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Alixandrea Corvyn makes her deserved bid for fame.
This is Alixandrea Corvyn, of Last July and Rhombus and various previous bands. It’s a cover of “White Rabbit”, but with this grasp of imagery she’s on the right track. This video is just made to be...
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Strap On Halo: Altar of Interim EP, Prayers for the Living CD (2016).
Strap On Halo are a goth rock band from the goth scene. This is unfortunate, insofar as not even current goths are interested in current goth music — it’s a subculture of new clothes and old music. As...
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Reviews: Amy’s Arms, Foster Body, Uranium Club (2016).
Today we hit the Bandcamp for various recommendations of mates’ mates’ bands. Send yours in! At worst it’ll be ignored. AMY’S ARMS: My Dear Violet — Toronto indie goth rock band with dual female vocals...
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Links: cultural markets in late capitalism, Patricia Morrison, the 1938...
The consumer markets are not for you any more, and particularly not the cultural ones. A nice interview with Patricia Morrison of the Gun Club, Sisters of Mercy and the Damned. Restoring a synthesizer...
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Reviews: Vanguard, Dark Narrows, Navvi (2016).
VANGUARD: Never Surrender (Infacted) — EBM is rather closer to ’80s Hi-NRG disco than its proponents will generally admit. Ian Levine with an Access Virus and a shouty bloke on top. Probably more...
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David J. of Bauhaus on Alan Moore, interviewed by Phil Sandifer.
David J. Haskins is not just the other guy from Bauhaus (the person Peter Murphy was talking about when he said he wasn’t going to sing anyone else’s lyrics ever again), he’s also an old mate and...
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Reviews: Deerful, Brandy Kills, Milan (2016).
DEERFUL: Without Borders — Deerful time again already? Excellent. This is atmospheric floaty pop that nevertheless nails its chorus into your head with relentless efficiency. It’s also a political song...
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Dark wave: Voight, LisaWars, Dear Deer (2016).
VOIGHT: Malware — some bands played Movement by New Order and heard a manifesto for action. This record suggests to me potential for a short rambling thesis on Movement as a template for non-goth...
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Reviews: Massenhysterie (2015), The Big Sun, Dyan (2016).
MASSENHYSTERIE: Massenhysterie EP — “kinky electro punk”, or Neue Deutsche Welle revival from Austria: authentic “we just bought our first MS-20” sound, shouting in German and unfortunate tendency to...
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Witch house: I’d make myself a majickal sandwich.
Witch House is a made-up genre that became real. It was invented as an in-joke and now goth DJs claim they play “witch house”. Perhaps the secret ingredient is the gr▲†u‡†Øu§ Un‡cØd3. The closest to a...
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Post-punk: Belgrado, Radar Eyes, Rakta (2016).
BELGRADO: Obraz (La Vida Es Un Mus) — old-style homemade dub-leaning sparse post-punk. Compressed collage fragments, fraught with meaning, assembled just right. And it’s all sung in Polish. There’s a...
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Synthpop: Crystal, Vile Electrodes, Hante (2016).
CRYSTAL: “Ride”; “Ride” (All-Night Remix) — “Synthwave” is a Bandcamp tag that mostly means “I can’t find a vocalist”. In musical terms it sounds like frenetic synth-lead and Linn drum film themes...
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Reviews: Arsia Line, The Primary Colors, Lindy Vision (2016).
ARSIA LINE: The Beyond — straight-up unabashed witch house, in the wild, in my reviews! May or may not have lasting qualities, but it’s certainly pleasant enough for eight minutes. Spooky darkwave...
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Witch house is the new coldwave: totally not goth video links.
Nivek Ogre of Skinny Puppy being interviewed by a kid. Nivek is just super nice. This is wonderful. What goth clubbing was like in 1984: The Height of Goth: 1984: A Night at the Xclusiv Nightclub....
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Reviews: Black Arcade, Atlantic A.M., Bootblacks (2016).
BLACK ARCADE: Transhuman — the Gary Numanesque synth intro line made friends with me immediately. (And now I’m thinking about what makes it sound like that; might be the implicit I4-ii chord...
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Reviews: Frustration, Logic + Olivia, Beborn Beton, Disjecta Membra (2016).
The latest works from bands who’ve been around a while. FRUSTRATION: Empires of Shame (Born Bad) — post-punk of the variety that was just punk rock a couple of years on. Not quite post-punk revival....
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Reviews: Crack Cloud, Night Trap, Ivy Fae (2016).
