2022 is over with. I survived another year. The years continue to pass with increasing speed. I’m still in my mid 30s, but I feel that, the older I get, I can almost sense the rhythm of the Earth as it tilts toward and away from the sun, on an endless carousel ride that we cannot escape. If the Gregorian calendar made any sense, we would celebrate the New Year on Winter Solstice, or the day after. Or was that too pagan for Pope Gregory? Anyway, the rest of society follows this calendar, at least in the country I’m in, so I cannot avoid it. New Years Eve is like just another day to me, really. Just like Christmas is mostly just another day. I only barely acknowledge it because everyone else is. I’ll still have some sparkling apple cider and stay up past midnight tonight as my one tradition I still keep, nearly devoid of real meaning. I’m not going out anywhere though.
To the point, here are my Top 10 favorite albums of the past year. Nine goth picks and one acoustic rock album that is still very dark because it’s Type O Negative covers. As I’ve said in previous years where I did this blog, this is only based around what I heard during the year. I’m sure I’ll be discovering music from 2022 that I missed out on for years to come. Included is my favorite song from each album embedded from YouTube (except in the case of Скубут, which had an official upload of the full album). We have bands from the US, Canada, Australia, Armenia, Austria, Croatia and Mexico. In no particular order:
It pays to be nice to to your neighbors. Because a few weeks ago, the neighbors across the street from me (who I had spoken to on a couple different occasions) were moving, and looking to unload some of their stuff. They knew that my wife and I like to sell used stuff that people throw away, as we had done when their next door neighbor moved away early this year, so we were their candidates. And they had some treasure! Stuff that would have been way out of my meager price range.
I felt like I since talk about music so much on this blog I might as well show off my new setup. Here’s my man cave:
I’m primarily going to discuss my new dual cassette deck, stereo receiver and turntable, but I can talk about my new CD shelves too, another free curbside pickup. This is my first ever stereo system and turntable, I’ve always been too poor to have them, but finally they’ve fallen into my lap like a gift from the Gods. Here’s a closeup of the stereo system.
The Tower of Babel! My room isn’t big, so I have to stack everything up. In order to use the turntable I have to move the cassette deck and speakers. This isn’t ideal of course. But, I use cassettes way more than records. This is my very first record player, a Victrola combo unit which also has a CD and cassette player, as well as AM/FM radio (which I have no reason to ever use, but it makes it look more vintage). I can’t say how it stacks up to other record players, but I love how it looks like something from the 1930s. The speakers aren’t the best, but it’s good for listening to old jazz. I had a few classical records laying around from my other neighbor who moved which I was unable to sell, and I went ahead and bought a Nirvana record at Target just to have something else to play on it.
“Things have never been so swell, I have never failed to fail. Paaaiiiinnnn”
The CD player, sadly, is very wonky, and only plays certain CDs. I haven’t figured out why it prefers some CDs over others. It will even play some of my burned CDs but not others. And the cassette player, while functional, is the weirdest one I’ve ever seen.
It kind of works like a car cassette deck I suppose. You slide the tape in like a VHS tape to a VCR, but from the side, and push a button to eject the tape. It makes a weird clicking noise when you get to the end of the tape until you eject it and flip it over. I have no idea yet how to clean it if I need to, but suffice to say I won’t really be using it often as long as I have that dual cassette deck. I have a few 1930s jazz tapes I can play on it. The turntable itself is nice though, I think. Admittedly, I don’t know a whole lot about turntables, I can’t really tell how high the quality is. I can say that it works though. I think combo units like these get a bad rap among vinyl purists. But hey, I’m poor, it was free and it works, I’ll take what I can get. I’ve always wanted a record player, but it was such a low priority it was like a distant dream. Now, I will slowly build a record collection. Records are usually pricy though, so it’s never going to be as huge as my cassette and CD collection. You can get records for cheap at thrift stores, but it’s mostly “thrift store music” ; or classical, country, Christmas and Christian music. Maybe jazz if you’re lucky. Granted I’ve found some 90s rock before, but on CD, not vinyl.
Anyway, onto the cassette deck.
This is my precious. People talk crap about cassettes for having bad sound quality, but that’s because most people never get to hear them on one of these. It sounds amazing. The sound is rich, you don’t hear the background hiss. And it does some neat tricks. I don’t have to flip the tape when it comes to the end of Side A, it can play both sides of the tape. And the fast forward feature can skip tracks like you would with a CD; it somehow detects quiet parts of the tape and stops there. I don’t want to put too much strain on the belts so it’s not something I’m going to do often. It also has a timer, which is nifty. And you can record from one tape to another.
I scavenged the speakers off another stereo that was broken. They sound great. It took me a while to figure out how to set it all up because I’ve never in my life had anything fancier than a boom box. I needed to get audio AV cords to plug in through the stereo receiver to get it to work. It was a learning experience. Here’s the stereo receiver.
