The brainchild of US drummer/multi-instrumentalist Rona Rougeheart, SINE has released a new single entitled ‘Succumb To Me’ on Metropolis Records today. Co-produced by Rougeheart with Curse Mackey (Pigface) and mastered by Mark Pistel (Consolidated, Meat Beat Manifesto), the song mixes industrial sounds with dirty disco and rhythmic sub bass to form the perfect definition of what she refers to as her signature genre, ‘electronic boom’.
“While working on my next album, I decided to open a new session and start something fresh just for fun,” Rougeheart recalls. “As another track began to form, I was really loving the vibe, so I anchored it around two deep synth bass hits that pan right and left to give the listener a surround sound experience, especially in headphones. The lyrics seemed to write themselves as I recorded scratch vocals, just letting it flow. The lyrics are cheeky and a little sinister, with a dash of sex appeal. It’s definitely one of my favourite SINE tunes to date!”
The Los Angeles-based punk band Sour Tongue was formed in the early days of the 2020 pandemic by Satori Marill and John Murphy, the mission of the alternative rock, grunge and riot grrrl influenced quintet remaining the same ever since their inception: “when it stops being fun, we’ll end it.” Fusing disco with grunge, hardcore punk with country, plus much more, Sour Tongue utilise humour and a degree of sonic absurdity to convey a deeper message of angst and desperation.
Having developed a global fanbase via four previous singles, an EP, plus a US tour with industrial rock heavyweights KMFDM, the band’s bright and breezy new single ‘I Thought You Liked Me!’ was written about a near universal experience felt by girls. “I wrote the song about being manipulated and lied to, getting fed up and reversing the roles,” states vocalist Marill. “I wanted to talk about reactive impropriety, but with a feeling of guilt tucked beneath it, because I think a lot of people are ashamed to admit when they do something out of spite. I think anyone who has ever had their heart broken and done something stupid in return can relate to it.”
The single is taken from a forthcoming EP entitled Final Girl, their most personal set of songs to date. Told as a story in four parts, it is about the intersection of grief, betrayal and heartbreak, yet loving through it all. It’s dark, it’s angry, it’s funny, it’s heartbreaking. It’s a horror comedy.
Just as the birds of prey from which they take their name are creatures of the night, so this Irish act – essentially one guy – who draw inspiration from the darker realms of postpunk, goth, and synth-based music are very much dwellers of the dark hours, as debut album Death Games attests, with titles such as ‘Perfect Nightmare’, ‘Tombs’, and ‘Send Me to My Grave’. The album’s themes are timeless and classic, offering ‘a haunting exploration of love, mortality, and the fragile nature of existence,’ while casting nods to touchstones such as Lebanon Hanover, Boy Harsher, and Black Marble.
Lead single ‘Give Me Your Stare’ opens the album in style with a disco beat and throbbing bass giving this bleak, echo-soaked song a dancefloor-friendly groove. The vocals are backed off but ring clear through a haze of reverb, offering a hint of The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds in terms of production values.
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The compositions on Death Games are pretty direct: there’s not a lot of detail or layers, and it’s the electronic beats and pulsating basslines which not only define the sound but drive the songs. The sonorous synths which twist and grind over the top of these predominantly serve to create atmosphere more than melody, although haunting, repetitive motifs are commonplace, and the vocals, too, being low in the mix and with a fairly processed feel, are more a part of the overall sound than the focal point.
‘Skin on Skin’ brings a wibbly, ghosty synth that sounds a bit like a theremin quivering over a minimalist backing of primitive drum machine and bass synth, and the likelihood is that they’re going for early Depeche Mode, but the end result is more like a gothed-up Sleaford Mods, although, by the same token, it’s not a million miles away from She Wants Revenge around the time of their electro-poppy debut, and that’s perhaps a kinder and more reasonable comparison. ‘Fevr 2’ brings an increased sense of urgency with skittering bleeps skating around the reverberating drums: it has both an 80s movie soundtrack vibe and a vintage goth disco feel, and despite its hectic percussion and busy bass, ‘Tombs’ conjures a haunting, requiem-like atmosphere.
The ‘death’ thematic may not always be literal, and as much concerned with the death of love and the ends of relationships, but the duality the theme offers serves OWLS well. There’s no denying that it’s both a stereotype and a cliché that an obsession with death is such a goth thing, and OWLS fulfil these unashamedly – but then, why should there be shame? Why is it only goth and some strains of metal which embrace life’s sole inevitability, and explore mortality and the finite nature of existence? Even now, after millennia, we aren’t only afraid of death, but, particularly in Western cultures, we’re afraid to think or talk about it. People passing in their eighties and nineties still elicits a response that it’s a tragedy or that they should have had more time, and I’ve seen it said of people departing in their sixties or even seventies that it’s ‘no age’. We seem to have a huge blind spot, a blanketing case of denial when it comes to death, as if it shouldn’t happen, that it’s an injustice, and that no-one deserves it. But nothing is forever, be it love or life, and while loss – any loss – is painful, it comes attached to inevitability, being a matter of when, not if.
