Posts Tagged ‘goth’

Black Angel – Lascivious

Posted: 15 October 2023 in Albums
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6th October 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Lascivious is Black Angel’s fifth album, which promises the band’s ‘hybrid Gothic Rock sound and taking flavors from their 80’s predecessors while adding new tones… retaining the essential gothic elements that drive his inspiration as originally provided by the likes of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, The Cult & Sisters of Mercy.’

Certainly, Lascivious is steeped in the stylistic tropes of the 80s, not least of all the thick four-four bass grooves and smashing snare drum which both dominates and defines the sound. But the first thing that strikes me, as a longstanding fan of that golden era in the 80s (I was too young for the start of it all but when The Sisters and The Mission started breaking the Top 40 singles charts between 86 and 88, it was a revelation which set me on a lifelong journey) is that the ‘new tones’ very much involve contemporary production. That is to say, it’s just that much cleaner and fuller, more polished than the true ‘vintage’ sound.

Ah, but they know the features of yesteryear. It’s been a while since I’ve heard a fadeout, but that’s just what happens on the album’s first track, ‘Killer’ – and it’s not the last time on the album they employ it either.

The drum intro on ‘Black Velvet Amphetamine’ is an on-point lift of the snare sound of the Sisters’ cover of ‘Gimme Shelter’, and many of the sounds can be pinpointed as having a certain root or origin. In fact, five seconds into the title track, it’s clear that the drums are lifted from ‘Heartland’, although it also leans on the Sisters’ cover of ‘Emma’ by Hot Chocolate, and it’s clear they’ve been raiding the early Sisters back catalogue – and fair play. The Sisters achieved some incredible sounds with minimal means, with ‘Temple of Love’ marking their first step up from an eight-track ‘studio’ in the run-down northern seaside town of Bridlington.

But if the drums and guitar work make big nods to The Sisters, Corey Landis’ croon is closer to that of Wayne Hussey than the cavernous baritone of Andrew Eldritch. One of the divisions between fan-camps when Hussey and Adams went and formed The Mission – and a source of tension when Hussey began offering songs with lyrics. I write as a fan of the Mission when I say that while they work in the songs, Hussey’s lyrics are more cliché patchworks than literary masterpieces (Eldritch played with and perverted cliché and did so poetically), and one problem with bands who followed in the wake (excuse the pun) of both The Sisters and The Mission is that they’ve had a tendency to ape the lyrical substance without really adding anything creatively unique

‘She’s My Suicide’ slips into more generic rock with a gothy edge, and makes me think of the bands who emerged following the cult but had more of a hair rock leaning, reminding me why despite all my teen goth credentials, I was pretty picky but then, right at the end, they pull out a really gritty, spindly guitar break that’s magnificent, reminding me of The March Violets. And this is a fair summary of the album as a whole: some really good bits, some solid songs, but some rather weak and generic aspects which hold it back in the bracket of ‘decent’ rather than ‘awesome’.

‘Bite It’ bristles with spiky guitars and a low-slung groove, and is perhaps the first song that seems to really fit with the sleaze implied by the album’s title, and ‘Want’ also achieves this, but suffers from trying too hard to be ‘More’. It’s a fair stab at bombast, but it’s hard to compete with the Sisters, especially when they’ve got Jim Steinman on hand, plus a whole host of backing singers and a monster budget for state of the art studio time. I’m sorry I’m not more undemanding. Halfway through ‘Dirty Little Secret’, I realise its chords are based on Motörhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’, and afford myself a small chuckle.

The slower, ‘Ticking of the Clock’ is driven by a crunchy, flangy bass that’s pure early Cure, and is one of the album’s real standouts, by daring to deviate from any obvious formula, and in fairness, the title track is low-slung, sleazy, and grinds out a dark seduction with style.

Sonically, Lascivious is more than solid, and Black Angel clearly know what their doing: there’s no question they have their sound and style absolutely nailed – and consequently, with this set of solid songs, the album will go down well with existing fans and a huge chunk of the goth crowd, and deservedly so.

