Posts Tagged ‘theatrical’

Morlocks – Amor, Monstra Et Horrore Profundi

Posted: 3 January 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Metropolis Records – 10th January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

According to their bio, ‘Morlocks are a Swedish act who combine elements of industrial rock, neo-classical, darkwave and metal with epic production values to create an exciting hybrid sound. Having issued the long-awaited and well received album Praise The Iconoclast in late 2023, they subsequently promoted it with two US tours in 2024, both in support of their friends and occasional collaborators KMFDM.’

Asked about the inspiration behind the song, the band state: “Watch the world from a distance. Get angry at first, but also inspired. Take the darkest parts of it and twist them into something weird, beautiful and batshit insane – something that you could either dance to, brood in the shadows to or scream at the top of your lungs at the moon. Preferably all of the above. Everything can be turned into art, and art must hurt. Situation normal: all fucked up.”

‘Everything can be turned into art, and art must hurt’ is a phrase which stands out here. It may seem somewhat dramatic, but to summarise Buddha’s teaching, ‘all life is suffering’, or ‘life is pain’, and the function or art – true art – is to speak in some way of deep truths of what it is to be human. Art must therefore, reflect life and capture something of the existential anguish of the human condition. If it doesn’t, it isn’t art, it’s mere entertainment. And if the idea that ‘Everything can be turned into art’ may superficially seem somewhat flippant, a diminishment of serious matters, if the work is, indeed art, and not entertainment, then the obverse is true: using the pain of life as source material is the only way to interrogate in appropriate depth those most challenging of issues. In other words, making art from trauma is not reductive or to cheapen the experience – but making entertainment from it very much is.

There’s a snobbery around what constitutes art, even now, despite the breakthroughs made through modernism and postmodernism. It’s as if Duchamps had never pissed on the preconceptions of art for the upper echelons of society who still maintain that art is theatre, is opera, is Shakespeare, that art can only exist in galleries and is broadly of the canon. This is patently bollocks, but what Morlocks do is incorporate these elements of supposed ‘high’ art and toss them into the mix – most adeptly, I would add – with grimy guitars and pounding techno beats. Art and culture and quite different things, and those who are of the opinion that only high culture is art are superior snobs who have no real understanding of art or art history.

The five songs on Amor, Monstra Et Horrore Profundi are therefore very much art, although that doesn’t mean they don’t also entertain. ‘The S.N.A.F.U. Principle v3.0’ arrives in a boldly theatrical sweep of neoclassical strings and grand drama – and then the crunching guitars, thumping mechanised drums and raspy vocals kick in and all hell breaks loose. Combining the hard-edged technoindustrial of KMFDM – which is hardly surprising – with the preposterous orchestral bombast of PIG and Foetus bursting through and ascending to the very heavens, it’s complex and detailed and thrillingly dramatic, orchestral and choral and abrasive all at once.

With tribal drumming and bombastic, widescreen orchestration, ‘March of the Goblins’ has a cinematic quality to it, which sits somewhat at odds with the rather hammy narrative verses. It seems to say ‘yeah, ok, you want strings and huge production and choral backing to think it’s art? Here you go, and we’re going to sing about radioactive dinosaurs like it’s full-on Biblical’. It’s absurd and audacious, and makes for a truly epic seven and a half minutes of theatrical pomp that’s admirable on many levels. Ridiculous, but admirable.

‘The Lake’, split over two parts with a combined running time of over ten minutes explores more atmospheric territory, with graceful, delicate strings, acoustic guitar, and tambourine swirling through swirling mists before breaking through into a surging tower of power, melding crunching metal guitars with progressive extravagance, and medieval folk and martial flourishes.

Amor, Monstra Et Horrore Profundi is remarkably ambitious and unashamedly lavish in every way. Quite how serious are Morlocks? They’re certainly serious about their art. But while delivered straight, one feels there’s an appropriate level of knowingness, self-awareness in their approach to their undertaking. And that is where the art lies: theatre is acting. The stories told are drawn from life, and resonate with emotional truth: but the actors are not the action, and there is a separation between art and artifice. Amor, Monstra Et Horrore Profundi is something special.

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Plague Garden – Under The Sanguine Moon

Posted: 2 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Bleeding Light – 3rd January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

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.

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Watch: ‘Curse Breaker’ by Miss FD

Posted: 1 January 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Dark electronic music producer, MISS FD has just released her latest bewitching cinematic gothic music video for her song, ‘Curse Breaker’.

‘Curse Breaker’ is a liberating dark piano piece with laid bare female vocals that channel raw emotion, empowerment, and mystique.  A spell unbinding transformative song about overcoming and letting go.

The music video, directed by long-time collaborator and friend Tas Limur, was filmed in a Victorian mansion in Historic Old Louisville, KY.

