Tearist. CDR.

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. ~Albert Camus

Holy fucking fuck. This.

A Siouxsie-Salem-Suicide goth freak-scene making out with the memory of the Cocteau Twins, trying to find out what really made Elizabeth Fraser’s voice quaver so ecstatically. Yasmine Kittle (really) bleats round, aching, bruise-black moans and screams over sticky-fingered synth fugues and clittery-clacking subway-track beats. It’s dark and powerful and flushed with sex.

I keep thinking, goddamn, why doesn’t anybody make music like this anymore? Not “like this” in the sense of sounding like the bands I think they sound like—although that counts, too—but “this” in the sense of a band that arrived just for you, that says here I am, singing in your voice, even if you cannot make these sounds. Something that can infuse you and take over your DNA. I can barely remember the last time I fell fucking hardcore for a band. Maybe it’s my age; maybe I listen to too much music to be intimate with any one album anymore, but this makes me want to string up Christmas lights over our bed and commence with the gettin’ it on.

Digging for music is looking to find your true heart. Or to rediscover it, to bare your chest to a melody’s dart, slipped like a needle through your red heart and suturing you with long, swooping silver threads, a riotous fray of impossible roller-coaster loops and knots strung like telegraph wires to passing clouds and buzzsaws and dizzy helicopter-seedlings and fractured cups of papershell eggs and fingernail clippings and nothing at all and nothing more so than (and above all) Fuchsia.

Memory is a graveyard of carefully stowed cardboard boxes and index cards; things you’ve snipped off with shears hoping to preserve. But I still want them in me. I stop the world. I melt with her. I pull out my web of veins and peel them back like I’m unrolling an elegant glove, until it hangs like a mirror from my fingertips, and press the tips and tracery into the ground, or into the mossy, crushed-velvet cave between her legs,

(legs, hips and arms smooth and taut as a sapling, her gamine body, the pearlescent skin of a crepe-myrtle draped around a tangle of antlers, her scapula and pelvis revealing themselves in subcutaneous parabolic swells like waves in the ocean, and at the apex of her inner thighs, two creamy divots like the first scoop from a clean spoon through a freshly opened box of vanilla ice cream)

but every pulse and fluid surge between us ticks off another perfect sphere of unrecoverable time—glass candle grenades strung like morse-code crystals on chandelier strands stretching back into the inky black nebula of a startled squid’s ejaculate—time making its slipstream getaway the moment it’s been noticed.

I worry that I am succumbing to nostalgia. Things used to be different and I was used to that. But it’s still the same (and new) every time.

I need to hit play again.


Tearist

Sex Church. Dead End/Let Down.

It seems inevitable that a goth band would eventually name themselves Sex Church. I'm just surprised it didn't happen twenty-five years ago. The genre was already awash in religious/erotic iconography (I used to have this sweet t-shirt that combined a medieval painting of the Virgin Mary with a similar painting of Jesus in such a way that made her look both topless and intersex), and everybody knows goths like to make out in graveyards and old churches. Even a large contingent of my non-goth friend’s stories of their first time begin with, “So, I was away at church camp…”

Dead End rides a stomping, Bauhausian bass line out of the gloom before wading knee-deep into a black pool of fuzz and feedback. From there it takes off on an endless, mesmerizing blanket of deep purple tones and crushed velvet vortexes. Chiming guitars skitter and pluck at silver threads while the rest of the band ascends a hypnotic Spacemen 3 riff that becomes the song’s driving force. At the last minute, they suddenly perform a graceful swan dive and explode into a joyful chorus of Jesus & Mary Chainisms. The B-side is more gloom and dirge; smeared lipstick to the a-side’s electric tangle of bird’s nest hair.

Sex Church is made up of former members of Catholic Boys, Vapid, and Ladies Night, none of whom I am familiar with, although I notice that Nick G was in The Tears.

They have a new EP out on Convulsive Records, too.

Sex Church

The Birthday Party. Peel Sessions.

The only hits the Birthday Party ever landed were to their audience’s guts. “Dangerously unhinged” barely begins to describe their mutant hybrid of punk, goth, funk, improvisational jazz and psychotic-sleaze-blues.

The band seemed locked in a death-battle with melody, thrashing and throttling the life out of it, often sounding like each member was playing a different song to the others. Meanwhile, Nick Cave strutted and preened like a demonic carnival barker daring you to buy a ticket to the most depraved freak-show around.

Their bared-teeth wit and gleeful nihilism sound like nothing else ever attempted. “Wherefore art thou, babyface?”, Cave screeches, summoning the haints and voodoo-dollies that haunt the roots of rock and outlaw country—spavined vinyl gods out for a final, delirious spin.

Peel

Rose of Avalanche. First Avalanche.

Like the In Rock album, First Avalanche was the result of another dispute with their record label. Unlike NEMS, who could never get The Boys’ albums out on time, Leeds Independent Label was so eager to cash in on Rose of Avalanche that they rarely waited for the group to finish a whole album, instead jumping the gun and issuing collections of singles and b-sides without the band’s consent. This one came out in 1986, just as the band signed to Fire Records.