The stark and sombre ‘Send Me to My Grave’ commences a trilogy of dark, downbeat, funereal songs, which grow progressively darker, more subdued, the vocals more swallowed by evermore cavernous reverb. Even when the beats kick in and the bass booms, things warp, degenerate, and seem to palpably decay and degrade. There’s a weight to it, a claustrophobic heaviness, and the kick drum thwocks away murkily as if muffled by earth and six feet under sods. ‘This Must be the End’ is brittle, delicate, the calm that comes with the acceptance of… of what? What comes after the end? It feels like the song, and the album, leave this question hanging with an ellipsis, a suspense mark. It seems fitting, since we simply don’t know. But it does very much leave the door ajar for OWLS’ follow up, and that is something to look forward to.
Clan Of Xymox will release a new EP entitled ‘Blood of Christ’ on 6th December. The title song is also included on ‘Exodus’, the current album by the dark wave wizards released in June 2024, with the EP also including the brand new ‘You’re The One’ plus six remixes of each track for a total running time of 64 minutes.
The reaction:
EP? EP??!! Well, yes, I suppose with fourteen tracks and a running time in excess of an hour, its play is certainly extended. What kind of duration would qualify for a long player, I wonder? On vinyl, this would be a double album at 33rpm. Available as a download only, Blood of Christretails at the same price as the album which spawned it, Exodus, released in the summer.
Carping and pedantry aside, this is an ambitious project for a single, with the album track accompanied by a non-album B-side – something which is always welcome – and, as advertised, six remixes of each. Does anyone really need six remixes of any song, even the most diehard fan? It’s debatable, although not a debate I’m about to open to the floor.
I suppose electronic music does lend itself more readily to remix treatment than more rock-orientated stuff. The 80s and early 90s witnessed the rise of the remix via the extended 12” mix and then over time, we began to see 12” and CDs with different remixes, which were all about milking fans in order to boost sales and chart positions
As a choice of single, ‘The Blood of Christ’ is a strong one: pumping beat and pulsating bass underpin a solid tune with stacks of atmosphere and a huge, theatrical chorus, straddling the boundaries of both classic and contemporary goth. ‘You’re the One’ is a bit popper, but still driven by those all-essential dark undercurrents.
And so, onto the remixes: the album’s remaining twelve tracks alternate between the two songs, the obvious benefit being that you don’t get back-to-back takes of the same track for half an hour. However, by presenting the same two tracks alternately, it’s a little like the old days of flipping a 7” over and over, only hearing differences and new details with each play, and over the course of an hour and a bit it becomes quite mind-addling, and with both tracks employing similar stabby, undulating synths and tempos, the sameness starts to dull the senses after a while.
Too much of a good thing? Perhaps. And perhaps there’s a time commitment involved in distinguishing between the different versions and finding your favourites, preserved for the serious fan. Individually, the tracks are great, although I’m not convinced any of the remixes really improve on the originals, but presented together in such quantity, it feels like overkill.
When it comes to spaced-out, trippy conceptual stuff, I can’t help but wonder if large quantities of drugs are involved, or of the creators are just a bit crackers. Their debut album Attention Earth! Featured a song called ‘Mushroom One’, which makes mee think drugs – or perhaps just the image they want to portray. The members of HENGE, Mancunian purveyors of self-styled ‘cosmic dross’ go by the names of Zpor, Goo, Grok and Nom, and Zpor, their ‘front-being’, explains of the new album: “Alpha Test 4 is our third Planet Earth LP release. With each record we have sought to fine tune our extraterrestrial sounds for human ears, optimising these alien frequencies in order to more effectively access the pleasure sensors in the Sapien brain…We believe that the wisest lifeforms are always open to new learning, and we have been conducting our own studies on the human beings that we’ve encountered on Earth so far. We have discovered that exposure to this alien music can have a profound effect on the human nervous system, and have recorded an average increase of 72% in the happiness levels of human specimens attending our experiments”.
If you’re going to do performance, you need to commit to it completely: there can be no half-measures, no stepping out of character off stage, and HENGE clearly live and breathe being HENGE, and one would like to think they’re entirely aware of the absurdity of it all, but happy with the trade of preserving the identities they enjoy at home and in their dayjobs or whatever. I’m going to at least hope that Zpor doesn’t insist that his wife and kids and colleagues address him as such.
Alpha Test 4 is noodly, doodly, silly fun that harks back to the 70s with its cheesy, wibbly synths and tinfoil futurism that was retro even at the time. It’s not so much prog in its primary inspirations, so much as ‘Where’s Captain Kirk?’