CRACK CLOUD: Crack Cloud — This caught my attention from the first note of “More of What”, as something tagged “post-punk” that gets into the funkier style of the time, something you hardly hear...
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Reviews: Nápoles, Damsel in the Dollhouse, Digital Logic (2016).
So I use the Bandcamp new arrivals as a radio, so what, so should you. NÁPOLES: Nápoles — “Valentina” is jangly guitar indie with a simple but attention-catching intro. The chords are cliched, but...
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Celebrate the day with a goth pool party.
Four goth girls, ten black bath bombs, champagne … “It’s Monday night it’s after 9pm, I’m home alone with my dog, so …” (“How is it you can go to three different continents, and see goths doing the...
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The Danse Society: goth rock roads not quite taken.
The first Danse Society album, Seduction from 1982 (that’s the original mini-album plus early singles version on YouTube), has mostly turned from post-punk inchoate strangeness to straight-up goth rock...
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Links: Jon Langford and the Sisters of Mercy, J. G. Ballard’s house, your...
Jon Langford of the Mekons and The Three Johns on his time with the Sisters of Mercy. J. G. Ballard’s house is up for sale again, and this time they’re advertising him as a feature. Awful yellow...
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Reviews: Tetrolugosi, Makoto Kino, A.D. Mana, Foretaste (2016).
TETROLUGOSI: Tetrolugosi II — sp00py music for goths that isn’t at all goth rock, done on assorted keyboards, theremin and bass guitar. Cheesy as hell, but nevertheless pretty good and fun with it....
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Reviews: Rose and the Diamond Hand, Venus Hum, Hand In Waves (2016).
ROSE AND THE DIAMOND HAND: Universe Is Woman (German Shepherd) — old-school post-punk goth rock with real drums from Manchester, led by Rose Niland and her excellent voice. The songs and playing are...
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Reviews: The Pineapple Thief, Trance To The Sun, Scandinavia (2016).
THE PINEAPPLE THIEF: Your Wilderness (Kscope) — “post-progressive,” which I thought was a term meaning “you’re allowed to program loops in Ableton on it.” This appears to all be musicianship, though....
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Synthpop reviews: Cloud Spell, Cavendish Laboratory, Seaofsin (2017).
CLOUD SPELL: Yarrow (Fobe) — minimal synth with ethereal dreampop female vocals, with songs strong enough not to ride on the effects. Sometimes the instrumentation is a bit too minimised and the song...
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Electro pop: Cyborgdrive, Lebanon Hanover , Katja von Kassel (2016, 2017).
CYBORGDRIVE: Majestic Land (Amuza) — electrified disco that verges on synthwave, but takes in more influences and a wider perspective. Not quite EBM, but seems to have fans in that sphere. They’ve...
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Post-punk in black: Posh Lost, Masquerade, 1919 (2016).
POSH LOST: Posh Lost (Mirror Universe) — straightforward post-punk revival. There’s more than a little Pixies, Smiths, Interpol and Editors in there. Their tastes in bassline-driven ’80s indie and...
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Essays by Post(Graduate)Punk: Crass, Sisters of Mercy, Psychic TV.
Post(Graduate)Punk is a Tumblr blog that seems to have stopped about a year ago, but I’ve been enjoying their pointers and rambling opinionation on punk, post-punk and the stuff that’s been...
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Reviews: Quimper, Chrysta Bell and David Lynch, Black Tape for a Blue Girl...
QUIMPER: Retrieval (Soft Bodies) — quiet atmospheric and somewhat sp00ky instrumental pieces. The piano-based “Boundry” introduces you gently. My other favourite was the title track “Retrieval”....
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Reviews: Artefact, Ritual Howls, La Orden (2016, 2017).
ARTEFACT: Votive Offering (Adagio 830) — debut album from a goth-leaning Welsh post-punk guitar band with anarchopunk and folk-punk influences. The proper punky dry demo-tape sound, rather than an...
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Reviews: Traitrs, Vanguard (2016, 2017).
TRAITRS: Rites and Ritual (Pleasence) — angsty guitar post-punk driven by the drums with a high bass. The precursor to goth rock as we knew it, back when you’d learn of this stuff from the front...
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Reviews: Amyl and the Sniffers, Bestial Mouths (2016, 2017).
AMYL AND THE SNIFFERS: Big Attraction — trashy St Kilda rockabillyish cowpunk that sounds on the surface like less work than it probably was and catches the attention more than you’d expect from what...
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Alixandrea Corvyn, Amongst Animals, Near Death Experience, Tangerinecat —...