The video follows MISS FD through a curse-breaking séance which releases her from a haunting apparition, symbolizing freeing oneself from the binds and limitations of the past.

Watch it here:

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Keir Cooper + Eleanor Westbrook: Star Quality – Speculations for Guitar and Voice

Posted: 23 September 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Discus Music – 27th September 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

One way to tell an avant-garde musical work from its title alone is when the title provides a quite precise statement relating to its compositional nature. And so it is that this collaborative set of songs by Keir Cooper and Eleanor Westbrook are structured around guitar and voice.

‘Willow Tree – A Dialogue’ takes the interesting form of – perhaps not surprisingly – a dialogue of sorts, in which Westbrook’s adopts two contrasting modes of delivery, with a spectacular operatic aria juxtaposed with a spoken-word interrogation as a counterpoint. The effect is closer to a simultaneous internal monologue running across the song itself rather than a dialogue in the conventional sense. Meanwhile, the delicately picked neoclassical guitar is subject to interruption by clunks and distortion and occasional whirs and bleeps and the operatic vocal strays off kilter and the dream which drifted in twists and flickers with darker shades: not pronounced enough to be truly nightmarish, but unsettling.

The pair continue to explore the contrasts of melody and disharmony as Westbrook squeaks, squawks, trills, and purrs an infinite array of vocal gymnastics and Cooper’s guitar work, which chimes and treads delicately from folk to flamenco via classical streams, stamps on its own beauty with sudden and unexpected stops and stutters and forays into wrongness with stray notes and dissonance.

‘Superstar’ strays into the space which soundtracks a sense of derangement, the territory where things make no sense, and that place of incomprehension instils an unsettling confusion that borders on anxiety. ‘Modern Translation’ follows a similar trajectory: it’s a piece of magical neoclassical chamber music that’s twisted as if performed in an auditory hall of mirrors. Everything is wrong: something that should be soothing and beautiful is warped in a that it becomes unheimlich, eerie.

It’s hard to locate a touchstone or reference point for this: perhaps there are elements of later Scott Walker present, blended with hints of The Ex with its more avant-jazz leanings. One can only muse as to how they came to create this work: despite its clear foundations in the realms of classical and opera, Star Quality ventures so far from this path that it often bears little resemblance to any given style. The pieces evidently do have quite detailed and complex structures, as there’s nothing haphazard or uncoordinated about the way the two play together, but it’s impossible to decipher them from an outside perspective.

There’s a grand yet ethereal theatricality to ‘Bordering the Afterworld’, and ‘O’ soars and swoops and squeaks and whoops its way theatrically – and somewhat crazily – across some sprightly, if vaguely gothic-sounding guitar picking that suddenly, from nowhere, begins to buzz and thump. ‘The Time I Gave Up the Stage’ draws the curtain on an incredibly curious and as far off the wall as is imaginable.

Star Quality clearly has theatrical inspirations and aspirations, but shows two artists who are more interested in exploring their outer limits than taking the limelight in a mainstream setting – and for that, I applaud them.

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Mayflower Madame – A Foretold Ecstasy

Posted: 11 May 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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10th May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Back in April 2020, writing on the release of their second album, Prepared for a Nightmare, I remarked that it had been four years since their debut, Observed in a Dream, and it had felt like an eternity. And here we are, a further four years on, and ‘A Foretold Ecstasy’ has landed as the prelude to album number three, due in the autumn.

Here, they’re straight in with that tight, solid rhythm section – a chunky bass with a hint of chorus to fatten it out while also giving it that classic spectral goth sound, melded to a relentless four-four metronomic thump, minimal cymbals, no flamboyant fills, just taut, a tense, rigid spine around which the body of the song grows. This, of course, is the foundation of that vintage gothy / post punk sound which originated with The Sisters of Mercy and, thanks largely to Craig Adams – who is arguably one of the greatest bassists of all time by virtue of his simple style of nailing a groove and just holding it down for the duration – carried on in The Mission. The Mish may lack some of the style and certainly the atmosphere and lyrical prowess of The Sisters, but the musical ingredients – and in particular that unflinching rhythm section – are fundamentally the same. And so it is that while the dominance of that thunking bass and bash-bash-bash snare may have become something of a formula, it’s hard to beat and absolutely defines the genre.

Mayflower Madame have always sat more toward The Mission end of the spectrum, whipping up songs which owe a certain debt to Wayne Hussey’s layered, cadent guitar style. But what they bring that’s unique is a swirly, psychedelic / shoegaze hue, a fuzzy swirl of texture and light. There’s a dark decadence, a lascivious richness to Mayflower Madame that accentuates the dramatic aspects of the gothiness: theatrical, flamboyant, but without being hammy or campy. And of course, Trond Fagernes’ vocals drift in an ocean of reverb, and the cumulative effect isn’t simply atmospheric: it carries you away on a sea of mesmeric sound.

