Top 10 Songs of the Month ~ July 2021/Հրոտից 4513 ~ Jrimurmur, Vestron Vulture, Candelabre
I have been especially bombarded with good music this past month. I am going to run out of room on my 16gb MP3 player very soon, methinks. It’s the problem of having a refrigerator that’s too full.I’ve been back into post-punk again mainly, along with some darkwave, so this will be a very goth list as usual. And it feels very liberating to not be limiting myself to 3 or 5 songs anymore. We’ll have a nice round number this time, 10. Maybe it means more writing, but I’m okay with that, I just need to start writing them earlier now. I started this one in late June. Here’s what’s been rattling around in my head this past month.
Jrimurmur ~ Averak
On July 3rd, I found no less than four Armenian goth bands! Turns out No Man Cry is not alone. Here’s our first band, Jrimurmur, or alternatively Jrimurmurner (the “ner” is a plural suffix). Google Translate tells me it translates to seaweed; understandably since Armenia is a landlocked country I have never come across that word. Jrimurmur is a duo from Yerevan, Armenia, who describe themselves as “two crazy girls making noise”. They’ve been active from at least 2015, and just released their first full length LP last month, Lur Mur. This song, “Averak”, translates to “Ruins”. It’s a breakup song; the singer claims that their lover left them in ruins, comparing themselves to the ruined medieval Armenian capital of Ani, which is now on the Turkish side of the border, while the lover went on to flourish like Yerevan, the current capital. It’s a cover actually. The original song was by Elvina Markaryan, a very famous jazz singer in Armenia and the former Soviet Union. I can swear I’ve heard it before, but I have no idea when. But I recognized the lyrics in Jrimurmur’s version. Jrimurmur’s version has quite a different, gothier sound to it. It’s almost like Lebanon Hanover. A really close second from this band for me is “Anharmar a im Mej” (“I am Uncomfortable in Myself”), a really nice post-punk track which leads me to believe the huge post-punk scene in Russia must be catching on in Armenia.
Vestron Vulture is a band out of Monterrey, Mexico. They just released three albums at once on June 30th, Hexen, Heretic and Hecatomb. The song “Cemetery Cowboy” is off the album Heretic. This music video was what captured my attention; it’s a sad video actually, of a young woman being consumed with a cocaine addiction. Maybe it sort of struck a cord with me this month because I finally decided to quit kratom, a far less harmful and a legal drug, but still very addicting, and going through a week of horrible withdrawals. It’s also just a great post-punk track, with its gloomy bass guitar and macabre subject matter. I don’t know why the word “cowboy” is in the title, but at least this sounds nothing like a country song. Another song I like from Vestron Vulture is “Crippling Death”, off this same album, which I also recommend listening to. The singer Vestron Vulture, the namesake of the band, has been very prolific since 2010 when he left a thrash metal band to go solo, with almost forty albums, and in that time he has hopped through several different genres if you look into his back catalog, from more electronically influenced styles like synthwave and EBM, to this sort of music, which he’s been making since 2019. It seems he’s been through even more genres than Mortiis. And I only just heard of Vestron Vulture, which means I get to go on a fun journey through their discography. By releasing three albums on the same day, he certainly likes to spoil his fans.
Candelabre is a band out of France and just released a new album in May of this year. I typically think of France as like the coldwave capital, thanks to Hante, Minuit Machine, and going further back Little Nemo. But this band has kind of a goth rock/shoegaze sound to it, reminding me a lot of Glaare and Electrotsoy, bands in the same genre. It’s a mixture of dark and light energies; that’s how I would describe their music. In an interview I uncovered they explained that the music is a combination of all three of the band member’s personalities, which explains how it has such a mixture to it. Singer Cindy Sanchez has a really beautiful ethereal voice as well, carrying the music over any darker elements. This song, “Ceasefire of Love”, turned out to be my favorite one so far from them. It’s a very impassioned song. I tend to associate ceasefires with war, quite the opposite of love. So what is a ceasefire of love then? Is it when two lovers decide to take a break from one another? The lyrics, available in the description of the music video, speak of war, but are very abstract and I can’t make much sense of them. I suppose it’s open to interpretation.
You can find their new album, For Time is to Have Wings, here:
This track caught my attention because the music video incorporates footage from the infamous Max Headroom signal hijacking in 1987. If you’ve never heard of that go ahead and watch it, it’s somewhere between creepy and funny. The song fits the video well. The beginning almost sounds like what you would imagine a signal hijacking to sound like, before it gives way to a kind of sinister-sounding heavy electronic beat with growling vocals. Metal Disco is out of Greece, the side-project of Toxic Razor of the band Paradox Obscur, who’ve made my lists before. I found another review of this same video, which in turn provided me more information about the band. This is a good industrial track, and I feel like I don’t find a lot of modern industrial music that I like these days, but I really like this one.
