaldi, with Francesco Bassoli and Martino Cappelli joining the trio for live performances. The band’s roots date back to 2016 in Rome. Initially focused on communicating images and composing scores for short films, they morphed into the trio we know today with their style, literary echoes, imperious art-pop and enigmatic aesthetics.
“VONAMOR is an escape plan, our treasure island, a thick and savage jungle that gives you the chance to let your prayers and whispers reverberate like a church. We used the music in this album to walk paths that we hadn’t known before, to connect Rome to Paris to Berlin to Beijing, to mix techno music with folk, to let our voices and bodies mingle and dance to an incredibly weird yet familiar beat, and finally to search for a boom of love and light into the dark of our everyday life: yes, VONAMOR is a boom!” says Luca Guidobaldi.
To accompany the release of their Tragica EP, Crimson Brûlée have unveiled a video for ‘I Came Back to You’, ‘when exploring a haunted house leads to the adventure of a lifetime…’
‘Slowburn’ is, true to the title’s promise, a slow-burner, and as a single, it’s solid – not immediate, but appreciation evolves with repeat plays. The track itself is, in many respects, very much in the darkwave tradition, with cold synths and equally cold, almost monotone vocals that also carry an ethereal quality.
There’s a mesmerising, hypnotic quality to the original song, which, we learn is ‘a song about passion; passion- a deep love/emotion that consumes body and soul. It is about depth of feeling for a person, place, process or thing.’ Against brooding piano and backed-off beat, it calls to mind Jarboe-era Swans and some of her solo work, in no small part due to Cat Hall’s powerful but understated vocal.
Cat explains the origins of the song as follows: “I wrote this as I was considering the many all-consuming passions of my life. Passion to write. Passion for art. Passion for nature, for the planet. Passion for science. Passion for humanity. Passion for the individuals I love. Also, the painful realization that despite my intense feeling, actions and orchestrations, these things, places, people, and processes come to an end. I come to an end. My passions die with me.”
Our passions drive us and keep us alive, and without passions, what have we and what is life? And what passion is there in a set of remixes?
My standard complaints around remix EPs are that they’re essentially lazy and eke out the smallest amount of material for the most physical space, and that they’re something of a short-change for fans; then there’s the fact they’re often really, really tedious, with the same track or tracks piled back to back and mostly sounding not very different apart from either being more dancy or dubby. This set is a rare success, in that the remixes are so eclectic and diverse half of them don’t sound like the same song, but without doing that whole thing of deconstructing it so hard with ambient / techno / dub versions that there’s nothing left of the original in the versions – another bugbear.
The Von Herman Lava Lamp Mix piles on the soul and sounds like Depeche Mode circa Ultra, while the Kirchner Charred Mix is a straight-ahead, thumping electrogoth dancefloor-ready banger. The Haze Void Mix cranks up the grind, with oscillating electronics more akin to Suicide than any contemporary act. This is the biggest, densest, and most transformative reworking of the lot, venturing into space rock territory as it thuds an d rattles, twisting the vocals against an urgent, throbbing sonic backdrop and throwing in some hints of Eastern mysticism for good measure. It’s an intense experience. The Hiereth Lonely to a Cinder mix brings some brooding piano and even harder hammering beats, landing it somewhere between the Floodland-era sound of The Sisters of Mercy and that quintessential Wax Trax! technoindustrial sound.
It’s a corking single, and as remix sets go, this is a good one.
If there’s ever been an emerging theme across music of all genres in the last year and a half, it’s isolation. Yes, if a global pandemic has achieved one thing, it’s brought everyone together in their feelings of isolation.
And so it is that we learn that the tracks on Graceful Isolation ‘address the feelings of isolation and coming to terms with new norms that the past year has brought. The title is derived from the fact that over the course of the album, none of the collaborators were ever in the same room.
One could counteract that in creating an album featuring numerous collaborations (notably Kimberly Kornmeier of brooding orchestral electro goth act Bow Ever Down on vocals on three songs, but also a slew of remixers), Dave McAnally has been far from alone despite being forced to work in physical isolation, yielding an album that demonstrates that distance is no object and geography is a state of mind, even if it is no substitute for proximity.
