I suppose I lost track of ‘new goth’ bands at the end of the 90s, and am still a way behind even now I’m a bit more back on it, and so History Of Guns, described by Mick Mercer – the authority on all things goth, who’s Gothic Rock Black Book was a bible for be when I was 13 and discovering the scene, as “By far, the most inventive UK band to have got their hands caught in the Industrial threshing machine” – bypassed me.
As the parenthetical numerals in the title suggests, this is a remixed version of their debut single, released twenty-five years ago, and it’s accompanied by a brace of new songs by way of B-sides, in the way things used to be done back then, when you had 12” and CD singles – and while I don’t get nostalgic for much, there was something special about these formats. Then there’s the fact a 12” single used to cost about £3.50 and a CD single a couple of quid – which probably sounds as incredible as a £1 pint or 3p tin of beans (Kwik-Save, No-Frills, c1995) to anyone under 35 – meant they were affordable, accessible.
But while we’re talking nostalgia and the passage of time, the accompanying video uses footage, originally filmed by Danni Cutmore on a VHS camera, of the band writing and performing the song at Earthworks studio in Barnet in 1998. It’s grainy, fuzzy, saturated, and looks like it could just have easily have bene shot in 1988, or even 1978. On the one hand, digital technology means the quality of video footage, even when shot on a cheapy mobile phone, is usually crisper, and isn’t prone to deterioration – but on the other, it’s so commonplace, it has less currency and less buzz about it, somehow.
The music itself… yes, it’s got that vintage post-punk feel to it, spun with an industrial edge, and pitching the band alongside Alien Sex Fiend, Cabaret Voltaire, Nitzer Ebb, Coil, Nine Inch Nails, Deathboy, The Prodigy, and LCD Soundsystem is all quite fair enough.
The classic spindly goth guitar sound spins spidery webs across a thumping drum machine, and there’s that quintessential low-slung bass groove… not to mention Del Gilbert’s theatrical baritone which looms powerfully over all of it. But then there are shuddering laser synth blasts which bubble up from nowhere, fizzes and whizzing and bleeps create the sensation of listening to two songs at the same time. Perversely, it somehow works, not least of all because there are strong hooks and the beat hits just right.
First B-side, ‘i am defective’ shows how they’ve evolved: it’s a dubby instrumental which leans far more into the electronic territory which only coloured their debut single. It’s also harder-edged and more overtly industrial, too, not just with the electronics, but the crunching, serrated guitars which cut in and threaten speaker damage. ‘LMS (Deep Mix)’ – a radical reworking of ‘Little Miss Suicide’ is in the vein of Rosetta Stone circa The Tyranny of Inaction – at least to begin with, but then swerves hard into the kind of electronica that qualified as technogoth or even cybergoth and reminding me why I drifted from the goth scene at the time. Now, I’m a bit more open to these things, and as an example of hard-edged industrial goth, it’s solid.
This release presents a neat straddling of the band’s formative years and their current sound: a clear win for fans, and a neat introduction for the unfamiliar.
Under The Sanguine Moon is the fourth album from Denver, Colorado-based goth rock band, Plague Garden. As the pitch tells it, ‘The album features a prominent vampiric theme. Delve into the catacombs of a nocturnal world, where tales of bloodlust at dusk reign supreme. Listen to fantastical tales of the undead and even a little bit of Greek mythology added in for variety… From the album’s blood-red artwork to it’s [sic] hemophilic lyrics, this LP is bound to please even the darkest children of the night. For fans of gothic rock, post punk, deathrock, darkwave.’
Having got into gothness around 1987, just on the cusp of teenagerdom, I would come to discover that, just as with metal, this was a genre with many disparate threads. The vampiric fascination, which represents the popular image of goth – and espoused by the myriad dark souls who descend upon Whitby for the legendary goth weekends and trace the steps of Dracula following the small port town’s prominence in Bram Stoker’s genre-defining novel – is a league apart from the origins of the music which would come to be synonymous with early goth – predominantly Leeds-based acts such as The Sisters of Mercy, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, The March Violets, and Salvation. You won’t find a hint of vampirism here. Bauhaus’ debut single, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ predates the emerging Leeds scene, and the whole vampire / spooky template can be pinned squarely on this single, which can’t exactly be considered representative of their output as a whole. But still, people like to latch on to easy tags.
