Top 10 Songs November 2021/ Տրէ 4514 ~ Nation of Language, SYZYGYX, Tout Debord, Contre Soirée
Lots of great music competed for my attention in the last 30 days. If I had time to make this a Top 40 list I would. You know, I wonder if I could ever be a legitimate music reviewer one day. I would need to learn to write stuff like “ethereal vibrations breathe saturated pain and swirl through the vortex of the listener’s soul, enrapturing them in the essence of the synthetic elements of the cosmic rhythms of the universe”. Stuff like this. I don’t know how some of these music reviewers come up with this stuff. I have an MFA in Creative Writing and I still don’t understand it. Instead I’m like “I’ve had like 50 songs by obscure goth bands stuck in my head all month, here’s a few of them, oh and look another Armenian band I dug up”. These blogs are more like diary entries than reviews. I just want to point others in the direction of good music.
This time around I’ve got a couple French coldwave groups, a band from Mexico, England, Finland, and the rest are from the US.
Nation of Language ~ This Fractured Mind
Now here’s a feel-good song. It’s been my ear worm for the last week or so, and it’s been a while since a synthpop track has done that for me as I’ve drifted ever-more towards guitar-based gothic music genres in the past couple years. Nation of Language is a synthpop band out of Brooklyn, New York. I did hear of Nation of Language last year when they made their debut with the song “The Wall and I”, but this song really grabbed my attention when I heard it. It sounds like it was made in 1982. It’s like a cross between Kraftwerk and really early Depeche Mode. The music video is a lot of fun, and it really goes with the song in a way not all music videos can manage. The way it was filmed reminds me of maybe a really high quality VHS tape; I don’t know if it was actually filmed on VHS or not but it does have that nostalgic analog look to it regardless. It looks like it was filmed in the 1980s. You have to love that little plastic dancing robot that shows up throughout the music video. It looks so happy. I don’t know if it’s a wind-up toy or what.
The album this song is on, A Way Forward, debuted November 5th if this year.
Tout Debord is a coldwave band from France, which really is the best country for coldwave music. This band has that classic coldwave sound. This is the title track of their newest EP, which consists of four songs. Bandcamp didn’t seem to have the option, but if you go on the website for Detriti Records you can get it on cassette too. It’s the kind of music that would sound good on a cassette, very raw and minimal. At this point whenever one of the YouTube channels I follow for this type of music posts something that looks like a low budget cassette cover, I know I’m going to like it.
Contre Soirée is a another French coldwave act, out of Paris. I found this song thanks to Radio Darkitalia, a radio station out of Perma, Italy and my current favorite thing to listen to on Radio Garden. The name of the band translates to “counter party”, which from what I can gather is an idiom that doesn’t exist in English. It’s when you hold a party to rival someone else’s party and funnel away their guests. This song is extremely catchy, and the somewhat incorrect English grammar just adds to the appeal.
The album this is from, Inner Fire, can be found here:
Scissor Kicks is back! I didn’t feel like they were gone that long, their previous release was 2019, but I guess that is a long time in today’s music industry, where the norm now is releasing a single every few months rather than an album every 2-4 years. They were very prolific in the brief time they were active before their hiatus so I had figured they just needed time to write music, but no. I watched an interview recently that Cold Transmission had with the lead singer Luna Blanc. In the intervening couple years they were gone, whilst the music industry was crippled by the pandemic, the duo became a solo project, the other half of the duo Josh Clark left the band to pursue his own music. That can be enough to dissolve some bands, but SYZYGYX is still going strong, and honestly if I hadn’t known that background story I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference, they sound as good as ever.
The new album, (Im)Mortal, comes out on December 3rd.
Of Blood and Wine is a gothic rock band from Finland. They lean very heavily into the spooky, Halloween-esque aesthetic, and this song is a perfect example of that, released around Valentine’s Day earlier this year. The singer sounds a lot like Peter Steel from Type O Negative. That’s probably what drew me to the band. Musically it also reminds me of Kentucky Vampires and Scary Black, two other bands that also use the same sort of aesthetic too. But they’re definitely worth checking out.
Getting back into the classics, I’m still discovering music from the 1980s that inspired the sound of the modern bands I’m into, and this band is one of the pioneers of deathrock, Skeletal Family from Keighley, England. The band is famous enough to have a Wikipedia page, something I’m not used to when researching a band. They might have been another of those bands from the 80s that released a couple albums and disappeared, but since their initial 1982-1986 run they’ve had two comebacks, the most recent one being 2012 to present. Anyway, this is still a band to keep an eye on, word on the street is they have a new album in the works. This band is something to think about when listening to similar-sounding modern bands like Mystic Priestess and Ötzi.
This track is off their 1985 album Futile Combat, which while listed on Bandcamp can’t be purchased directly through them, but via a link on the page. I’m always surprised when albums this old even show up on Bandcamp, but there you go.
Slow Danse with the Dead is back with another monthly single release. The release of this song was very timely, with the cold winter months ahead, existing seemingly to combat the cheery, boring, overplayed Christmas music those of us on the dark side are going to have to be tormented with until the end of December. A dreary song about wintry desolation is a breath of fresh air against the obnoxious wrath of tired old holiday songs like “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey, which will be played on loop at every department store until the year ends. Thank darkness for Slow Danse with the Dead, for reminding us that there’s so much more to winter than this dreaded holiday season.
Frequence Noir is a coldwave band out of Mexico. This song has a catchy dark beat with echoing vocals that while difficult to decipher add to the atmosphere of the song. A song about impending doom that’s still danceable. Their sound reminds me a lot of contemporary Mexican coldwave artist Werner Karloff.
This song was a single off their 2018 debut album Lost. They’ve had one more album since then, 2019’s Violence.
Son, Fire! is a Russian post-punk act from Moscow, and has that classic sound that everyone has come to expect from the blossoming post-punk scene in the former Soviet Union, headed by the likes of Molchat Doma. I first did a deep dive into this subgenre about a year ago, and I’m still finding new bands I like. Son, Fire! is an emerging act. Their first single was released just last August and they’ve had a handful since then, this being the most recent one from October. I wasn’t able to dig up a whole lot on them, perhaps in part thanks to the language barrier, but I will be keeping an eye out for more from them. I really wanted to find out why they named their band that.
The name of this song translates to “Who are we, where are we from, where are we going?” Quite a mouthful, but it looks like it’s shorter to say in Russian than in English. Maybe it rolls off the tongue better in its native language. If you look the song up on Bandcamp they provide the lyrics in English. Even with the translation I find the lyrics hard to understand, but they’re being poetic. Lots of concrete imagery in the lyrics, I’ll give them that.
Suffering for Kisses is a band out of Seattle, Washington, and are pretty well-known in the scene. Singer Tony D’Oporto writes music in varying tones, saving his more aggressive songs for his acts Gnome and Crisis Actor (aha, so he’s responsible for the “Orange Man Bad” song, which I could never tell if it was pro or anti-Trump), so Suffering for Kisses is reserved for his softer side.This song caught my attention because I love space-themed songs, even if they’re only indirectly about space. Their brand new EP Love and Demise came out early last month. It’s one of those albums, all too rare these days, where the songs flow into one another, and each song, although able to stand on their own, is part of a greater whole. This song caps it all off as the emotional finale of the mix.Thus far it’s my favorite song on the album, although I only purchased it last Bandcamp Friday, so I need a little more time to sit with the songs.
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