‘DNA’ brings stupid funk and daft robotix vocals and it’s probably fun if you’re into it, but mostly it’s annoying: their space-age daft Punk shtick just feels obvious, derivative, passé. And yes, everything is just recycling now: that was postmodernism, where we accepted that originality was dead and celebrated that the future was built on assimilations and permutations of the past. Progress lay in the innovations of new hybrids and how genres were intermingled, and we reached a point, I’m not quite sure when, where it all came down to the execution. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it… and HENGE do it, and with wild abandon and great enthusiasm.
But great energy does not make for a great record on its own. Alpha Test 4 is bursting with energy and brimming with bubby synths: ‘Ra’ is exemplary, an explosion of Lucozade and Red Bull-fuelled 8-bit twitchy pop that crosses XTC with D‘n’B, and spins in a dash of Eastern promise alongside a swirl of experimentation. The worst excesses of YES are tossed into the mix along with Jean Michele Jarre and Yello. It has its moments, but most of those moments are indulgent and rather corny. But HENGE likely know this and don’t care, because unless they are from another planet and spent their time hovering in space, they’re aware and self-aware, and grasp the absurdity of what they do with both hands before jettisoning the junk, and no doubts regardless of my views – and likely because of them since the chances are everything I dislike is everything fans love – Alpha Test4 will go stratospheric.
Now in their twenty-seventh year, Girls Under Glass return after an extended break – of some seventeen years – with a new album that wasn’t wholly planned. As the bio notes, explain, when they started composing some new tracks for an EP to round off a planned boxset of their complete works, ‘The fire reignited and songs kept coming… [they] understood that their batteries had recharged to bursting point after a 17-year break and the projected EP turned into a full-length.
The trouble with being forerunners and progenitors is that time catches up. What was innovative at one time becomes assimilated, absorbed: ‘influential’ becomes commonplace, however much you keep moving. And while Backdraft shows that Girls Under Glass have progressed, it also shows how external elements have, too – even within the spheres of post-punk and goth, which on the face of things, haven’t evolved all that much. Emerging bands are still emulating The Cure and The Sisters of mercy circa 1985, and oftentimes if feels as if these are genres locked in time – but then, the same is also true of punk, and contemporary grunge acts.
At least Girls Under Glass can lay justified claim to being there at the time and laying the foundation stones for the sound that endures over thirty years on, and they’re fully accepting that this new outing draws on the sound and sensations of their previously active years in the 80s and 90s. ‘Night Kiss’ brings all the synth-goth vibes where early New Order and third-wave goth acts like Suspiria meet, but there’s much to chew on across the ten songs on Backdraft. ‘Tainted’ – which features Mortiis on guest vocals – has a more industrial feel – but that’s industrial in the way that Rosetta Stone drew on Nine Inch Nails for Tyranny of Inaction than Ministry. It’s got grit and magnetic bubbling synths and some hard grooves, but the aggression is fairly restrained.
Single cut ‘We Feel Alright’ has a vintage vibe and sits in the bracket of ‘uplifting goth’ – it may not bee recognised as a thing, but it sure is, and propelled by a pumping disco beat, it’s one of those songs that brims with an energy that makes you want to raise your arms and your face to the sky as you’re carried away on the driving rhythm and expansive synths and guitars.
The six-minute ‘No Hope No Fear’ blissfully ventures into Disintegration-era Cure stylings, with a bold, cinematic approach, while ‘Everything Will Die’ is a quintessential slab of Numanesque electrogoth It’s uptempo, even poppy, but it’s dark, and if the Hi-NRG pumping of ‘Endless Nights’ is a shade cliché, but they redeem the dip with the sparse six-minute ‘Heart on Fire’ with its sepulchral synths, before erupting into an epic climax that’s like a shoegaze / synthwave take of Fields of the Nephilim.
Ultimately, Backdraft is a solid album: its roots are deeply retro, and it’s not one hundred percent hit, but it’s a solid addition to the catalogue of a band whose longevity speaks for itself.
It might sound daft now, but seeing Depeche Mode perform ‘Stripped’ on Top of the Pops in 1986 felt like something risqué. It was a family show, after all, and I was ten years old. It wasn’t your average pop subject matter, and even at that age, I was aware that this was a bit dark and sleazy. It’s not just that I’m now forty-seven years of age, but times have most definitely changed. It isn’t that sex is necessarily more mainstream now – as a kid I’d see my grandad’s copy of The Sun whenever I visited, and Page 3 calendars were commonplace décor in offices and places – but the slant is different. Whereas Duran Duran’s ‘Girls on Film’ video was simply something you wouldn’t see, but Cardi B’s ‘WAP’ wasn’t the only song to have gone stratospheric in recent years which was hyper-explicit on every level.