With layers of synth which drift like mist across a production that balances dreaminess with a driving urgency, ‘A Foretold Ecstasy’ floats between haunting verses and surging choruses – and it’s hinting at their best work to date.

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PHOTO CREDIT: MIRIAM BRENNE

Watch: ‘Hermaphroditus’ by Camerata Mediolanense

Posted: 10 May 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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CAMERATA MEDIOLANENSE unveil the occult video clip ‘Hermaphroditus’ as the second single taken from the Italian ensemble’s forthcoming new album Atalanta Fugiens ("Atalante Fleeing"), which is based on an enigmatic alchemist tome and slated for release on June 14, 2024.

Watch the video, directed by Alan Factotum and Carmen Onophrii, here:

CAMERATA MEDIOLANENSE comment: "The song ‘Hermaphroditus’ is based on the thirty-third emblem of the treatise ‘Atalanta Fugiens’ written by the German alchemist Michael Maier and released in 1617", composer, multi-instrumentalist, and choir vocalist Elena Previdi reveals. "The Hermaphrodite, also called rebis (‘double thing’), is the fruit of a chemical marriage between opposites: the masculine and the feminine, naturally, but also the sun and the moon, hot and cold, blood and milk, gold and silver, or even, as in this passage, sulfur and mercury. The Hermaphrodite therefore represents divine perfection, which is achieved at the cost of unspeakable suffering that underlies the process of transformation of derangement into stillness, and that underlies the conflict between delirium and reason. Musically, a timeless voice starts the tormented alchemical process generated by the two choirs and the two harpsichords. The direction of the music is clear and neat, but at the end the funeral march of the horns makes its way. "

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Erotic Secrets of Pompeii – The Wheel, the Spade, the Stars in Motion

Posted: 29 December 2023 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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6th December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

I hadn’t been looking for something that straddled Bauhaus’ more experimental cuts and David Devant and his Spirit Wife… But that’s how it goes. You don’t know what you want – or need – until you find it, and stuff lands on your lap when you least expect it. This is theatrical, crazy, over the top. It’s the sound of a band flipping out, melting down in every direction – more of a document of an electrical shock to the brain than the frazzled fizz of the frothing seafront.

‘The Wheel, the Spade, the Stars in Motion’ is no instant grab post-industrial froth: instead, it’s a frenetic electronic mania, all the froth and panic. The panic… the panic is real. It’s the soundtrack to waking up disorientated and wondering where the hell you are and what on earth is going on, and the video only adds to the bewilderment, the wackiness as surreal as the most inexplicable dream.

Strolling bass and wonky guitars are only half of a story which throws into the melting pot the sharp, sinewy guitar pop of Franz Ferdinand and the over the top agitated dramatics of The Associates.

The lyrics are utterly barking, but shouldn’t be dismissed as mere quirky nonsense: there’s a genuine poeticism and flair for language on display here.

The maid was in the garden

Disfigured by a bird

That reactionary raptor

Left her undeterred

The specksioneer made it clear

harpoon held aloft

Declaring that his love for her

could melt the permafrost

Playing with the tropes of the Elizabethan sonnet, but at the same time spinning circles of Surrealist imagery, Erotic Secrets of Pompeii are a unique proposition, and for all the warped oddness, which shouldn’t work but does, ‘The Wheel, the Spade, the Stars in Motion’ is a cracking single if you can step back from the craziness for long enough to reflect and absorb.

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John X Belmonte – Under the Stars of Andromeda

Posted: 26 December 2023 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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18th November 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

As my sweep-up of singles released a few weeks back but still in the later stages of 2023 continues, we come to John X Belmonte’s ‘Under the Stars of Andromeda’. The New Yorker has been slipping out slabs of dark alternative pop since 2020, and has maintained a fairly steady output these last three years. Citing David Bowie, Depeche Mode and Kate Bush as influences, he promises ‘Haunting atmospheres, beautiful melodies, driving rhythms, and rich sonorous vocals [which] draw the listener into his musical dream world.’

With perhaps the exception of Depeche Mode from Black Celebration and later, these touchstones don’t really convey just how gothy Belmonte’s work is. ‘Under the Stars of Andromeda’ is a dark, stark electro cut that pulsates and has all the ingredients of the kind of electrogoth which started coming through in the mid 90s. There are chilly layers of synth which drift and hang like a freezing fog to conjure murky atmosphere, and as the track evolves, it feels that we’ve left earth and are being carried through clouds of dust particles, floating free of any gravitational pull, and a thumping techno beat cuts in and takes things stratospheric.