This perhaps unduly preface is to say that the goth / vampire thing is something I find difficult to fully embrace. Goth bands doing vampy stuff is simply not the same as Steven Severin providing live soundtracks to classic silent movies.
The other thing I find difficult to really align is that while there is a whole new wave of acts of a goth persuasion emerging, there are a lot of goth acts loitering and lingering featuring older guys – in the forty to fifty-plus demographic, which I will, in the interest of transparency record as being my demographic – doing this. Plague Garden do sit within this bracket.
Under The Sanguine Moon is a solid album. It sits in the third wave goth bracket alongside the likes of Suspiria and the Nightbreed roster of the late ‘90s – brooding, theatrical, with booming baritone vocals that are sort of aping Andrew Eldritch but fall into that more generic ‘fah-fah-fah’ singing down in the throat style. With piano taking a more prominent position among the standard musical arrangement of drums / bass / guitar, Plague Garden create a layered sound which does stand out from many of their peers, and they so absolutely nail that quintessential goth sound with the solid foot-down four-square Craig Adams style bass groove. This is nowhere better exemplified than on ‘Shadows’, with its spectral guitars, the perfect cocktail of chorus, flange and reverb creating that brittle, layered sound which defined the 80s sound.
The vocals are mixed fairly low, and it’s the bass and drums which dominate, and this is a good thing – not because the vocals are bad, but because it puts the atmosphere to the fore, and means the lyrics are less obvious, which is probably no bad thing.
‘The Dirty Dead’ is a crunchier, punkier take on the sound, and carries hints of early Christian Death – think ‘Deathwish’ – and this carries on into ‘Pandora’.
The cover they mention is ‘#1 Crush’ by Garbage, an early B-side that’s one of the hidden gems of their catalogue. Plague Garden’s take is unsurprisingly lugubrious, theatrical, and makes sense as a song selection with its nagging, picked guitar part and crunching percussion.
There’s a flood of blood at the end, with ‘Blood Fingers’ and ‘Blood Debt’ closing the album. The former, haunting, hypnotic, a classic moody goth cut, the latter offering a slower, dreamier take on the former. These guys have got their sound honed to perfection, and if you’re into more trad goth delivered with a more contemporary spin – but not too contemporary – you probably can’t go too far wrong with Under The Sanguine Moon.
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.
Anniversary editions and reissues have become a massive part of the music industry in recent years, in keeping with the ever-growing tendency to milk all things nostalgic. Many are shameless cash-ins, designed to compel dewy-eyed fans to purchase an album from their your again at eye-watering expense in order to hear it in a new ‘improved’ remastered form, accompanied by several discs of demos, outtakes, acoustic and alternative versions, and contemporaneous live recordings that no-one ever plays more than once if at all, while cherishing a deluxe booklet of photos and whatnot and reflecting on just how fucking old they are and wondering where the decades have gone.
That doesn’t mean there’s no merit to marking anniversaries, and this release is rather different, being a part of the commemorations of twenty years of Sister 9 Recordings with a comprehensive retrospective of cult Sheffield act Dolium, who first broke onto the city scene around the turn of the millennium, before coming to the attention of John Peel in 2004. The band went on indefinite hiatus in 2010, but during their years of activity, amassed a substantial body of work, including two full-length albums, Kisses Fractures (2005), and Hellhounds On The Prowl (2008). A third album, Brother Transistor, was recorded but never saw the light of day… until now. Add all of their singles and other bits and bobs, including their shelved debut single – which made it to test pressing but no further due to lack of funds – and this four-CD set provides instant access to their complete discography, and more. As such, it’s a boon for fans and an ideal introduction for anyone unfamiliar with an act described by KERRANG! as ‘a less depressing Joy Division mixed with the black horror of Bauhaus and the melodic dynamics of the Pixies’.
I’m not entirely convinced there’s much ‘black horror’ to be found in Bauhaus’ catalogue, but it does capture the punky / goth stylings of a band who espoused the indie / DIY ethic and injected every moment with pure adrenaline. They started out with a drum machine, but progressed to live drums when Simon Himsworth joined. Being a small world, it would appear that this is the same Simon Himsworth who would later play guitar in brief but legendary York band We Could Be Astronauts alongside former Seahorse Stu Fletcher.