The album, Rough and Dirty, releases on July 25th, and can be found here:
“For years some people have argued that this kind of pornography is a matter of artistic creativity.”
Yes, this song came out in 1984, two years before I was born, and I just recently heard it. Certain iconic goth/industrial bands just fly under my radar sometimes, despite my being into this type of music since 2005. Take my recent dive into Christian Death, for instance. I’ve been on a Skinny Puppy binge the last couple of weeks. Now I know what influenced Velvet Acid Christ. Skinny Puppy were way ahead of their times, and it’s strange to think I could have been listening to this song as a kid, if I’d had any way of discovering it back then. The Skinny Puppy song “Warlock” made my top songs of the month list before some years ago (before I started putting them up on my blog), but I failed to probe deeper. To be honest, some Skinny Puppy songs are a bit too sample-heavy for my tastes, which deterred me for a while. Take for example “Monster Radio Man”, which is basically just samples from The Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” with a simple beat in the background. That’s the whole song. I think using samples from that episode could make for a great industrial song, but it’s got to at least have lyrics, and shorter samples, not ones that take up the entire song. I mean I could just watch the actual episode if I wanted that. The samples in “Far too Frail” are used more sparingly. The one I quoted above came from a speech by Ronald Reagan, and the other sample, “They’re alive, they’re human beings!” comes from the movie Shadow of a Doubt directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Despite being 37 years old this year, you can find the album Remission on Bandcamp.
The Black Veils ~ Rabbits (The Foreign Resort Remix)
You know, I never once thought I’d hear a post-punk song about rabbits. This would be great for the soundtrack to a remake of Watership Down. I actually wonder if that’s what this song is about. One fun thing to do when listening to this song is to imagine it being sung by Elmer Fudd. “Wun, girl! This ain’t no wand foh wabbits!” It’s such a good song though. Has good energy to it. It’ll get stuck in your head. This version is a remix by The Foreign Resort, which is a band I have enjoyed before (my favorite song of their’s is “She is Lost”). The original version is slower and a bit more minimalistic, but I think I prefer the remix, which is upbeat and exciting. I don’t always prefer that with every song, but I think it works with this one. The song was released last month as a single for an upcoming album The Black Veils will be releasing later this year. I look forward to hearing their album when it comes out.
You can find the single with the original version and the remix here:
It’s the Russian coldwave/darkwave band from Austria again, Skubut, with another hit song. This is the second time they’ve captured my attention, as I was listening to their previous album back in February. I would say they’re among my favorite Russian language post-punk bands right now, along with Molchat Doma, Electrotsoy and Divid. Скубут is a solo project by Mikhail Shlepin. How it came to be based out of Vienna, Austria I have yet to learn. The song’s title translates to “Substance”, and comes off their album Сгублен (“ Ruined” in English) which was just released on June 21st. Their second album this year in fact. Give it a listen.
Altar of Eden truly sounds like it came right out of the early 1980s, echoing the sound of classic deathrock. It’s got a heaviness to it that a lot of modern bands in the genre lack. Their album Chimeras came out last February. I bought a couple of their albums on Bandcamp early last month when I discovered them, unfortunately their cassettes were sold out but I would have loved to listen to this band over a cassette, it’s just the type of music that sounds good on analog media. I found an interview with the singer of the band from after their album Chimeras was released. From what I can gather they’re not trying to chase any trends with their music, they mainly just listen to classic punk and post-punk and go from there. I can respect that, as an artist I don’t like chasing trends either. Just stick to what you want to make.
Node is a coldwave band out of Yerevan, Armenia. Right after I found Jrimurmur, YouTube’s algorithm brought me to the page of Vardan Sargsyan, linking me to other Armenian coldwave, post-punk, dark alternative by the bands Node, Duke, and Kay. I could probably write a separate blog post about the Armenian dark alternative music I’ve uncovered so far. The singer reminds me of the likes of SYZYGYX, Selofan and Lebanon Hanover. They sing in English with a distinct Armenian accent. I don’t have a lot of information about this band, as of yet, but they do have a Bandcamp. This track is very eerie, and almost hypnotic. The visuals in the music video add to that too.
This is off their album Thought Infection which was released in November of 2020. Check it out here:
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