I automatically staked out my life-long spot at stage right, leaning on the PA. I grabbed this spot in 1985 and shall not relinquish it. Tangerinecat started with a super-loud electronic bass loop....
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Purple Fog Side: The Discord (2017).
PURPLE FOG SIDE: The Discord (SkyQode) — a Russian band who call themselves goth and play trancy techno pop on an industrial label. New album, after the previous collection. This album is all vocal,...
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Seeming: Sol (2017).
Seeming’s new album Sol: A Self-Banishment Ritual (Artoffact) is out today. Go to Bandcamp and preview it and probably buy it, it’s good. The CD version has a bonus disc, which is actually the...
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Hante: Between Hope & Danger (2017).
HANTE: Between Hope & Danger (Synth Religion) — after the excellent No Hard Feelings EP, we have the much anticipated second full album from Hélène de Thoury. The record this keeps reminding me...
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Reviews: Marsy, HYTS, Dreams Are Like Water (2017).
MARSY: Sweet-Sides — “Vaporwave” is probably even worse as an adjective than it is as a noun. But for sure Montréal’s Marsy partakes of it, though that’s not all she does. The music is frenetic...
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Reviews: Elektrostaub, The Frozen Autumn, Nervenbeisser (2017).
These should be up on the Echozone Bandcamp in due course. ELEKTROSTAUB: “Also Without You” (Echozone) — Hi-NRG bass and into intertwining EBM sawtooth lead lines. Vocals by Anne Goldacker of Obscyre...
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Reviews: The Big Sun (2016), Autumn (2017), Snog (1992, 2017).
THE BIG SUN: The Barely Formed Offspring of our Half Conceived Ideas — just a couple of months after last year’s Lonely Girl, though I missed it at the time. This is more of the same: ridiculously...
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Links: Black post-punk, plagiarism, contextualising music, John Lurie’s...
Post-punk.com versus ahistoricality: Non-white goths and post-punks. What goes into a plagiarism analysis. The trouble with placing the context for an interesting new thing in 2017: a rock critic’s...
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Reviews: Fires, Second Still (2017), Duran Duran (1979).
FIRES: Red Goes Grey (Metropolis) — harsh dance synthpop that doesn’t call itself “industrial” or “EBM,” though it totally is. There’s also a fair whack of synthwave influence, though it’s not...
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The Frozen Autumn: The Fellow Traveler (2017).
Are you into synthpop? Have you been sad since Wolfsheim stopped releasing music? Do you believe in heaven above, do you believe in love? Do yourself a favor and check out The Frozen Autumn’s November...
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The Cascades: Diamonds and Rust (2017).
While the rest of the world moves, changes, shifts, reshapes itself, and discovers irony you can always return to the comforting refuge of goth rock, which seemed to largely ossify in the late...
View ArticleReviews: Aboleth, Zanias (2016, 2018).
Writing about music is the most ridiculous notion, and the review pile is only getting larger. So I’ll give just embedding players and mumbling something a go. This works for me, and that’s the...
View ArticleLinks: Bauhaus, WFMU Free Music Archive saved, post-punk indie labels, Pete...
Bauhaus have released the other recordings from the “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” session. Here’s David J talking about the session. The WFMU Free Music Archive has found a new home — it’s been bought by...
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Gary Numan: Savage (Songs from A Broken World) (2017).
For those most familiar with the classic synth-pop Gary Numan, which included a string of hits such as ‘Are Friends Electric?’, ‘Cars’, ‘Down in the Park’, ‘Music for Chameleons’, ‘She’s Got Claws’,...
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Boy Harsher: Careful (2019).
Careful (Nude Club Records) is the new Boy Harsher album, and it’s a qualitative leap over the “Country Girl” EP, which was a qualitative leap over Yr Body Is Nothing. If you’d told me Body had...
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Records: Cortez (2018), Statiqbloom, various goths (2019).
CORTEZ: No More Conqueror (Cheap Satanism) — played this in the background while I was doing other things, and kept noticing it and thinking “hey, this sounds good.” Metallic post-hardcore with lots of...
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Records: P.H.O.B.O.S. (2021), The Birthday Massacre (2022).
P.H.O.B.O.S.: Bleaker Beater (Megaton Mass Products) — An unpleasant bloody racket. The tags include “black metal”, but the sounds are more along the lines of high-powered electrical industrial...
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Justine Ó Gadhra-Sharp: Sídhe (2022).
JUSTINE Ó GADHRA-SHARP: Sídhe EP (UTM) — A nicely varied EP from a veteran of the New Zealand goth scene. This was actually recorded in the early 2000s and the recordings were finally polished up and...
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