Goth In All Its Glory-The New Wave – Take 93
Sunday, 09 August 2015 03:40
When this week’s package arrived from HQ it was a really mixed bag that got me thinking about what we get sent as scribes, the initial sift through by the machine that dictates who out of us gets what, is almost like a rock and roll match.com. (Now there’s an idea). My point? It’s based on what someone else writes and the machine picks out the scribe with the nearest or most compatible taste, not always to the best effect. We’ve all had those dates from hell and as we’ve got older we tend to avoid some things like the plague!
So what’s my point to this pre-amble? Well, contained within my latest package were two titles, both classed as Goth, if you read the blurb, but as far away from what I would class as Goth music as it can possibly be. Almost like picking a blonde and a red-head turns up, remember Johnny H? Now Goth or Gothic music to me began back in 1979, interesting times indeed as post punk began to kick in I had the Mod revival, I had a Ska revival, the NWOBHM, the beginnings of industrial music, very early New Romantics, Psychobilly and more to the point bands the beginnings of what I would categorize as “Gothic”.
Who were those early bands? UK Decay for one, a fledgling Siouxsie And The Banshees, and for me the band that personified the early genre Bauhaus. Who can forget the opening scene of The Hunger, Pete Murphy in a cage singing the unforgettable ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, awe-inspiring.
Then the music mutated and we moved into a black (pun intended) or even purple patch where the likes of Sisters Of Mercy, Fields Of The Nephilim, Sex Gang Children, Theatre Of Hate and Killing Joke all held sway. You’re probably starting to pick up that if anything, Goth was a bit of a sub-culture that grew out of the Punk scene, worth remembering that.
As more and more bands got tagged with the label it began to diversify, from All About Eve to Celtic Frost, from Balaam And The Angel to Paradise Lost. It doesn’t matter how we look at it, thinking back to where it came from there’s no link to that initial genre that gave birth to it, that has long gone. Because jump forward further and we begin to hit the Evanescence/Within Temptation/Marilyn Manson times and what is now classed as Goth or Gothic no longer has that punk feel. That crucial bit of an edge. Okay maybe Manson did initially have it but he soon lost it to MTV. And it’s become more baroque, almost Heavy Metal in its leanings, waiting for the next nudge to further mutate into something different, maybe the record companies at some point will let us decide what to call things and maybe we’ll just class it as music, good, bad or indifferent and not try to harken to the past.
So on to the albums that prompted this preamble, first up:
Sündenrausch (Sin Noise) definitely sounds better in the original German, and their album ‘Sündstoff’ which whilst it isn’t Goth, there is a hell of an Evanescence feel to it. Vocalist Kira Hempel really has that operatic feel, but did we really need the ‘Dr Feelgood’ intro to ‘Hier and Jetz’ (Here And Now)? There’s a fair rock feel next with ‘Heute Nacht’ (Tonight), led by the vocals and some cracking guitar licks. I found as I listened the LP whilst being entirely sung in German, to actually be a relatively easy listen, even if you do have to try and work out what the song is about. With titles such as ‘Poems’, ‘Lost Understanding’, ‘Connected Forever’ and ‘Scars’ (I hope) you should be able to get the feeling of lost love/despair and darkness which I think the music is trying to convey. All things that are definitely classed as Gothic but remember the movement came from the punk scene hence the Take 93 of this article’s title. It’s not what I‘d call Goth BUT WHAT DO I KNOW? It’s actually OK well worth a listen and one I’d recommend to the MTV Generation of Goths not the Old School that I fit into.
Next up, and straight out of Germany we have singer/songwriter and poet? Florian Grey, and ‘Gone’ an album which is very different to Sündenrausch largely due to it being male vocals to start with, but secondly all sung in English sand thirdly owing more to Electronica as a genre.Now Florian Grey is one man throwing together his own influences and what comes out the other end actually hints more towards Muse at its most Prog than anything Gothic. Depeche Mode at its most Electronic too but I have to say this is really not for me and the more I listen to it the more I dislike it, I really don’t like the vocal delivery, and if you can imagine a pseudo Goth Meatloaf you’ll start to get the idea why. This is as far from the original Goth ideals as you could possibly get, but if you like, let’s call it Dark Pop, with tracks like ‘Demons’, ‘Laudanum’ and ‘Black Symphony’, then you along with all those MTV kids will truly lap it up.
So let’s get back to the start the rock and roll match.com. The program that whirrs into play at HQ, every time something new comes in needs a bit of a debug, or maybe some record companies need to brush up with their descriptions and then they might just get their product to the right reviewer. I’m sure we have someone on the team who loves a bit of Meat ? But they’ll probably never admit it.
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