There’s an obvious chronology about the first two discs, which contain Kisses Fractures and Hellhounds On The Prowl respectively, with contemporaneous EPs and singles by way of bonuses. As titles like ‘She’s The Pill That Makes Me Want To Stay’, ‘Drug City’, and ‘Whore Whore’, all from Kisses Fractures indicate, this is a band who are fully committed to the trash aesthetic of sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll – with a heap of death and suicide on top – and Kisses Fractures is a low-fi blast of post-punk drama. With hints of The Jesus and Mary Chain and The March Violets in the mix, likening the sound to any specific bands is difficult and rather too specific: what they bring is an assimilation of an era and an aesthetic, and the sound is more that off the mid-80s than the mid-00s. It’s exciting: there’s no let-up, no mid-album lighter-waving anthem, just back-to-back overdriven explosions of raw energy that are every bit as punk as anything released in ’77 or ’78. ‘Driving With The Deathettes’ B-side ‘Daddy’s Swinging in the Attic’ cranks up the sleaze true-crime dirt, against some repetitive lo-fi riffage.
The same themes are present on Hellhounds On The Prowl, which delivers another batch of tightly-packed squalor-filled shock, horror, and filth with titles like ‘“Suicide” Was My First Word’, ‘Coughin’ In The Coffin’, and ‘Junkie Howlin’’, the latter being a swampy, hipshaking fucked-up rockabilly boogie which pretty much sets the level for the album, which does feel more evolved, if not necessarily more mature. ‘We Want Your Blood’ is a lurch into straight-up B-movie horrorcore, and the thunderous ‘She Can’t Steak My Heart’ continues to place the vampire fixation, while ‘Gü the Destroyer’ melds the high-octane explosivity of Dead Kennedys with an Industrial edge. It works, and they get away with it because there’s clearly a dash of pastiche and self-awareness infused with the relentlessly rambunctious rock ‘n’ roll.
As much as they’re about drawing on, and revelling in, cliché, and the work of their precursors, there’s clear common ground with contemporaries like Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster. I say ‘like’, but it’s a very short list, to say the least. Then again, the scuzzy garage blitzkrieg of tracks like ‘Godspeed Your Love To Me’ sits comfortably alongside garage revival acts like The Strokes and The Hives. Only this evidences that Dolium were better. As is so often the case, it’s not always the good bands who make it, and perhaps Dolium were just too intense, too wild, too primitive. Among an endless list of contemporaneous vampire-themed ragers, including ‘Holy Water’, ‘Oh Lord, I See No Reflection’, ‘These Fans Have Fucking Fangs!’, ‘You’ve Got Holes!’ comes on like Queens of the Stone Age, and if nothing else, showcases the band’s eclecticism.
I’m sure forums and fans have debated the ins and out of why they decided to call it a day before putting out album number three, but there’s little out in the world on the topic, and hearing the material on its belated arrival gives no clue: it presents the band in ferocious form, evolved to another level, bursting with gritty guitars and showcasing a newfound level of songwriting ability – there are hooks galore, and the production is meaty. It may be more accessible than its predecessors, but it’s by no means mainstream. ‘Get Off on My Machine’ brings the riotous grunge blitzkrieg of Pulled Apart By Horses; ‘(There Goes My) Jellies Girl’ offers unexpected melody and could almost qualify as ‘anthemic’. The gritty uptempo chuggernaut of ‘The Future In Hands’ seems to take not-so-subtle cues from ‘My Sherona’. It’s so tempting to contemplate what might have been… but to do so is futile. The past is past, and Dolium’s peak is certainly past, but Brother Transistor is a belter and that’s an ineffable fact.
AA
The fourth and final disc, which brings together everything else not included on the other discs, namely the first four-track demos and a bunch of offcuts and rarities from the span of their career, is, as one would anticipate, something of a mixed bag, and often raw, rough, and barely ready. The demos provide an insight into the early evolution of the band and their early material, again sounding more like they were recorded in 1983.
With seventy-six tracks, this is not only a monster, but a truly definitive collection which presents the good, band, and the ugly – but mostly it’s either good or ugly. One thing is clear: Dolium were a band out of time: sounding like 1984, they’d likely have gone down a storm now or as part of either the goth revival of the late 90s or a few years ago. They just weren’t the sound of the post-rock dominated mid-noughties. But if there’s any justice, history will recognise Dolium as underground greats.