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False Fed – Let Them Eat Fake

Posted: 11 October 2023 in Albums
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Neurot Recordings – 13 October 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Let Them Eat Fake may be False Fed’s debut, but the members have between them a substantial catalogue of releases. The band comprises Discharge frontman Jeff Janiak, Amebix guitarist Stig C. Miller, Nausea, Ministry and Amebix drummer Roy Mayorga, and JP Parsons, and collectively, we’re told that this album sees them ‘all stepping outside their musical comfort zones to present an album of discomfort and rage in the face of reality’.

The solid, throbbing bass, glacial synth and squirming guitar that mark the album’s opening with ‘Superficial’ may come as something of a surprise given this preface: we’re deep in dark post-punk territory here, and it’s a huge shift from the hard, attacking pace of either Discharge or Ministry, as well as an immense stylistic departure. Janiak’s vocals, too, aren’t hardcore hollering, but a resonant baritone, at least unto he breaks our roaring and raging toward the end. The vibe is more UK goth circa ’86 than anything else, but this is fitting, given the many parallels between now and then. Yes, so much for progress: we’re right back to the 80s in a climate of fear and a new cold war… and not just a cold war. Instead of coming together to make some kind of effort to address the self-made catastrophe of climate crisis, we seem hell-bent on destroying one another.

‘The Tyrant Dies’ is more what you’d expect from this bunch: industrial-strength hardcore punk with a metal edge: the blasting punk fury of Discharge with the gritty heft of Ministry… but then the bridge slows things and we’re back in goth territory – well, goth as filtered through a strain of Rammstein – and the portentous refrain of ‘we will rise’ feels like a call to arms while at the same time calling on the ‘undead, undead, undead’ refrain of ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’: it’s time for a resurrection.

This album hits harder as it progresses: the guitars drive harder, the drums roll heavier, and goth, punk, and metal tropes melt together to forge something devastatingly intense. I haven’t heard anything that amalgamates these elements – and so successfully – since Alaric’s End of Mirrors, released in 2016 – also on Neurot.

‘The Big Sleep’ is all driving fury, hell-for-leather drums, chunky, chugging metal guitars, and high-pomp vocals echoing from the chest. Meanwhile, ‘Dreadful Necessities’ comes on like Killing Joke with its taut compressed guitar sound and driving beat. It’s dense, and probably more accurately described as steely grey than dark, since it brings a strong, melodic chorus.

The title – Let Them Eat Fake – may be light-hearted on the surface – but obviously has darker undertones in terms of its reference to class division, and that’s one of the major factors behind the album’s anger. And this is an angry album. Let Them Eat Fake is also an album that has a clear trajectory, and it builds as it progresses, becoming louder, faster, harsher, more angry with each song. By the end, it’s positively incendiary, a full-on roar of fury driven with guitars that burn. And ultimately, it makes sense as an articulation of ‘discomfort and rage in the face of reality’. We’re all feeling it. Reality is pain. Let Them Eat Fake tells is like it is.

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Listen: ‘Panic’ by The Neuro Farm

Posted: 9 October 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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‘Panic’ is the new single from DC goth rockers The Neuro Farm. The song is inspired by a childhood episode of fevered delirium, and it will be featured on their next album planned for 2024.

The Neuro Farm is a darkwave gothic rock band based in Washington DC. Combining vocal harmony with soaring violin melodies, driving rhythm guitar, and ethereal sonic textures, their music has been described as hauntingly beautiful. The Neuro Farm draws on influences such as Joy Division, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sigur Ros, Chelsea Wolfe, Portishead, and Rammstein.

Listen here:

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Watch: ‘Surrender to my Will (The Enchantment)’ by NFD

Posted: 24 September 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Ahead of the re-release of the epic TRINITY E.P. this October NFD are proud to present stunning new video for a special edit of Surrender To My Will (No Mercy), The Enchanted version. Featuring American alternative DJ & Model, Ashely Bad in the role of the Witch and the NFD frontman in the role of the Demon the video is more of a movie short than a music video with strong atmospheric Gothic visuals tell the tale of a venture to Hell and back.

