Wolf Parade, based in Quebec, synths meet guitars, akin to She Wants Revenge blinded by a disco ball. Infectious beat but there’s more to them than that, methinks.
Still not sure about Semi Precious Weapons: once you get past the bang factor of their potty-mouthed eponymous track, I think they might be just another garage band (albeit quite a good one).
I thought I should’ve liked Pendulum (heading our way), what, with all that black and a single called Witchcraft, but alas, despite some promising moments, it was all just too slick and ran off the ears.
And I still haven’t caught up with the latest long-player from The Dead Weather, whose previous, debut, album gave the ears a grand old workout (thanks, Jack).
Which leaves me contemplating the forthcoming tour of Peter Hook “and friends”, the Joy Division and New Order bassist playing JD’s Unknown Pleasures album in full, with other choice morsels from the catalogue. I’m struggling: it might be sensational, or it might just be a tribute band that happens to include an original band member. The presence of a resurrected Wreckery as support spices the deal, but still …
Speaking of JD, I’ve been listening to a lot of them lately, through headphones, and been surprised to hear yet more nuances I hadn’t detected previously. Martin Hannett, you were a genius working with very clever young men.
And finally, two new releases to cause impolite degrees of salivation: a new album from Android Lust, and a re-release of Concrete Blonde’s Bloodletting with tasty, remastered extras.
How to Destroy Angels is a new project featuring NIN mainman Trent Reznor – it’s mostly quiet, moody, elegant, with touches of Reznor’s industrial synths and arrangements pleasing to the ear. The band (comprised of Reznor, his wife Mariqueen Maandig on dreamy vocals, and NIN producer Atticus Ross) is offering a free six-track self-titled EP, or an upgraded version for US$2, at its website.
This clip for The Space In Between illustrates the style beautifully.
Parasite shakes things up a bit, with a Slip-like feel thanks to fuzz guitar and Reznor’s threatening vocals in the mix; Fur Lined is likewise upbeat but sans sharp edges.
The EP’s diversity and overall charm bodes well for the album – on its way!
I admit it — I’ve been dragging the technology chain. While many in my community are discussing which ebook reader to acquire (and oh, the temptation there!), I’ve only just entered the mp3 age. My first acquisition: an iPod Classic, black, 160Gb. That should hold the silence at bay! (But let us not forget, sometimes, silence is indeed golden.)
Why now? It was time, I figured. Time to stop carting CDs around the country, or relying on the paltry 100-song capacity of my voice recorder for emergency relief on aircraft. Time to overcome the jamming, jumping, slowly fritzing stacker in the boot of the car, and the bland if not annoying, repetitive, often facile radio. Time for something that offers the right music for the right moment, at the touch of a button.
But what to put on it? Everything! But no, let’s prioritise. Favourites, clearly; and now, alphabetically: Android Lust, yes; Bryan Adams, maybe not. Choices, choices… My, how our tastes have changed, and how, yet, we can’t quite let go of the old stuff, the formative stuff, the aural milestones on the musical journey to now.
It comes with a moment of mourning for artwork: from LP gatefolds to CDs and now to postage-stamp sized jpegs. Still pretty as the flick across the iPod screen, but not so much art as guidepost, now. The fanboy in me wants a cover to be signed; it wants liner notes. I know it’s all about the tunes, not the packaging, and my ear can’t really pick up the quality loss from file compression (though they say this AAC stuff is almost as good…), but still: can you sign my iPod mister?
And then there’s the accessories. A protective sleeve for the so-slim iPod, speakers for overnight on the road (aren’t these cute? small, light, bass boost, iPod recharging while you play: tick, tick, tick and tick).
You’d think this is the kind of stuff shop assistants would try to sell you when you were buying the original unit, but no: much more important to chat to your mate on the phone, reluctantly cradling him away on one shoulder for the time it takes to ring up the transaction, let alone show the customer some options. I don’t much need the value-adding at food counters, but when you’re buying tech, yeah, a little bit of effort would go a long way to helping the customer complete the set. But the dude saved me money because I found the gear I needed elsewhere and cheaper, so hey, cheers for that.
So now it’s back to the A-Z, that cycle of choose-burn-add-eject-artwork-choose, with one avaricious eye on the ebook readers: Kobo, BeBook, dare I say iPad…?
Benatar? Hell yes; but which? Or all? Choices, choices…
It’s thirty years ago today that Joy Division singer Ian Curtis took his own life. So sad, and such a waste. To mark the anniversary of a great songwriter and performer, one whose music has affected me deeply, here’s a tribute video pulled from the interwebs, set to a suitable anniversary song, New Dawn Fades:
Could be a good night for a Twenty-Four Hour Party People/Control double – two exceptional films, the first about Factory Records and their artists, the second an amazing biopic.
