There are so many songs I’m into this month it’s hard to rank them. So consider this list in no particular order. Although perhaps the two Armenian bands I have on here are at the top in honor of Navasard, ancient Armenian New Year, which falls on today. Happy 4514! So let’s go with that. That’s the calendar these Top Songs of the Month blogs go by, after all. A personal tradition.
Jrimurmur ~ Anharmar a im Mej
I discussed this band last month, a coldwave/post-punk duo from Yerevan, Armenia. This is another great song from them. The title translates to “Uncomfortable in Myself”, and the lyrics carry with them themes of body dysmorphia, and not liking to look at yourself in the mirror. I think a lot of people can relate to that, for as Kraftwerk once said, “Even the greatest stars dislike themselves in the looking-glass.” There are three different versions of this song that I’ve found. Jrimurmur’s YouTube channel has two versions, and yet another version made it onto their album Lur Mur, released last June. Obviously the video above is my favorite version. Like I said last month about the track “Averak”, it has a very Lebanon Hanover vibe to it. The video is fun too, as the duo traverse Yerevan. Since I’ve been there, I recognize some of the sights, like the ferris wheel they ride, and the tank they dance on near the Mother Armenia statue (their equivalent to the Statue of Liberty). And what an image; how many bands can you think of that dance on a tank in their music video? Fun fact: it’s at the top of this list because I want that image as this blog entry’s thumbnail.
Check out their album here:
No Man Cry ~ A Calm Evening
Here’s another band I’ve talked about on the blog before, another out of Yerevan, Armenia. No Man Cry just released their fourth album in about a year, Disappeared Men, and what’s special about this one is that it was released just two days before singer and sole member of the one-man band Tigran Davtyan began his mandatory two-year military service for Armenia. The western media isn’t talking about it, but this is a scary time to be serving in the army in Armenia, given their hostile neighbors at the borders in the aftermath of a vicious war late last year. Fortunately from what I hear Russia is going to help patrol the borders now. But I wish him well, and I look forward to hearing from No Man Cry again after this two-year hiatus. I think in many of the songs you can feel the angst and anxiety of someone about to enter the military service in a wartime environment. This song, “A Calm Evening”, gives the feel of the calm before a storm. The lyrics, in Armenian, tell how the singer will miss their hometown while he will gone for years but will try to keep the image of it in his mind. Probably has an autobiographical element to it.
I raise my glass to you,Tigran. Stay safe.
The album Disappeared Men doesn’t appear to be on Bandcamp, although No Man Cry’s other albums are. So I don’t actually know a way to listen to the album while supporting the artist. But maybe he wanted it to be free. Anyway you can find the other albums here:
And you can listen to this album on their official YouTube channel:
Alone in my Room - Rain Man
Alone in my Room hails from Fresno, California, one of my own former hometowns. Fresno is a very bleak, polluted and depressing place, and if you stay there too long you’ll get asthma. I wonder why I haven’t heard a post-punk or goth band from there before now. I love their band name, since I spent much of my childhood and teens alone in my room, and that’s always represented a comfortable and safe place for me to escape the world. And I love gloomy post-punk music too so this band was really up my alley. Upon purchasing their self-titled album this past Bandcamp Friday, this song was the one that stood out to me the most, with its distinctive guitar twang and echoing, droning vocals with a catchy beat.
Their self-titled album came out in April 2020, and can be found here:
Slow Danse With the Dead ~ Babble of Despair
Unlike the first track I ever heard from them, “So Obnoxious”, though, this one does also have a catchy beat, and you could do some good goth dancing to it if you felt so inclined.
You can find the song here:
https://slowdansewiththedead.bandcamp.com/track/babble-of-despair
Wires & Lights ~ Sleepers
This is one of those songs that I just didn’t give enough attention to when I first heard it, but later on I listened to it again and found that I really enjoyed it. Wires & Lights is a quartet from Berlin, Germany, and this song is off their debut album A Chasm Here and Now which came out in September 2019. Which feels like a long time ago now given the kind of year 2020 was. I heard it at the time, but somehow this song got lost in the shuffle, until I went through my old music video playlist on YouTube and heard it again, and it struck a cord. It’s a very passionate song. The lyrics themselves sound really good on the song, but when you actually read them it’s kind of hard to make sense of them. It definitely has themes of the difference between the states of dreaming and being awake, and running from darkness (negative emotions perhaps). I like the line “the darkness won’t leave because the morning finds you, what you believe is just a shield around you”. It reminds me of how people conform to a set of beliefs to explain their reality, whether or not these beliefs are actually true or rational, for their own psychological comfort. It’s a shield from the uncomfortable truth of our existence. But that’s just my interpretation.
You can pick up A Chasm Here and Now on Bandcamp:
This Cold Night ~ Black Cherry
This song makes me hungry with its talk of black cherries, sour candy and apricots. I’m not sure where the high school drag queens fit in, that’s a lyric that comes straight out of nowhere, but oh well. Anyway, I only recently began listening to This Cold Night, a band out of Austin, Texas, but I like what I’ve heard. I only later realized that they provided the backing vocals to “Run Away, Simon”, a favorite from last year. It’s funny when that happens, I’ll hear a remix or collaboration with a band I already like, and sometimes years later discover the band that remixed/contributed to it and start listening to them. This is another song from 2019, but it somehow flew right under my radar until last month.
I had a nice chuckle when looking at their Bandcamp page, and under the “Follow” button, where most bands would list their Facebook and Twitter pages, it proudly proclaims “I do not exist on social media and neither should you.” Alas, it’s been too late for me since I joined MySpace in 2005, although I admire the sentiment. You can find this song along with three other tracks here:
Pretty Addicted - ‘Tones and Whiskey
I discovered this band when the singer herself Vicious Precious Bardon posted her new music video in the Sounds and Shadows Facebook group (which by the way is a good place to drop in on all your favorite gothic bands and DJs and get starstruck). This sent me down the rabbit hole. You might even say I became pretty addicted *winkwink nudgenudge cue laugh track*. Pretty Addicted’s music is very aggressive, and the singer doesn’t sound like anyone else I’ve heard. The music videos are fun too, and Vicious always has the best makeup jobs. On their Bandcamp page they deem themselves dance-punk, which is a new genre to me but I like it. Out of all the songs I went through in my binge this was the one that was stuck in my head for days. It’s about craving for human interaction, and getting it by having a one night stand with someone you meet at a bar. I can relate to the loneliness aspect at least, if not the solution she takes.
Another favorite track that came up as a close second from the same album is the title track “Soul for Sale”. I love the line “suffering is what makes me create”. A highly relatable song.
The song appears on their album Soul for Sale, released just last April, and can be found here:
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