‘Strip Me’, the lead song from the latest EP from Johnathan|Christian harks back to the mid 80s, both sonically and in terms of how it feels simply ‘a bit naughty’ and ‘a shade raunchy’ rather than full on porny – and besides, it’s more of a metaphor here than anything literal or kinky. It’s a cracking tune, a mid-tempo string-soaked slow-burner that’s as much Kylie’s ‘Confide in Me’ as it is anything by Depeche Mode, and it’s a quality dark pop song.
‘Sway Back’ brings some swing, and ‘This Too’ crunches Disintegration era Cure with Depeche Mode circa 86 to create a slick and expansive song that conveys an emotional depth beyond mere words.
Strip Me is an EP of two halves, with a remix of each of the three tracks following on. And if you’re going to do the remix thing, it probably pays to get some notable names on the mixes – and Johnathan|Christian achieve that with Ministry’s John Bechdel, EBM legend Leæther Strip, and Steven Archer (Stone Burner/Ego Likeness) all pitching in.
Of the three, ‘Strip Me’ still stands as the standout, but the other two are nicely done, with Leæther Strip delivering a dark disco stomper. Solid stuff all round.
What does worldwide quarantine do to our favourite porcine libertine? Raymond Watts holed up in his sty and created The Merciless Light, the new album by PIG. Ably aided and abetted by long time accomplices En Esch and Steve White, Watts also welcomes a new swine to the trough as Jim Davies (Pitchshifter/The Prodigy) adds another new level of impeccable (in)credibility and talent.
The Merciless Light seethes, swings, seduces and snarls. Extraordinary electronics and a glut of glitz, glam, guitars and grooves create a masterful mélange of mirth, malice and winking wit from our very own venerable Vicar of Vice.
A stellar sample comes in the form of the snazzy ‘The Dark Room’, which clocks in at exactly three minutes and delivers a massive knockout punch with mercifully no paunch. A video for the song directed by LA based Ibex is available now. Watch it here:
Four further tasty morsels from the album can be consumed in the form of video snippets, while album opener ’No Yes More Less’ has also been released as a single ahead of the main course being served on 23rd September.
Back in November of last year, I gave ‘What If I Were the Boy?’ by The Vaulted Skies a massive double-thumbs up, having previously raved about their debut EP, No Fate back in 2018. And now ‘What If I Were the Boy?’ has been rereleased, this time as a remix courtesy of Mark Saunders, whose eye-poppingly extensive discography includes work with The Cure, Lloyd Cole, Depeche Mode, Siouxsie and the Banshees… and many others, including some truly huge names like David Bowie, but those I’ve picked out are relevant is they’re illustrative of his longstanding links with post-punk, of which The Vaulted Skies are emerging contemporary exponents. But Saunders also has a long history of wording on radio-friendly and more dance-orientated material, and it’s fair to say that his remix of ‘What If I Were the Boy?’ brings these two threads together very neatly.
The song itself draws on contrasts in its take on a ‘nostalgic tale that is filled with reflection and regret’, inspired by an encounter experienced by vocalist/guitarist, James Scott., who recounts how “In college, I was paired up in an acting assignment with one of the popular girls. She propositioned me and in doing so, verbally and indirectly alluded to a very troubled home life. I wish I’d recognized the cry for help underneath it all. This song captures the desperation I have felt when wondering what became of her.”
Saunders sensitively preserves the stark, haunted angst of the original, but subtly packs some extra oomph and wraps it in a dark disco groove. The chunky gothy bass of the original is smoothed into a more dancefloor-friendly sound, the drumming – the cymbals in particular – is slickened down and given a more buoyant disco twist. If the original sounded in some way tentative, despite its solid assurance, then the remix rolls it all out and effortlessly stretches it past the seven-minute mark in vintage 12” single style.
If the grit and flange of the driving guitar in the chorus is backed off a bit in favour of a more even sound, well, it works, as does the cleaner vocal treatment. In short, this version may lack the ragged punch of the original, but it by no means does The Vaulted Skies a disservice, and will likely be a major step toward connecting the band with the larger audience they so richly deserve.
As a slice of buoyant yet dreamy electropop, it’s hard to fault ‘Dream Curve’, the new single by self-professed ‘witchy goth rock band’ Metamorph. Well, ok, lyrically it may not be quite Leonard Cohen or Richard Butler (both completely piss on the popularly esteemed Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison), but then ultimately, the purpose of pop music isn’t primarily to distil every word into a moment of poetical genius. No, the purpose of pop is to entertain, and, where possible, to stick in your head, and here, Metamorph achieve.
‘Dream Curve’ blurs fragments of image and reflection amidst a swirl of synths pitched against an insistent bear and pulsing sequenced synth bass. It’s pure Europop: it’s fundamentally simple, but it’s effective.
Aural Aggravation 