Goth rock/post-punk band, Ghost Painted Sky recently unveiled their latest single, the introspective ‘Insomnia’.
Ghost Painted Sky have always tried to write songs that are true to their own life experiences, while also tapping into something a little more universal. With the new song ‘Insomnia,’ they explore some of the most familiar of common modern plagues: stress and sleeplessness.
Raw, claustrophobic, and perhaps a bit more aggressive than some of their previous material, ‘Insomnia’ is the sound of the night fight against the thousand micro-demons of anxiety that crawl and claw around the edges of peace and sanity.
AA
GHOST PAINTED SKY began as the solo studio project of David Strong, as a way to process some major life changes through songwriting, which resulted in a debut self-titled EP released in 2014. The following year brought a second short EP, The Shadows Breath, and the first live performances.
In 2017, Lisa Wood began contributing vocals with the Scars EP, and then with the first full-length Ghost Painted Sky album, Flightless, released in the summer of 2018. Lisa has since become the second official member of the band and the primary vocalist, continuing through the Ephemeral Wake EP (2021), and a series of singles – of which ‘Insomnia’ is the latest – offering previews of what to expect from the forthcoming second full-length album, Failure Blooms. While David remains the principal songwriter, Ghost Painted Sky continues to include work with musical collaborators and live band members (including current violin player, Aurora Grabill and guitar player, Michael Boudreau) while continuing the ever-present theme of songwriting as vessel for personal exploration and catharsis.
The claim that ‘New Skeletal Faces cast their own black light onto the long dormant corpse of Death Rock, shattering the mirror of modern Heavy Metal into fragments that reflect back a fresh new take on this form of music with an energised & outlandish conviction’ is a bold one. Ominous, menacing, perhaps, or deluded and deranged?
California may be known for its sun and sand, but it has a long history or dark currents which run contra to its popular image, perhaps most notably Charles Manson’s Family being based in The Golden State – which in turn drew Trent Reznor for the recording of The Downward Spiral. In between, Christian Death spawned the proto-goth / nascent death rock sound which, while evolving in parallel to the scene in the north of England, was unique and distinct, and the early eighties saw California home to a thriving hardcore punk scene. I suppose that wherever there is affluence and clean-cut TV slickness, there is bound to be rebellion, a counterculture which stands at odds with it all. No doubt some of these factors drew New Skeletal Faces to California for the recording of Until The Night, the follow-up to 2019’s Celestial Disease.
They proffer an ‘effortless blending of the spirits of old; with the seductive & spellbinding gothic prowess of bands such as Christian Death fused with the raw unbridled energy of early Swedish black metal legend, Bathory to create a bold new statement of intent, in stark contrast to the often overly-refined polish of contemporary metal. Until the Night is, as a result, something more akin to listening to the 1980’s Sunset Strip in an alternate universe from hell.’ For good measure, and to really clarify their position, there’s a cover of Bathory’s ‘Raise The Dead’.
In all, it’s apparent this is destined to be dark from the outset. Across the album’s eight tracks, they paint everything darker shades of black with densely-woven layers of sound. The guitars, while overdriven, are reverby, and quite smooth, and while the riffs take their cues from black metal, there are some overtly gothy licks, and the atmosphere is very much reminiscent of Only Theatre of Pain but with the dial cranked a few notches further over into the ‘metal’ domain for the most part. Then again, the title track, with its thunderous tribal percussion, spindly guitar laced with flange and chorus, and thumping bassline, encapsulates the sound of goth circa 1985, only with shouty vocals which belong more to the hardcore sound of the same time.
Titles such as ‘Ossuary Lust’, ‘Wombs’, and ‘Pagan War’ are fully invested in the trappings of gnarly metal and its themes, but ‘Zeitgeist Suicide’ reflects a self-awareness which may not be immediately obvious.
As I touched on in my recent review of Vessel’s cover of ‘Body and Soul’ by The Sisters of Mercy, while there is a clear interface between goth and metal – even if it does tend to be primarily a one-way street, which finds metal fans embracing goth bands, in particular The Sisters of Mercy and Fields of the Nephilim – its rare to encounter a particularly successful merging of the genres. In the main, goth-metal is cliché and cack. Despite appearances, Until The Night is neither, and is perhaps the most potently-realised stylistic synergy since The End of Mirrors by Alaric in 2016.