And what a fun little toy this is. I like to play around with the bass sometimes but it makes the whole house vibrate so I can’t get too crazy with it, unless I’m alone. This thing can make my mixtapes sound downright majestic. Things like this cost $300 on eBay. And yet here I am, with a free one. It took 36 years for it to happen, but I have a stereo system.
There is still a place, however, for my boombox. For you see this stereo system is from the 1990s, so it doesn’t have an aux port. I use aux ports to record music onto blank cassettes straight from the internet these days. I also don’t have a CD player for the stereo system. That’s the one thing it’s still missing. One of these days I’ll have to get my hands on one of those high end CD players from the 90s that I can plug into my stereo receiver. Anyway, while it’s really hard to find a good newly-made cassette player these days, this modern boombox gets the job done pretty well. It’s a Panasonic.
And last but not least, let’s have a closer look at my CD/cassette shelf. It’s always subject to change as my collection grows.
On the top here we have my electronic music; my Kraftwerk albums, Das Ich, Ministry, SYZYGYX, Ayria, and some others. On the bottom are my metal albums; Covenant/The Kovenant, Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir, Stratovarius, Type O Negative, Alice in Chains and Nirvana.
Got some of my favorite cassettes on bottom, including recent Bandcamp and concert acquisitions from goth bands, my bootleg of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, a few good mixtapes including my very first two from 1999 (the yellow Memorex ones).
And what the hell, here are those DVDs and VHS tapes you might have seen in some of the pictures here. I cover up the logos because I got sick of staring at them. I like to enjoy a movie as an individual work of art, not part of some corporate catalog. The two tapes on the top left are bootlegs I made by printing out the covers. One is disguised as a “Good Guys” tape from the Child’s Play series, and houses a VHS mixtape of horror movies and shows. The one next to it is a copy of the short film Kung Fury.
Damn, I’m not ready for it to be the end of the year yet, it all went by so fast. You sure it’s not still 2020? This decade is probably going to feel like one long year. It doesn’t feel like December either, probably because Florida doesn’t have a winter, it has a wet season and a dry season, with maybe a cold snap here and there if we’re lucky. The days are shorter though, and I’ve come to find especially in recent years that I have a very love-hate relationship with the Sun. Seasonal Affective Disorder will do that. In fact the entire holiday season which exists across cultures in the northern hemisphere probably exists because Seasonal Affective Disorder is way more widespread than people think. I’m reminded of a Mark Twain quote: “From the cradle up I’ve always been much like the rest of the human race; never quite sane at night.”
Time is short these days, and I dedicate a lot of my free time to my webcomic, but I would still like to round up my top albums of 2022 and do a blog entry about it if I can. I’m also slowly working on two other blogs, one about a series of mixtapes I made and another about my new music setup in my room. Let’s see what I can get done. The other two blog entries can wait if need be.
Anyway, my music tastes over the past month have reflected my moods as the days darken.
Leiv Reed ~ A Dying God Coming into Human Flesh (acoustic cover)
Acoustic covers of black metal songs is a subgenre I never thought about seeking out until recently. But I’ve been really into acoustic music for the past year or so, especially dark acoustic music which is kind of rare, and it finally came up after having very limited success in finding acoustic covers of goth songs. Leiv Reed is the foremost artist in this YouTube-based subgenre. I used to be really into black metal as a teen but my tastes simmered down over the years, now a lot of it sounds like noise to me unless I heard it as a teen. But bringing it down to an acoustic level makes it easier for me to enjoy.
This is a cover, the original is by a band called Celtic Frost. The original song doesn’t sound too dissimilar to this, it’s mostly acoustic except for the electric guitars and growling vocals over the chorus. But I like Leiv Reed’s voice the best. This song has been kind of an ode to my chronic back pain as of late, as I feel like a conscious being trapped in a slowly aging body.
Another song from Slow Danse with the Dead this month. “Doom and Gloom” could be used to describe their entire discography really. But I felt like this song hit close to home for me, as many songs by this band do. I’m sure many people are familiar with the feeling of waking up, and immediately regretting it because you know that today is going to suck and there’s something you’re really not looking forward to doing that day, or you’re just not happy with your life in general at that moment. It’s weird how sometimes when you wake up, especially if you’ve just been having vivid dreams, it takes a few seconds to remember who you are, where you are and what you’re going to be doing that day. Sometimes that reality setting in is painful.
Devoted Sinners ~ Everything I’ve Ever Loved is Dead
Now here’s a happy-go-lucky song that will get the party jumping! A song about how the singer’s favorite musicians and actors are all dead, as well as everything else they have ever loved. It belongs on a playlist with Type O Negative’s “Everyone I Love is Dead”, “Everything Dies”, and Mortiis’ “Everyone Leaves”. The mention of Vincent Price hits the hardest for me. Imagine what he could have done with just one more decade. The singer keeps it mainly limited to goth icons. If I were writing this song perhaps I’d have also mentioned Layne Staley, Kurt Cobain, Florian Schneider, David Bowie, Peter Steele, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and The Three Stooges. Well you could go on all day about great deceased musicians and actors.