So I’m just about to say how much I enjoyed Jeff Martin’s gig at Ruby’s last night, and I see that Ronnie James Dio has died from stomach cancer. The little guy had a massive voice — anyone who saw him tour with the Heaven and Hell Sabbath tour had nothing but praise for him (alas, I was elsewhere, and now the opportunity is forever lost).
Maybe it’s fitting, then, that Jeff Martin’s Requiem-Hurt combo was a highlight of last night’s two-hour acoustic set, accompanied by Armada bass player Jay Cortez. This was their third night in a row, and Martin’s voice had taken on a huskiness that added to the impact of the slower tunes, but he didn’t favour it, giving each song everything he had.
This was my first outing at Ruby’s, an easy 30-minute drive from home and plenty of off-street parking, at least at eight on a Sunday night. It’s an atmospheric and intimate club, lots of black and red, and a wicked timber staircase down to the basement loos. Naturally, as it is these days, it seems, the crowd had its share of tossers who got more vocal during the night: I’ve never seen bouncers come to the front of the stage at a Jeff Martin gig before, and it was a relief when the manic-depressive domestic in front of us finally decided to take it outside.
But they managed to contain themselves for the opening songs, Morocco and the aforementioned Requiem. The set canvassed Martin’s career, including Tea Party favourites The Bazaar and Sister Awake rubbing shoulders with solo songs The Kingdom and Stay Inside of Me (a duet with support act, Brisbane singer pear), and Armada tunes The Rosary (written for his dead grandmother) and Line in the Sand, and a stomping encore double of Going Down and Black Snake Blues. Add a second duet (regret I didn’t catch the singer’s name), on the Peter Gabriel/Kate Bush hit Don’t Give Up (a RockWiz hit with Tina Arena), and a cover of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart, and it was a thoroughly enjoyable, emotionally charged concert. But then, his usually are, which is why, despite the aggravation of arseholes who chatter and elbow and take their flash photographs, I keep going back for more of the same (but never quite the same).
Martin is said to be withdrawing for a few months to work on a new album. Can’t wait for that!
The Cult played a full house at Melbourne’s grand concert hall, The Palais on the St Kilda foreshore, tonight, and it was everything I hoped it would be from the seminal ’80s rockers. Their music has filled many a mile of lonesome highway and provided a backdrop to plenty of get-togethers, so to see Ian Astbury strutting his stuff alongside guitarist Billy Duffy was just magic after all these years.
Astbury, still wielding one of the most distinctive voices in rock, wore black: black pants, shirt, jacket, gloves, sunnies. From my seat in the back row — and how well is the Palais designed, with its sloping floor and staggered seats, so the view was still phenomenal — he looked a little fuller in the face than in the band’s heyday, kind of a melding of, say, Jeff Martin and Bill Oddie, and of course a touch of Jim Morrison, whose swaggering shoes he’d filled out the front of the Riders on the Storm (the Doors tribute band, featuring members of the Doors) (I think I can get away with that gentle jibe, given the Cult’s roster has rotated around Astbury and Duffy).
At least he wasn’t hidden under a hoodie ($100 at the merch stand — men’s thin cotton tees $50, women’s $55) as he was in Brisbane.
Duffy looked remarkably unchanged, still playing his trusty Gretsch White Falcon (“the whole Love album is played on a Gretsch, it was the only guitar I owned’), given a rest only in the second set for a couple of ‘heavier’ numbers from the group’s later and largely ignored albums.
While Astbury didn’t scramble over the rather depleted Marshall stacks nor writhe upon the floor as in clips from the days of yore, he did groove, he did yarn, he did flick that long black hair, he did chuck the mic when it played up and he did give the tambourine a bloody great hiding: the heart of soul was still beating.
The band played two sets: the first consisted of the entire Love album, their breakthrough album from 1985 featuring singles Rain, Revolution and the Goth club favourite, She Sells Sanctuary (big cheers from the crowd for this one!). It took about an hour, the concert lit with basic lighting and a big screen of complementary video.
The second set, slightly shorter, was a ‘best of’ that wowed the crowd, hitting a slight lull during songs from Beyond Good and Evil and Born Into This (the latter album deserved more attention, IMHO), before ending on a wicked high with Fire Woman and Love Removal Machine. As Astbury said, they don’t play ‘pretentious’ encores, and after that set, it would’ve been superfluous anyway. (And encores are a bit wanky, aren’t they? They’re expected now, formula, no longer an accolade for the deserving.) The sunglasses had come off for the second set, so he could kind of get away with poking fun at pretension.