AA
Chiming guitars swirl around relentless, barrelling beats on ‘Wombs’, before ‘Zeitgeist Suicide’ leads with a weaving bassline and some fizzy, treble-dominated guitar, and they go at it hard and fast. ‘Enchantment of my Inner Coldness’ brings together vintage goth with a vocal performance that evokes the spirit of Public Image Limited, and in doing so, succeeds in sounding – and feeling – both expansive and claustrophobic at the same time.
Until The Night scratches and drives its way – all the way – to the Bathory cover which drawn the curtain down on this dark, fiery, and furious album. It may well alienate goths, metalheads, and post-punk fans alike, but it feels very much like their loss, being an album strong on songs and confident in its own identity in the way it positions itself uniquely across the genres.
It was the single release of their cover of The Sisters of Mercy’s ‘Body and Soul’ which brought me to this album. I’ll not retread the ground I covered in my review of aforementioned cover, other than to note that I was uncommonly impressed by the band’s spin on the track, and shall instead pick up on the point that I was intrigued as to precisely how a cover would fit into the art of a concept album.
In a sense, I find myself back in the 80s, when – before it was possible to stream an album online or otherwise hear it without owning it, unless a mate passed you a tape recorded from their copy – one purchased an album on the strength of a single heard on the radio. It was not all that uncommon that the single was absolutely in no way representative, and you’d feel somewhat duped. Imagine buying Faith by The Cure in the basis of ‘Primary’, for example. You may not necessarily feel duped, but you’d probably struggle to reconcile the single and album experiences, assuming you could lift yourself off the floor to do anything at all by the end of the album. But then, oftentimes – because you probably only bought an album a month, on vinyl or cassette, you’d play it enough times to come to appreciate it anyway. This simply doesn’t happen anymore, and what’s more, the art of the album is one which is criminally undervalued. That isn’t to say I feel in any way duped by The Somnifer: it’s simply that the single, while obviously the most accessible and attention-grabbing track, is not entirely representative.
Taking pause for a moment, there’s that term – ‘concept album’ – which creates immediate obstacles; it can be perceived as self-indulgent, overblown, conceited, arty in the way that implies a superiority, or even just plain wanky. You can largely blame prog for that, but there have been plenty of excessive concept albums in other genres, particularly metal. But I’m not here to prejudge: I am genuinely curious, especially as the single showed considerable promise. So, first things first: what is the concept?
As they set it out, ‘The album captures the different mental stages one can pass through, from feelings of self-empowerment to existential dread. The Somnifer takes listeners on a journey that blends the drama of classic doom (Candlemass, Cathedral), cosmic psych explorations (All Them Witches, King Buffalo), and the aggression of hardcore and crossover scenes, with the timeless instrumental journey of classic heavy metal.’
The title track certainly builds atmosphere, and it’s the kind of brooding, heavy-timbred tones which call to mind Neurosis, interlaced with a hint of the gothic, which draws the listener into the album. The guitar sound is clean, but rich, and earthy, gradually shifting towards a thicker, overdriven sound, but there’s lots of space and separation. This paves the way for the haunting ‘Draining the Labyrinth’, which takes some time before really going all-out on the riffery before ploughing into ‘Rapid Eye Movement’, the first track to really feature vocals prominently. With ethereal backing vocals floating in to balance the almost speechified spoken-word delivery atop a Sabbathesque riff, it’s an interesting blend of elements.
‘Eat The Day’ comes on like Melvins aping Sabbath with an overloading blast of thick, mid-rangey guitar, before the rippling instrumental ‘Delta Waves’ brings softness and respite, starting out a bit Pink Floyd before growing gradually more intense in its playing. ‘Recurring Nightmare’ slams in out of nowhere, snarling, downtuned doom riffing, churning power chords and darkness, replete with dramatic, theatrical vocals and searing lead guitar work. One of the album’s heaviest pieces, is brings the intensity of the sense of being trapped in a nightmare, the repetitive guitar motif recreating that terrifying sense of déjà vu.
In terms of concept, it works well: instead of pursuing some artificially-imposed narrative arc, The Somnifer explores the way in which moods and emotional responses can manifest as rapid and unexpected transitions, which aren’t always provoked by obvious triggers.
