It’s September 2020 and I’m still
around. The seasons are changing, Florida is finally starting to cool down a bit, and I can actually
venture outside again without melting. California isn’t so lucky, sadly. My old home state is
consumed by flames. It is the burning times; seems to happen every year now. I
think I’ll take yearly hurricane scares over yearly fires. But maybe I only say that because I've still never been in a really bad hurricane before. People act like the
year 2020 is at fault for all this, like it’s some weird curse. Same thing
people said about 2016. But the truth is everything led up to this point. The
fires, the hurricanes, the pandemic. It’s all been in the works for a long
time, and it's all interconnected. People put way too much stock in their calendars; as if their
abstract weeks, months and years have any real significance on a universal
scale. They divide time up so it’s easier to pretend the past is separate from
the present. But the present is the culmination of the past, they are part of a whole. It’s not just some
unlucky year. What we’re seeing right now are consequences. Do people really
think this is all going to end in 2021, that the curse will be broken at
midnight on December 31st? I don't think so. And it definitely isn't going to magically go away if the right candidate wins the US presidential elections either.
Well, enough about current events.
My plans for the blog for the coming month are a little scant, as it’s going to
have to take a back seat to higher priorities once again. I even think that I’ll debut my webcomic next month. I’m really trying to push to the
finish with that, and soon, because I could use some extra money. I'm going to post it up somewhere on a webcomic site and start a Patreon. I finished one page today, took a break to write this very blog while my son was asleep, and once the blog is up I'm going back to working on the comic. That's how invested I am in it right now. But with
Halloween on the way I want to do a few spooky entries on the blog. I have a fun one
planned about what particular moments in movies and shows creeped me out as a
kid. Either this month or next month I think I’ll make public an essay I wrote
about Vlad the Impaler years ago too, just to help get in the Halloween spirit.
It would be fun to talk about my Halloween mix CD too, but I’m getting ahead of
myself, that’s for next month.
But anyway, it’s time once again to list my
top 3 songs of the month, because it’s little personal traditions like this
that keep me sane, even if I’m the only one it holds any significance to. Each
year I put as many of my top songs of the month as I can on a mixtape, and it
helps me remember my past later on. It's a real trip down memory lane marathoning those yearly mixtapes. It’s like uploading my consciousness into a
computer program. The blog gives me a chance to share it with people. But in
practice, I suppose the blog is just a chance for me to mumble to myself online
to a real or imagined audience. My music tastes haven’t changed since last
month. I’ve been getting my new music from YouTube lately, particularly from
the uploader Sound in the Distance. This is the music that’s been getting me
through these times.
Slow
Danse With the Dead – I Look Like Death
Slow Danse With the Dead (STWTD) released their
second album on September 1st, and this is the title track from
it. And so soon after their debut album! That only came out last July. I don’t
know how many bands just release two albums within a couple months of each
other, or even two in the same year. Perhaps we owe it to the quarantine. As
soon as it was announced on Facebook, I paid $5 for it on Bandcamp. No cassette
version, yet at least, just an MP3 download; which of course I burned onto a
CD. The new album is characteristic of STWTD’s “misery goth” style. The song
itself is about dressing in goth attire while living the ideal lifestyle of a
goth, “sipping wine in an abandoned tomb” and such. The Spanish lyrics in the
chorus “Parezco la muerte, te ves coma la muerte” just sound really catchy,
contributing to this song becoming stuck in my head as of late.
Find the
album here: https://slowdansewiththedead.bandcamp.com/album/i-look-like-death
Selofan
– Living Scandal
Blogger's new YouTube search thing that lets you embed videos is not turning up the video for this song, even though I know an individual video for this song exists on YouTube! In fact, here it is. I could go find the video and embed it the hard way and deal with all the html, but I don't feel like it. So, here's the full album I guess. Bah. Don't make me switch to Wordpress, Blogger.