Earlier, Astbury, still showing a bit of an 80s touch with critters’ bushy tails hanging from his belt — the kind of thing you’d expect to see flapping from a bogan’s car antenna or perhaps wrapped around an elder Lady’s neck, its little black eyes staring at you from beside her bejeweled brooch and powdered cleavage — remarked how rock concerts weren’t as intense as they used to be. No ripping up of seats. In the US, he said, the audience tended to stay seated. Not so in Melbourne, though he did poke fun at a few who somehow defied the driving rhythm section. And at the time I thought he was coming across as a bit of an old whiner, harking back to the good old days. But then, as the phones came out and the texting and the tweeting took off, and the bint next to us insisted on flashing off her camera every three bars or so for the entire duration of the song, I realised he was actually quite right. It’s not enough to be there, headbanging with the thrill of hearing Astbury scream out Wildflower (though this take tonight was a little muddy, to be honest); you’ve got to take pictures of your pals during the song. You’ve got to let everyone know RIGHT NOW that you’re there. That’s if you’re not noodling off to the bar and missing it entirely. Dangerous ground for a man now blogging his rapturous headbanging experience? Maybe.
Bottom line is this: The Cult came, they rocked, it was awesome. (Andy, I wish you could’ve been there, brother.)
I’d be tempted to hit tonight’s gig at The Palace, if I wasn’t gonna be elsewhere.
PS Sydney’s Black Ryder supported, and also looked pretty good, and sounded just fine, though I regrettably missed most of their set, having been in line for the slightly over-priced but very fetching Cult merch. I hope they have more tricks up their sleeve than the fuzzy guitar.
Foodie aside: before the gig, we hit amigos and got fired up on cajun chicken burritos and extra jalapenos, washed down with Crushed Fairy cocktails (key ingredient: absinthe) and Sol beer. Rockin! I love the way you can walk down these cafe streets in this town and just pick one, and find it sweet.
Apparently, May 22 is World Goth Day. I’m not sure what that entails — I thought every day was Halloween for the children of the night. The website suggests it’s about music and shopping. Maybe it’s mainstream appropriation that’s pushing the subculture, or a motivated part thereof, to stand up and be counted, even if it’s better known for slouching in the shadows, content to be, if not revelling in, not understood. But hey, if it means someone’s playing Siouxsie and the Mission and the like, well, I’m all for it. And the good thing is, I can go as I am.
It’s one of those windy, now rainy and chilly, days in old Melbourne town, and I’ve been tapping away at adding new flesh to old bones fuelled by copious amounts of coffee and the new album by the superb Ego Likeness. The clip is of a tune from the album, Breedless, distinctive and easy on the ears while the rain patters on the roof.
Emerging writers might like to check out the awesome manuscript workshop collaboration between the Queensland Writers Centre and Hachette Livre which is now open.
Like some passion with those fangs? Ticonderoga Publications want your paranormal romance short story for their follow-up anthology, More Scary Kisses.
On a sad note, Australian small press Brimstone reports it won’t be publishing Australian Dark Horror and Fantasy 4, nor will it be continuing with the series.
But in good news, Ben Payne has released issue 1 of his new, free, online mag, Moonlight Tuber.
It seems it’s true. Blabbermouth has confirmed the rumour that Peter Steele, lead singer of Brooklyn band Type O Negative, is dead. It’s a damn sad day for Gothic rock.
Here’s a clip of the very cool Black No1: check out Pete’s amazing voice. Damn.
A recent blog post from Mil about Brisbane band The Horse Darkly led to this sweet cover of Suzanne Vega’s Luka, which got me thinking about other neat cover songs. I’ve got a bit of a love-hate relationship with these critters: sometimes they can make you look at a song in a totally different light, sometimes they seem to pay true homage, and other times they just suck.
Here are 13 darkly tinged standouts:
Nine Inch Nails,Dead Souls (Joy Division): if you’re gonna cover JD, you’ve gotta do it with soul, and Trent Reznor amps it up in this whiz cover from The Crow soundtrack.
And the original! (amazing, isn’t it, how majesty can surpass such poor vision and sound…)
Concrete Blonde, Everybody Knows (Leonard Cohen): a gorgeous song gains from Johnette Napolitano’s smoky voice and Jim Mankey’s guitar. See also the band’s cover of Bob Dylan’s Twist of Faith. Johnette offers two superb covers (of The Scientist and All Tomorrow’s Parties) on her solo album, Scarred.
Inkubus Sukkubus, Paint It Black (Rolling Stones): witchy Gothic synth-rock puts a new shade on the Stones’ ode to depression.
The Shroud, Alice (Sisters of Mercy): Goth band covers Goth band, with strings!
Marilyn Manson, Sweet Dreams (Eurythmics): take a great pop song and cast it darkly — it’s a tactic that works well for Manson, who has also done the business on Tainted Love.
Type O Negative, Summer Breeze (Seals and Crofts): another Gothic take on an otherwise breezy little ditty.
Johnny Cash, Hurt (Nine Inch Nails): Cash puts his own crown of shit on the NIN tune. He repeats the dose on Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus.
Rammstein, Stripped (Depeche Mode): Want to put a Germanic twist on the DM classic? Just add drums and guitars. Loud ones.
