It’s the beginning of the month of Արաց (Arats) by the old
Armenian calendar. Everyone’s recovering
from their holiday hangover and it’s back to business as usual; as a result,
it’s a dismal time of the year for a lot of people. But for those of us stuck
in Florida, it’s one of only maybe four months out of the year where you can walk
outside and not need a shower every time you come back in because the humidity
reduces you to a sweaty, swampy mess. And it actually cools down at night. So, I’m trying to enjoy it while I can.
I have been just drowning in new music lately, between a 30-track
compilation album I purchased this week and all of the weekly podcasts I listen
to. Every time I get new music off Bandcamp or something and don't buy a physical copy, I burn the MP3s onto blank CD's, because I like to listen to it in the car or on my boom box (I guess I'm probably what the youngsters would consider a hipster too). I haven't even listened to all the CD's I've burned in the last month. I don’t have enough time to focus on all of it. I know, first world
problems. It’s like complaining that your refrigerator is too full. I think I
may need to just take a break from listening to new music and focus on what I
have for a while. As of now, here are the top three songs that are powering me
through the weather-roulette that is Florida winter.
Click here for an explanation of my tradition of keeping track of my top
3 songs each month, and last month’s picks.
[:SITD:] – Revelation (Solitary Experiments
Mix)
For the first time in a long time, I finally found a song where I like the remix better than the original track. [:SITD:] (short for Shadows in the Dark) is a band I’ve been into for a couple years, and have become my favorite active German industrial band, perhaps in part because I’ve been waiting for a new album from Das Ich since 2006, but I enjoy this band on its own merits too. [:SITD:], which has been around since the early 2000’s (and I wish I’d heard of them a lot sooner than I did) released this just last month. “Dunkelziffer” and “Genesis” are two other favorite [:SITD:] songs of mine, but both of those are fast-paced and danceable, while this track is slower and introspective, more like something to meditate to. Maybe I’m getting a bit of a one-track mind lately when it comes to space, but this song makes me think about space, and the universe. The music has an emotion behind it that I can relate to right now as well. It’s music for a dark winter when the nights are long. Lyrically, it’s a pretty sad song. Take this bit for example:
I break my silence
To tell the truth
I curse the darkness
Where is my youth?
To tell the truth
I curse the darkness
Where is my youth?
My will is fading
My hands are cold
My skin is hardened
I feel so old
My hands are cold
My skin is hardened
I feel so old
Change
“curse” to “love”, and maybe I can get behind that feeling, at times. “I dwell
in darkness” might have worked too. But that's just if I were writing this. I wonder if I’ll come back to this song in
20 years and relate to it even more. To be honest I haven’t been paying much
attention to the lyrics when I listen to this song, it’s the music that I get
lost in.
The original track is good too, but this remix
just takes it to another level. Maybe I ought to give Solitary Experiments more
of a listen.
Grey Gallows – Enemy
Grey Gallows is an emerging darkwave band from Greece. This track is off their album Shades, released in October. A few days ago, I went ahead and purchased a 30-song compilation album put out by the Obscura Undead collective called UnObscured Vol. 1 2019, collecting some of the best dark alternative music from 2019. I really hadn’t heard the vast majority of the 30 songs before, despite being (I thought) pretty up-to-date on the music scene, but that just makes it more worth the money. Its name your own price too. I haven’t had time yet to even listen to the whole thing (ah, parenthood) but I have liked what I’ve heard, and this song is one I’m probably going to be listening to a lot in the coming weeks. Best to take my time with an album this long.
Buy the album here: https://obscuraundead.bandcamp.com/album/unobscured-vol-1-comp-1-2019?fbclid=IwAR0rXQnBcdT4O7C4TfUoSO-iTyw2b1dOE_guPVY3SQuHDTv0E5Ss_rPCq6k
Scary
Black – Stay in Your Lane
The perfect song for a Florida goth, where you have to deal with so many aggressive drivers on the road. But this song doesn’t really sound like a road rage anthem. It just reminds me of being on a long road trip at night, and you’ve been cut off, tail-gated and break-checked so many times; you’re just so utterly fed up that you’re numb to it, and you want everyone to just stay in their own lane and mind their own business. Scary Black is a pretty new band from Kentucky; someplace you wouldn’t really expect this type of music to come from. Wonder what the goth scene is like over there. I always figured everyone in Kentucky listened to country music or bluegrass, but Scary Black makes me face the prospect that my preconceived notions, shaped by growing up in California where people tend to turn their noses up at the southern US, are dead wrong. Scary Black sounds like they could be from Europe. I first heard of Scary Black back in September when I found the video to the song “Eat the World, Kill them All, Scalp Them With a Knife” (can’t ignore a title like that) and have been following them ever since.
Honorable
Mention: Essenger – After Dark
I think I’ll make these honorable mentions a regular thing. There’s always more than three songs I’m into. This one could have easily been on the list too as I like it quite a lot. Some darker synthwave. See, I listen to other genres. I like how the music video is a neon city, capturing the whole synthwave/retrowave aesthetic, which is essentially whatever people in the 1980’s thought the future would look like.
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