Watch the video here…

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Listen: ‘Purgatory’ by State of the Union

Posted: 15 August 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Electro-Industrial band, State Of The Union has unveiled their latest single release, ‘Purgatory’.

‘Purgatory’ is a song that explores the topic of suicide. As human beings, we go through the ‘ups’ and ‘downs’. Some of us have a harder time than others dealing with these emotions. Some of us can even get to the brink of suicide because we want to make it end as fast as we can.

In esoteric belief, a person who commits suicide disrupts their karmic flow and goes to a timeless place where one second could feel like a million years! This is very hard to comprehend within our own minds. To experience something like that, we have to have an out-of-body experience and travel to a very low-frequency dimension known as purgatory.

In some religions, purgatory is known as the place where spirits go to pay for their sins and burn karma before they move on to their next life experience. All in all, we will never know unless we go there. That’s why it is better to keep making powerful electronic music that makes club-goers dance their nights away to songs like ‘Purgatory.’

Listen here:

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Watch: ‘Illuminate’ by Our Frankenstein

Posted: 22 July 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Industrial metal band Our Frankenstein has just unleashed their new video for the single, ‘Illuminate’.

‘Illuminate’ is a song about finding the light that can exist in a barren and hopeless wasteland while building a better future for yourself. It’s about forging forward and discovering the strength in yourself to move on past a difficult time in your life.

‘Illuminate’ is available on all major streaming platforms including Bandcamp.

Watch the video here:

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Abrasive Trees – Nothing Exists for a Second Moment

Posted: 18 July 2023 in Albums
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16th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

After a lengthy and sustained spell of creativity, dark Devonshire band Abrasive Trees are taking stock, reflecting and consolidating on their achievements to date, something which also affords newcomers an opportunity to catch up, March saw the release of Epocha, a compilation album which gathered their singles and EPs from 2019-2021, and now, housed in a sleeve which continues the thread of the design of its predecessor, they offer up a live album, which captures the band performing at hatch Barn, a venue close to their base in Totnes.

Live albums are notoriously tricky. So many live acts have an energy live that simply doesn’t translate when recorded. Then, at the opposite end of the spectrum, I recall meeting a metalhead in my first few weeks of university who was gushing in his enthusiasm for Iron Maiden “T’ Maiden” as he referred to them as being an amazing live as because “it sounds just like ont’ album”. This stuck with me, because I wasn’t accustomed to such thick Northern accents back then, and also because the idea of a live show so slick it sounded like the CD was a cause for consternation. Some people may think it’s a good thing, of course, but for me – even at the age of nineteen – it seemed to be missing the point of playing live. Especially when it’s a big band, who you’re likely to be watching on screens instead of looking at the stage. Might as well be watching a video at home for that.

Then there’s the recording itself: too much audience and it sounds like a shitty bootleg that’s as much that gobby tosser and his mate yammering away over the band; too hermetic and soundesky and it sounds dead and like there was no-one there, and all the vitality of the live experience is lost. This six-track release, once again mastered by Mark Beazely of Rothko, is magnificently realised: the sound is superbly crisp and clear – it’s obviously taken from the sound desk – but there’s a hum and a sense of space and audience, and it isn’t so clinical as to sound like another studio recording.

There’s irony in the title here: the live experience exists only in the moment, but here we are with a documents which gives us that second moment of existence. But of course, this is not the thing in itself, but a recreation, which captures only a part of it. Dimensions are missing: the sights, the ambience, and so on. This gives us not the full give experience, but an aural document of the band’s performance alone. They know this. We know this.