The illusive goth sax makes an
appearance in this and a few other songs by Selofan, a darkwave band out of
Greece. I get excited when I find a Greek goth band (such as Grey Gallows),
because it’s almost like finding an Armenian goth band (as far as I can tell
they don’t really exist, although the band The Deenjes almost sounds goth). What's super interesting is that this band has collaborated in the past with Turkish goth band
She Past Away. Greece was subject to much the same mistreatment from Turkey as
Armenia was. Were they able to look past their national differences and bond over
their shared appreciation of the genre they both work in? I myself have also been
trying to divorce politics from my appreciation of art and move beyond
nationalism.
But
yes, back to the goth sax. Not everyone thinks saxophones belong in goth music,
(one of the DJs I follow, DJ Maus, has voiced her opposition to it, although I find
that our musical tastes usually align in every other way), but I must not be
alone in thinking that for some strange reason they go really well together.
Like how some people like peanut butter and chocolate together and some don’t
(I don’t, actually, but still). I want to make a CD mix of just goth sax songs, but I
don’t know if I’d be able to fill an 80 minute CD with it, because it is a
relatively rare phenomenon. The only other bands I can think of that have
dabbled in it are Lebanon Hanover and Night Nail. A couple of Ministry's early songs have it too, if you consider that under the goth umbrella. Perhaps if I also included
synthwave sax I could get the job done. Throw a few tracks from The Midnight on there or something.
Anyway, I’ve been listening the more
and more Selofan as of late. I first heard their song “Give Me a Reason” a year
or two ago but for whatever reason I didn’t start listening to their other
songs until recently. They’ve been around a while too, and have built up a nice
discography for me to gradually get through.
The
album this song is from, Vitrioli, can be found here: https://selofan.bandcamp.com/album/vitrioli
Molchat
Doma – Kletka
Molchat Doma is a band out of
Belarus. Their name translates to “Houses are Silent”. I discovered this band
fairly recently, but I like the feel of it. Someone in the comments on YouTube described
it best; even if you can’t understand the lyrics, you can feel the depression
that went into the song. Why am I so attracted to depressing music? I don’t
know. Dysthymia, I guess. Happy music usually annoys me, unless it’s
particularly good or can appeal to my nostalgia somehow.
I’m going to have to explore more of
Molchat Doma’s discography, but I definitely like them. I wouldn’t mind
learning to read Russian so I could know what their song titles mean.
Their
2018 album Etazhi can be found here: https://domamolchat.bandcamp.com/album/etazhi-2018
Honorary
Mention – OR30 - Still Dancing
I could go on about the dark music I’ve
been listening to, such as the bands Tearful Moon and Winter Severity Index,
but I like to branch out to other genres when I get to the honorable mentions.
My young son doesn’t yet share my tastes in music, so we try to introduce him
to whatever he will not automatically reject. He seems to like electro swing,
interestingly, which is a genre I’m kind of into. So we discovered the YouTuber
OR30 (I don’t know if it’s pronounced like “or-thirty” or ”oreo”), a singer and
animator who has produced an electro swing concept album called Clover. The
story of the album involves a young kid who’s depressed that her grandfather
died, and she gets visited by three spirits who try to cheer her up. The songs
are accompanied by animated music videos done in a black and white, Fleischer-esque
1930’s animation style. The songs haven’t all been released yet, we’re still
waiting on the last song from the three spirits. I like all the songs I’ve heard from this
album. “Help Me”, the introduction, is a really catchy one, and the song “100
Years” sounds like it could have been sung by Frank Sinatra. Right now, my
favorite is “Still Dancing”. It’s the tragic story of a dancer from the 1920’s
who was struck with a paralyzing disease. When she lost the use of her legs,
her daughter told her she could still dance with her hands, so she “danced” by
clapping her hands for a while until she lost the use of her arms. Her daughter
encouraged her to sing instead, which she did for a while. At last she is shown
in a hospital bed completely paralyzed, and her daughter tells her she can
still dance in her head. It’s so sad! But I like stories that tug on my heart
strings, and I appreciate the message. The dancer wouldn’t let anything stop
her from doing what she wanted to do. She never gave up dancing. I admire that.
I’m not going to let anything stop me from writing and drawing either.
Here’s
Or30’s YouTube channel if you want to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTAyRNwgMv_vvM8Z9UvKKEg
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