‘Image Rehearsal Reaction’ is a towering monolith of a track, a colossal ten-minute stoner/doom exploration that suddenly hits turbo at the mid-point, blasting fierily forward while the guitar solo runs wild. This is where they’re at their most ‘trad 70s metal’ of anywhere on the album, which is impressively diverse, something which the ‘concept’ allows for.
The album in fact closes with ‘Body and Soul’. It’s incongruous in many ways, but it oddly works to conclude a varied and yet consistent and quality album.
‘Crippled Crow’ is the final single by Norwegian band Mayflower Madame’s much anticipated upcoming album Insight, out on 1st November via Night Cult Records/ Up In Her Room/Icy Cold Records.
Compared to the album’s previous singles, this newest track expands on their distinctive fusion of edgy post-punk and dreamy shoegaze, incorporating aspects of noise-rock and darkwave. Driven by a driving bass line and dynamic drumming, the song leads you on a captivating journey – from the haunting verse melodies to the intense guitar passages in the choruses, culminating in a powerful ending. It evokes feelings of longing and remorse amidst the wintry streets of Oslo, intertwined with a burning desire for transformation and catharsis.
Check the video here:
AA
Mayflower Madame return to the UK and Europe for a tour in November. Tickets are available here.
Berries have been on our radar since 2017, and now, just over two years on from How We Function, they return with they eponymous second long-player. They’ve done a good job of building the anticipation with a run of well-spaced singles, starting back in the summer with ‘Watching Wax’, before revealing an altogether previously unseen side with the acoustic-led ‘Balance’. So which Berries will we see come to the fore here?
It’s more than a pleasure to report that it’s the very best Berries which manifest across all of the album’s ten cuts, all of them sharp. Ten tracks is in itself significant: it’s the classic album format of old, and all killer, no filler, and no faffing with interludes or lengthy meanderings. The whole album’s run-time is around half an hour: it’s tight, it’s succinct, the songwriting is punchy and disciplined, and has the feel of an album as was in the late 70s and through the 80s, planned and sequenced for optimal effect. But they also manage to expand their template within within these confines: there’s some mathy tension in the lead guitar work, and there are flourishes which are noodly without being wanky, and they serve more as detail rather than dominating the sound.
‘Barricade’ kicks in on all cylinders, uptempo, energetic, post-punk with punk energy amped to the max. By turns reminiscent of early Interpol and Skeletal Family, with some nagging guitar work scribbling its way across a thumping rhythm section, it’s a corking way to open an album by any standard. ‘Blurry Shapes’ is a crafted amalgamation of mathy loops in the verses and crunchy chords in the choruses, all delivered with an indie-pop vibe which is particularly keen in the melodic – but not twee or flimsy vocals. and Berries just packs in back-to-back bangers.
‘Watching Wax’ lands as the third track, a magnificent coming together of solid riffing, chunky bass, and sassy vocals. ‘Balance’ provides a change of pace and style immediately after, and it’s well-placed, wrapping up side one.
‘Jagged Routine’ starts off the second half with a choppy cut that brings in elements of poppy post-punk, math-rock and circa 1987 goth alternative rock. I’m reminded rather of The Kut, but then equally The Mission in the final bars, while ‘This Space’ steps things up with a dash of Gang of Four and a mid-00s technical post-rock flavour compressed into a driving rock tune that clocks in at just shy of three and a half minutes.
On Berries, Berries sound perhaps a little less frantic and frenzied, and maybe less confrontational and driven by antagonism than on their debut, but as a trade-off, they sound more focused and more evolved. The introspective introversion of the form creates an intensity that suits them well.
The guitar riff in the verse of ‘Narrow Tracks’ is so, so close to a lift of ‘When You Don’t See Me’ by The Sisters of Mercy that it makes me feel nostalgic for 1990, but finally gives me cause to rejoice in 2024, as they’ve incorporated it into a layered tune that has many elements and just works. Having waded through endless hours of bands doing contemporary ‘goth’ by making some synth-led approximation of a complete mishearing of anything released between 1979 and 1984 by the bands that would be branded goth by the press, it’s a source of joy to hear an album that captures the essence of that period without a single mention of the G-word.
Berries is a fantastic album. It gets to the point. It has power it has energy in spades – and attitude. They also bring in so many elements, but not in a way that lacks focus. In fact, they sound more focused than I would have ever imagined. This album deserves to see Berries go huge, and it’s got to be one of my albums of the year simply by virtue of being absolutely flawless and 100% brilliant.