Four of the six tracks here are featured on Epocha in their studio forms, but the two mid-set songs, ‘Kali Sends Sunflowers’ and ‘Moulding Heaven With Earth’ are from the post-Epocha double-A-side single, and ‘Moulding Heaven With Earth’ is extended here from its near-six-minute form to almost eight her, making for a colossal centrepiece to the half-hour long set. Over its duration, the band sound solid, and assured, and they bring the detail of the studio recordings to their live show, with added dynamics and energy – the bass and drums in particular when they hit peak crescendo cut through in the way that only ever really happens live, and so it’s a credit that this release captures that energy.

The set opens with ‘Before’ from the Now You Are Not Here EP, and while abridged from its original six-and-a-half-minute sprawl to just three and a half, it conjures a magnificently atmospheric space, with chiming guitars, drifting ambient synth drones, hand-drums, and brooding sax, not to mention Easter-inspired vocalisations to build tension, and it segues into the ornate and delicate ‘Now You Are Not Here’ from the same EP, introducing vocals to the set, and finding the band at their most dramatic, evoking the quintessential goth sound from circa 1985-86. Mattthew Rochford’s voice quavers and you really feel as if you’re with him, teetering at the of the world… before the chorus-soaked maelstrom descends.

The soft swell of clean, reverby guitar on ‘Kali Sends Flowers’ is so very reminiscent of Wayne Hussey it sends an unexpected pang of nostalgia, echoing as it does both ‘Severina’ and the intro to ‘Deliverance’. But instead of Wayne’s overt drawing on Christianity in his lyrics, Abrasive Trees delve into other belief systems, and crash into some bold crescendos in the process.

The samples on ‘Moulding Heaven With Earth’ are studio-clear, without sounding at odds with the mix of the music itself, while the near note-perfect ‘Replenishing Water’ breathes deeper as the guitars burst through the air and it explodes into a monumental extended climax that’s absolutely killer and one hundred percent exhilarating. There is so much energy and life here. There is not much vocal, and for some reason this often takes me by surprise.

There isn’t much chat either, but then, on the evidence of this recording, Abrasive Trees’ set relies on building and maintaining tension rather than rapport.

‘Bound for an Infinite Sea’ begins with the crescendo and drives hard to an energetic, bass-driven finale, Rochford’s voice brimming with emotion – and delving into gloom before soaring into gripping tension – and it’s all of this and more that makes Nothing Exists for a Second Moment so great. It’s almost as if you were there, and very much wish you were, but Nothing Exists for a Second Moment achieves the rare feat of making you feel something almost like having been there, slipping a subliminal buzz in the process… It’s as close to a second moment as possible.

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Farming Incident – Nine Degrees of Torture

Posted: 8 July 2023 in Albums
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skoghall rekordings – 30th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Racking up a second release in its first month of existence, new Swedish label skoghall rekordings – the gentler sibling of Dret Skivor – offers up a reissue of the second album by Farming Incident, originally released in 2008 on Wrath Records, home of The Scaramanga Six and Eureka Machines.

The tags which accompany this release include ‘experimental’, ‘hip hop’, ‘ambient’, ‘anarcho-folk’, ‘folktronica’, ‘politics’, ‘post-punk’, ‘post-rock’, and ‘space rock’, and if that seems an incredibly eclectic cocktail, it’s a fair summary of a band who never sat comfortably in any category, at a time when crossovers and hyper-hybridity were still pretty uncommon and even less accepted: this was a time in the wake of the 90s emergence of rap-rock crossovers and around the time when instrumental post-rock’s ubiquity was waning after what felt like an eternity but was in fact a span of maybe four years at most.

For this, their final album, Farming Incident had expanded its pseudonymous membership to four, with Agent Jones (guitar, bass), Agent Mays (drums) and Agent Procktaur (vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards) being joined by Agent Pushkin (backing vocals, guitar, bass) ‘to allow more flexibility in instrument swapping’. And that’s certainly a lot of guitar and bass-playing contributions across their personnel.