ROA never fit snugly into any one category, boasting a big, stadium ready sound that amalgamated elements of Lou Reed by way of Felt by way of David Bowie by way of Bauhaus by way of the Doors. Singer Philip Morris’ voice has the requisite deep-death twang, and Glen Schultz’s guitar alternated between blistering and stately. They sound oddly American for a band with indie-goth aspirations, and occasionally they succumb more to mannerism than inspiration, but for an unauthorized compilation, there’s still plenty of good songs—particularly A Stick In the Works, A Thousand Landscapes, and L.A. Rain.

First Avalanche

ROA official website

ROA on myspace

Kitchen and the Plastic Spoons. Best Off.

Wonderfully manic, deranged, tightly-wound, minimal, cold-wave synth band that sounded like a Teutonic Siouxsie fronting Liliput covering Devo. Fantastically barking mad in all the right ways. This was out of print for a while, but I believe you can buy a copy from the band on their myspace page.

Now is the time on Sprockets vhen ve dance: Happy Funeral, Liberty, The Poet (kind of bauhaus-y), Filmen, Polska Korridoren, Instrumental

Best Off

K&TPS on myspace

K&TPS official website

Garmarna. Vittrad.

During our Michigan years we got an early version of the fX Channel, which at the time played kitschy old syndicated shows interspersed between a sprawling, silly "Morning Show" that took place in a fake apartment. They interviewed guests in bathrooms, bands performed in the bedroom, there was a bit much like Antiques Roadshow where people brought in stuff to be appraised and you could call in and bid on it, pets were everywhere, and I believe one of the hosts may have been a puppet. One of the segments was Sound fX which covered a pretty eclectic range of music. They were playing Garmarna in the background one night and the reviewer described it as "medieval Pink Floyd", which really isn't true ("Fairport Convention for Cave Trolls" would have been more apt), but it does have an intricate, interlocking, grinding, wooden clockwork sound. Sort of like A Saucerful of Secrets with a puslating beat; something a gnome named Grimble Grumble would have danced to.

Essentially, it's ancient Swedish folk music played on violins, bag-pipes, violas, lutes, bowed harps, Jew's harps, bouzouki, electric guitars, and a hurdy-gurdy. Only, instead of folk music, it sounds more like the way Page and Plant were approaching their old Zeppelin tunes during their reunion tour. In fact, it's the sort of raw, windswept tundra, viking-metal that Zeppelin aspired to but never reached during their Hobbit-rock phase.

Klevabergselden is particularly apocolyptic. It's world music, but not the kind that gets played in free trade coffee shops. Think instead of something gothy, like Dead Can Dance or Miranda Sex Garden. This is probably Garmarna's most primal album. They got a lot more polished and industrial on later releases, but most of the fans seem to consider this to be their pinnacle.

Vittrad

Garmarna official site

Garmarna on myspace

Rose of Avalanche. In Rock.

For some reason, even though I know they were British, my mental catalog card for these guys tags them as being from some not quite identifiable European country with a flan-based economy. Oh, let’s say…Finland. Somewhere that learned English idioms and phraseology from SNL’s Two Wild and Crazy Guys, which could account for their rather awkward moniker and an album title so bland it almost sounds pretentious. Or maybe I’m just being led astray by the Fjarkorgstanian titles of a few of the songs. While I’m piling on—that guy in the middle up there looks like a really clammy Richard Ashcroft.

Anyway, despite all of that, In Rock does in fact, you know…rock. Numerous places describe them as goth, and while they do sound conspicuously like Bauhaus or Sisters of Mercy on more than one occasion, they also remind me of Echo and the Bunnymen and The Mighty Lemon Drops. I’d say they were more post-punk with shades of Television-like grandeur. Either way, they’ve been undeservedly overlooked. Not Another Day and Height of the Clouds Part 2 are particularly storming and should have been enough to make them at least minor stars.

In Rock

Rose of Avalanche official site

Rose of Avalanche on myspace

Cure. Pornography Tour 1982.

With taut, claustrophobic, skeleton-dry tracks like these, The Cure laid down the template for countless doom-’n-dance bands to follow, though nobody’s equaled the harsh, majestic gloom they conjure here.

The Pornography album reeks of illness, as if the whole band was suffering from hallucinatory fevers during the recording sessions. The drums beat out a martial rhythm, propelling and grounding the songs, but also sounding accusatory, as if they had their own secret agenda. Guitars stutter and stab, and lead singer, Robert Smith, wails from a black hole of depression.

Figurehead’s opening line, “It doesn’t matter if we all die”, sets the tone, and it doesn’t get any cheerier. It’s one of those albums that “gets you through high school” (or whatever difficult period you’re in), by generally being more dark, isolated and vicious than you could ever hope to be.

The Cure barely survived recording Pornography. In fact, I can’t think of an album that sounds more like the band making it hated every instant of it. And yet, from that, they pulled off a masterpiece. There’s a steely determination in the way they crafted an album as ugly and frightening as they felt at the time. It’s all the more menacing for the way you can feel them holding themselves back, doing a sinister ballet on the line between abandon and despair, and outright nihilism. It helps, of course, that they know how to write killer songs. Underneath all the gloom, it’s obvious that every wail, scrape and clang is as well thought out and placed as the handclaps and violins of any “normal” perfect-pop track.

Live, it takes on an even more oppressive quality. So, enjoy. This kind of hurt is timeless.

Cure Pornography Tour

Official Cure site

Cure on myspace