What a year this is proving to be for bands who have lain dormant, at least on the studio front, for quite literally decades. And when it comes to Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, it really has been a long time. The last Lorries release was an ultra-limited gig-only affair back in 2015, with just 50 copies pressed for Leeds in the August and 100 for Valencia the following month. Said EP featured two new songs, ‘Safe as Houses’ and ‘Piece of my Mind’, which were listed as being from the ‘forthcoming album Strange Kind of Paradise’. Time passed, and it really didn’t look like the album would ever see the light of day. But now, this official EP presages its arrival in February 2025, some thirty-three years since they called it a day with Blasting Off (1992).
The Lorries always stood apart from their contemporaries: whereas the Leeds post-punk scene of the early 80s clearly favoured black in every possible way, the band’s guitar sound was steely grey and like scraping metal, and paired with murky bass and relentless percussion, they forged an industrial clang that, was the perfect mirror to both the landscape and the times. Chris Reed’s baritone was less theatrical and more gnarly and angry-sounding than your archetypal goths which would follow. Fans will already know and appreciate all of this, but with so much history – and so much time having passed – some context is worthwhile, especially for those unfamiliar.
During their 80s heyday, they built a catalogue of outstanding 12” releases, with some of their best cuts not on the albums, and with Driving Black, they’ve added another. It contains six tracks, with two mixes of the title track – I gather the original will feature on the album – long with a mix of the as-yet-unreleased ‘Chickenfeed’. ‘Safe as Houses’ and ‘Piece of my Mind’ finally get to be heard – and owned – by more than 150 people, and hearing them again in this context reminds me of the buzz I got when first heard them almost a decade ago: they’re unmistakably RLYL, and if they’re more in the vein of the material on Blow and Blasting Off, the one thing that’s remained consistent throughout the band’s entire career is their sonic density, that claustrophobic, concrete-heavy heft, with ‘Piece of Mind’ being a solid mid-tempo chugger and a grower at the same time. It seems that the two tracks from the 2015 EP didn’t make the album cut – but this can be seen as good news, if they have material of this quality going spare. The same is true of ‘Living With Spiders’, a frenzied track which has spindly guitars crawling and scratching all over it. It would be a standout, but the consistency of quality across the EP means it’s one more cracking tune.
The strangest thing is how time – or our perception of time – seems to become evermore distorted. Perhaps some of it’s an age thing, but… I remember at the time, The Sisters of Mercy’s release of Floodland was hailed not only as the rebirth it was – stylistically and in terms of commercial success – but as a huge comeback after a great absence. But Floodland arrived only just over two years after First and Last and Always. Even more remarkably, I seem to recall the release of Crawling Mantra under the name The Lorries that same year was considered something of a comeback and a departure, even though Paint Your Wagon was released only the year before. The world seemingly lost the plot when The Stone Roses delivered The Second Coming after a five-year gap (and they really needn’t have bothered). And now, while Daniel Ek is advocating the production of ‘content’ on a constant basis, we have bands putting out their first new material in an eternity, and rather than having forgotten about them, fans are fervent – and rightly so.
Chris Reed’s reuniting with David ‘Wolfie’ Wolfenden – Leeds alumni who first appeared with Expelaires in 1979 along with one Craig Adams, who would do a stint as a member of The Mission’s touring lineup – is most welcome, because they’re simply a great pairing, and this is nowhere more apparent than on lead track ‘Driving Black’, which is vintage Lorries, kicking off with urgent, driving drums, before the throb of bass and rhythm guitar and a sinewy lead guitar, sharp and taut as a tripwire cut in and casts a thread right back to their earliest work in terms of style and structure.
The parallels between now and the 80s are uncomfortable; we may have ditched a Conservative government, but workers are still feeling the pinch, and global tensions are off the scale. That the BBC’s apocalyptic movie Threads is getting only its fourth screening – to mark its fortieth anniversary – feels worryingly relevant. And so it is that Red Lorry Yellow Lorry still sound essential and contemporary is equally testament to their songwriting and delivery, and the bleak times in which we find ourselves. Putting the social and political backdrop to one side, the Driving Black EP is an absolute triumph. There are no half-measures, nothing is weak or half-arsed, and it’s – remarkably – as if they’ve never been away.
Aural Aggravation 