‘Elk vs Volvo’ is a choppy slice of post-punk that crunches Gang of Four and The Fall together with sinewy guitars propelled by energetic drumming. It’s also got that authentic lo-fi eight-track early eighties sound, and really only being familiar with Dave Procter’s work from the last ten years or so, it’s something of a revelation to hear him doing vocals – and actually singing(ish) – in a more conventional indie / rock context. The verses on the goth-tinged ‘Sadism vs Fadism’ (although it’s more early Pulp with a dash of PiL and Rudimentary Peni than The Sisters of Mercy or The Danse Society) finds him in more recognisable voice, with a Sprechgesang delivery with flattened northern vowels, before coming on more like David Gedge in the choruses.

There’s indie-surf and straight-up indie in the mix, and it’s all going on really. Casting my mind back to 2008, and some of it’s hazy because time, and beer, and so may gigs and albums, but this doesn’t sound like an album from around that time. The nagging bass and guitar of ‘Stiletto’, which reminds me of Murder the Disturbed but with the synths from B-Move or even Ultravox, giving it very much a feel of c79-81, before it locks into a motorik groove.

‘The Terrorist You Seek Is in the Mirror’ finds Procter in the kind of lyrical territory he’s made his home since, slogging out slogans with passion, but with a fairly standard four-square punked-up pub-rock instrumentation, it’s perhaps the alum’s least interesting track, particularly as it’s overshadowed by the atmospheric stroll of ‘G.O.T.H.’ which explodes in a colossal crescendo three quarters of the way in, flange and chorus heavy guitars dominating.

They chuck in a surprise grunge tune in the shape of ‘Phobos’, but it’s also got that early 90s noise rock slant that owes as much to the more obscure acts. And then there’s the final track, ‘Owls’. It’s a goth—tinged alt-rock screamer, one of those longer songs that simply could never be long enough even if it was half an hour long, in the same way that The Honolulu Mountain Daffodils’ ‘Tequila Dementia’ is simply too short. ‘Night vision, owls are gonna get you!’ Dave sings, channelling paranoia and panic while prefacing the avian themes that would resurface latter in his career on songs like The Wharf Street Galaxy Band’s ‘No Puffins For You, Lad’.

A lot has happened in the last fifteen years. We’ve had thirteen years under a Conservative government for a start, and the whole world seems to have taken a nosedive socially, politically, economically, and it seems impossible to think now that Trump and Brexit and Johnson and Covid were only the tip of the iceberg. But while we’re seemingly more divided than ever as people wage war over pronouns and images of Mickey Mouse in hostels for asylum-seeking children, we do seem to have become more accommodating of music that is so eclectic as to seem rootless. Nine Degrees of Torture probably feels more at home in 2023 than it did back in 2018, but even now, it doesn’t really sound like anything else. Bits of stuff, yes, like a magpie raid on bits and bobs from all over, but it’s not grunge or post-punk or anything really, but somehow it hangs together nicely.

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The Bleak Assembly – Strangers Among Strangers

Posted: 7 July 2023 in Singles and EPs
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23rd June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Talk about moving fast: as their bio details, ‘The Bleak Assembly was formed in July, 2022. Two weeks after its inception, the first EP, We Become Strangers was unveiled. The Bleak Assembly’s meaning takes inspiration from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House – the ‘Bleak Assembly’ being the chain of people in the story whose lives are destroyed by the promise of wealth.” This seems a fitting parable for modern times, and show how we never, ever learn from history.

Comprising Michael Smith (all Instruments) and Kimberly (from Bow Ever Down), they continues to create at pace (ugh – I hang my head at having written such a corporate phrase in a review… but, phraseology notwithstanding, it’s true), and followed up their debut EP with the ‘Alibi’ single in February of 2023, and now they present Strangers Among Strangers. The goal of this EP, says Michael Smith was to “try a different sound. Bands seem to fall into a certain sound after a while, so if that should happen to us. I wanted to open it up to a more electronic sound to give us more room in the future.”