‘Poison My Skin’ makes for an atmospheric opener, with stark, minimal synths and drum machine providing a cold backdrop. ‘You’re never gonna touch me again’, Kimberly croons in a detached, robotic monotone, with subtle hints of Siouxsie, while giving voice to the thoughts that have echoed around my head that there are likely many people I have seen, heard, and been in the presence of for the last time in my life. I don’t miss the office, I don’t miss the people I used to work alongside in that artificial, uncomfortable, unnatural space, and yet… well, none of us expected that way of life to be curtailed, and certainly not in the way it was, an instant switch-off. March 2020, on being told to go home to work, I never anticipated being away more than a few weeks. And here we are… people have moved on; people have left; people are no longer with us. It’s been a long and painful couple of years.
‘All the Pieces’ and in particular ‘Impossible Dreams’ are stripped-back and sparse in their arrangements – not quite demos, but certainly skeletal, with stuttering drum machines providing the brittle spine to the songs. The lack of flesh on the bones is integral to the appeal here.
‘Drowning in the Past’ and ‘Illusions’ are tense, queasy in their taut atmosphere. McAnally resumes vocal duties, and said vocals are pegged low in the mix, compressed, accentuating the dislocation and distance. The former pegs a particularly expansive guitar solo to some nagging synths and comes on like a proggy James Ray, and it’s some good shit if you’re on the market for dark, gothy electropop.
My only niggle – surprisingly or perhaps not so much – would be that the thirteen tracks on the album consist of only five individual songs, and with three mixes of ‘All The Pieces’ slap bang in the middle, in addition to the original version, plus three versions of ‘Drowning in the Past’ it’s does get a little bit repetitive, and it may have worked better as an EP and a remix EP rather than a full-length album in its own right. Put another way, I’d play the grooves off the EP, but would probably only spin the remixes every now and again – not because they’re poor remixes, but because the original cuts hang together so well, it feels like a fully-realised document that requires no adornment.
Beneath the bright lights, and beyond the velvet ropes of Hollywood lies a different Southern California: a desolate land filled with darkness, punctuated by unrealized dreams, and broken down with anguished hearts. TIGERCIDE, formed half a decade ago in LA, gives musical form to this landscape with the ethereal, melancholic vocals of Shexist and the sparse, shadowy, and balanced beats of Saint Brendan.
The post-punk of bands like Joy Division and The Fall embodied a de-industrializing Manchester. The Bristol sound of Massive Attack and Portishead gave voice to the multicultural grittiness of their city. So too does the darkwave trip-hop of TIGERCIDE capture the ethos of Angelenos anxious about their future. In a city characterized by soaring rents, temperatures, and population, can there be any more California dreaming?
A Projection are a post-punk/darkwave act from Stockholm, who signed to Metropolis Records in 2019 for the release of their well received third album, ‘Section’. Inspired by dark post-punk/proto-goth acts such as The Cure, Sisters Of Mercy and Joy Division along with the electronica of Depeche Mode, the band are known for their compelling and dynamic live shows.
‘Darwin’s Eden’ is a brand new single by the quartet and sees them more fully embracing the electronic realm, placing themselves in the intersection between the ‘80s synth pop and the darkwave hit lists of 2021.
The opulent darkwave closing song off of VEXILLARY’s latest EP, SurViolence has now received the music video treatment it deserves. Both the song and the video explore the link between science and spirituality and how they influence one another. The dark supernatural theme is embodied by the menacing lyrics of the song :“Chimera awaits at the tip of his hands, a snap of his fingers and the beast is in your land."
The video echoes the same theme visually. It presents us with a sci-fi dream sequence that plays like techno hypnotism.
Watch the video here:
SurViolence adopts the theme of unease in an overly politicized society; using surveillance culture as a metaphor on how technology that was created to serve and protect can serve to exploit. Hence the title, SurViolence. The sub-plot of tension and lack of trust in the decisions that are being made for us fueled the eerie sounds and direction of the record.
Voyeurism has been weaponized to give rise to surveillance. Violence has been digitized to replace intelligence. This is where evolution has led us. It’s time to take back control. If only we could have our eyes back to see. Welcome to the surrealist horror of SurViolence.
Aural Aggravation 