It’s the vocal which really defines the sound, and the genre leanings, too: Belmonte’s baritone croon is theatrical, taking obvious cues from Andrew Eldritch and Peter Murphy, and it’s subject to heavy processing and compression, meaning that while it sits tightly within, rather than above the music, in terms of not only mix but tonal range, it feels detached, dehumanised. It’s effective, in that it sounds menacing, and sends a shiver down your spine, as you wonder just what he has in mind when he says ‘we’ll find a better place.’

The synth sounds may be trancey and expansive, but clocking in at four minutes, ‘Under the Stars of Andromeda’ is neat and compact, structurally, and the production is faultless.

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Watch: ‘A Victory of Dakini (Live)’ by Sigh

Posted: 16 June 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Following the announcement of the band’s new live album, ‘Live: Eastern Forces of Evil 2022’ and first single ‘Mayonaka no Kaii’. The band have unveiled their next track to come off the live album ‘A Victory of Dakini’.

The track is taken from the band’s visionary album ‘Scorn Defeat’, which the band will be performing in full, later this year at the UK’s Damnation Festival. The track, reminds us of the band’s beginnings and explores their more primitive style that would come to progressive into the fully fledged Sigh sound we know now.

The song details the story of a Japanese goddess ‘Dakini’ that rides on a white fox, according to Buddhist religion. Kujaku-Ou is a Japanese manga published around 1988 – 1991 and in it featured a lot of oriental occultism and were often the inspiration behind Sigh’s early material. Originally Dakiki is a goddess from India that would eat human flesh, however in Japan she is considered to be the goddess of sexual lust.

Mirai elaborates below:

‘A Victory of Dakini" is the opening track of our debut album "Scorn Defeat". I believe the first track of the first album is something special for most bands, and this is true to our case, too. Of course the song is way more primitive and simpler than what we are doing today, but obviously it’s got a magic feeling, which we will never ever recapture. "Dakini" is a goddess riding on a white fox in Buddhism. I wrote this song inspired by a Japanese manga, "Kujaku-ou".

‘A Victory of Dakini’ kicks off the live performance with ominous chanting before Sigh’s signature Death Metal crawl begins, conjuring all manner of otherworldly entities. The song itself is a masterful blend of Japanese culture with angular Death Metal precision, a style that has only been improved upon with each release right up until 2022’s ‘Shiki’.

Watch the video here:

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Sigh by POKO

Watch: ‘From The Mouths Of Beasts’ by Biomechanimal

Posted: 16 November 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Industrial metal band, Biomechanimal has just unleashed their epic new single and video, ‘From The Mouths Of Beasts’. The song is a celebration of all the music that became part of Biomechanimal’s influence; hard beats, epic orchestras, and a complete lack of reliance on genre boundaries.

’From The Mouths Of Beasts’ is a take on the phrase, ‘from the mouths of babes’, a concept in which children have a way of telling magnificent truths in their innocence. ‘From the mouths of beasts’ is the reverse of this.

We are surrounded by people, especially in the music industry, who use and use people, taking what they want from others, spouting whatever they like to get what the want. These people are incapable of truth and innocence. This is a song about them. Lines like ‘devolve to entropy’, ‘burn up my wings’, describe the effect these people have on others.

Recorded at Monolith Studio, "’rom the Mouth of Beasts’ s the focal point of the band’s efforts to reimagine themselves into something heavier, ferocious, and dramatic. Says Matt Simpson, “We wanted to commit to being as authentic as possible, with all our new material using studio drums (a first for the band)”. ‘From The Mouths Of Beasts’ is a far cry from Biomechanimal’s industrial and EBM beginnings.

Check the video here:

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Biomechanimal are a genre-smashing act from London, UK, mixing harsh vocals with massive bass design, huge guitars, and pounding kick drums. The brainchild of Matt Simpson, and active since 2013, the act have played from Finland to Australia, but are most often found in Slimelight, their home stomping ground, and have played shows with 3TEETH, Hocico, Aesthetic Perfection, and many more.

Biomechanimal has reinvented itself as one of the foremost bass acts in the UK, mixing the signature sound of the London underground with the brutal theatrical drama of orchestral metal. The proof is, of course, in the pudding, which has been sampled by venues all over Europe. After a string of releases in 2021 (including a vocal feature on Matteo Tura’s midtempo masterpiece Corrupt), the band has now unleashed their next single, "From the Mouth of Beasts" ahead of the upcoming EP.

Fronted by Matthew L. Simpson on production and vocals, Kekko Stefano Biogora on drums, Sarunas Brazionis on guitar, and Keith Kamholz on mixing & mastering, Biomechanimal is pulling out all the stops with a sound that is as menacing as it is immersive.

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