They have pedigree and experience, having between them shared stages with the likes of Assemblage 23, Razed in Black & Switchblade Symphony with their own individual projects, and it’s unusual to see them declare up-front that The Bleak Assembly will likely remain strictly a studio project. But why not? Sometimes the creative process evolves organically and feels like it needs to have that live outlet, while at other times, recordings simply don’t lend themselves to being replicated live. And then there are logistics, not to mention economics. The latter is a very real factor in determining how artists operate now. Funny (not) how the cost of everything has gone up apart from wages and the fees paid to artists.

But this sounds like a studio project, also. And that’s no criticism, and no bad thing. Oftentimes you’ll find bands striving – and failing – to capture the energy of their live performances in the studio. It’s often the case that they developed out of playing live and that’s the platform on which they’re familiar and on which they thrive. And fair play to them: but other acts evolved in the studio and are detrimented by distance, while others simply don’t feel comfortable as live entities and feel they simply cannot replicate their studio works in a live setting. Whatever the case with The Bleak Assembly, they’ve clearly found a method which works for them, facilitating a rapid stream of material.

With Strangers Among Strangers, The Bleak Assembly, who clearly have something of a fixation on strangers and the unheimlich have crafted a crisply-manufactured piece of electropop, and while it’s got some strong gothy / darkwave elements, there’s a lot of Midge Ure era Ultravox and Violator-era Depeche Mode in the mix here, as is immediately apparent on ‘A Night Like This’ (which isn’t a Cure cover).

Strangers Among Strangers is solidly electro-based and packs some real energy. It’s synthy and it’s dark – and nevermore dark than on ‘Ready to Die’, where Kimberley faces straight out into the abyss and confronts the ageing process and, ultimately, the end, against a backdrop of swirling chorus-soaked guitar that’s pure 1985. ‘Remains’ is similarly bleak on the lyrical front, and these songs channel a lot of anguish. It may well be that they’re common tropes in the field of goth and darkwave, but the delivery is gripping, as well as keenly melodic. There’s something of a shift on the EP’s second half, moving to a more guitar-driven sound, but the throbbing synth bass and cracking vintage drum machine snare keep everything coherent and push the songs along with a tight, punchy feel. There’s much to like.

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Listen: ‘Payback’ by Love Ghost X SKOLD

Posted: 30 June 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Love Ghost is an enigmatic Los Angeles-based group that has been making waves for some time with genre-bending music that is informed by both Seattle tradition and Soundcloud-era fearlessness. Frontman Finnegan Bell began playing guitar and singing at the age of eleven, soon opening SoundCloud and YouTube accounts to upload his own music and videos. He began playing acoustic shows in 2014 and subsequently founded Love Ghost.

As a quartet, Love Ghost have toured extensively, playing shows in major cities all over the world, while they have earned plaudits from US publications such as Rolling Stone, Alternative Press, American Songwriter and New Noise for their music that has included collaborations with artists from countries that include Mexico, Spain, Turkey, UK, Colombia, Germany and Russia.

They are now adding to that list of territories with ‘Payback’, a first single from a forthcoming album made with Swedish musician and producer Tim Skold. Best known for his work with Shotgun Messiah, KMFDM, Marilyn Manson and as a solo artist, Skold has recently been working as part of the duo Not My God (with Nero Bellum) and has also just toured with Front Line Assembly.

“I met Tim at the Viper Room [in LA] on Halloween night, after which everything magically fell into place,” explains Bell. “We had a few meetings and recorded ‘Payback’ in my band’s studio. Having just come out of a difficult relationship, I wanted to make a song about revenge, redemption and love gone astray. When I was writing the lyrics, Tim had some very interesting tips and production choices that really brought the song to life. SKOLD is a legend and I’m super grateful and excited to release this song and for everyone to hear it.”

Skold adds that “Love Ghost has a super natural flow to writing and performing so it’s pretty easy for me join in, step up and keep the action going. You don’t run into talent like this every day so it was obviously an opportunity I wanted to act on immediately. I’ve been around the block a few times, but I’m very excited about this collaboration and look forward to digging deeper into the full length album.”

Listen to ‘Payback’ here:

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