The singer only states that these people are dead, he leaves it to the listener to interpret how they feel about it. These great artists wanted to be remembered after their deaths, and they’ve succeeded. They may not be around to enjoy being remembered, unless ghosts are real, but they did what they set out to do in life, whether or not they got to live as long as they could have, they still succeeded. It’s interesting how we mourn people we’ve never met. But often times, you know more about your favorite singers and actors than you do your next door neighbor or even some of your relatives. They may as well be family.
Here it is, off their EP The Dangerous Obsession, released Halloween 2022:
This is a song that I first heard when it came out in June 2021, forgot about for a long time, but heard it again and liked it a lot. One of those songs that I needed to be ready for I suppose. I needed to be in a grim enough mood. I have had a pesky illness for over a week now actually, and while I’m not “violently ill” it’s just enough to affect me and make me extra gloomy and grumpy. This is a great song to put on when you’re sick, it catches that feeling perfectly. To be honest I thought that it might be a Slow Danse with the Dead song I had forgotten about, they sound very similar. The fact that it features backing vocals from Queen of Daggers was the first tipoff that it wasn’t them.
I was captivated by this music video. I don’t speak Spanish so I could only interpret what I saw. I know that Tenochitlan was the capital of the Aztec Empire, modern Mexico City, and the woman’s outfit looked like Aztec attire. She steps into a bathtub in the middle of the forest and washes her fact paint off, and then the tub fills with blood, as some huntsmen in war paint find her and carry her off. My guess was that perhaps it was a metaphor for colonization, and after finding the song on Bandcamp and looking at the lyrics in English it appears that I was right, it is a song dedicated to the destruction and colonization of the Aztecs. As an Armenian, I deeply empathize with the pain of colonized peoples, and I hope for Mexico that one day they can throw off the last vestiges of colonialism.
Another month down, edging closer toward the darkest time of the year. And my area is getting hit with a surprise late season hurricane. Hurricane Nicole, ain’t climate change fun? Well, even a category 1 is basically just an extra windy storm with a name, I’m not too worried, for now. Today has been a weird day as a result, though. Everything’s closed, no one is on the road, I had to get my kid out of school early, my hat won’t stay on my head. It’s going to suck for places that got flooded in Hurricane Ian six weeks ago, but fortunately for me that’s not my area. We are getting hit head on with it though.
My battle with chronic pain and seasonal depression continues, although I’ve been doing better than I was in late September to mid October. My doctor got me on better pain meds, I think that’s why my back has been hurting a bit less. I’ve had good days and bad days the last couple weeks. At least until I got some steroid injections done on my lower back on Monday, now it hurts like hell again. Yay. But that’s supposed to eventually help with the pain. It always takes about three to four days for the pain from the actual injections to go away enough for me to tell if they worked, that’s how it was for my tailbone injections anyway. Halloween also has a way of lifting my spirits, most years anyway (the exception was 2020), and it did this year too. Anyway, my mood dictates what music I gravitate toward, which makes it relevant to my monthly music review/diary. This month we have a few new bands, a few bands I hadn’t heard from in a while are back, a random song from the 1960s I just discovered, and our old standby Slow Danse with the Dead.
Slow Danse with the Dead ~ Obsession
So soon after their previous EP last summer, which was one of my favorite releases from them ever, Slow Danse with the Dead is back again with a four track EP, due out officially on November 11. I already pre-ordered it, and got this song. I feel like it’s kind if a continuation of “Strangers in the Dark”, with the lyrical reference to the mind being filled with chaos in both songs. My mind is also filled with chaos, which is why I love these songs. It’s wonderful being a fan of a band that regularly puts out new music all the time like Slow Danse with the Dead, I don’t know how he does it. Just an endless well of inspiration.
I love love love the original studio version of this song, which I reviewed when it first came out, and the remix does it justice. It maintains the same energy as the original while adding something new, and making the song fresh again. It’s a Phantom of the Opera-esque song about being so depressed you don’t want to move or speak. Here’s hoping Manticore Kiss comes out with some more new music like this soon.
Desmond Doom has been tiding his fans over with style mashups since his album Surf Goth came out. I really like his most recent one, which is Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” sung in the style of The Cure, namely in the style of their song “A Forest”. His vocals may sound a bit like an exaggeration of Robert Smith (I’m reminded of Al Jourgensen’s fake accent in early Ministry) but just as a song based on its own merits I really think it works. And I for one would love to see anyone do more crossovers of grunge and goth. Two of my favorite genres.
It’s not on Bandcamp (I’ve heard they get weird about covers), but you can check out his other music there:
It’s very seldom that I find music from the 1960s that I actually like, I’ll admit. Most music from that decade is too happy-go-lucky for me. But when I do find a song I like, it’s usually the weird experimental songs, like for instance “Caledonia” by CroMagnon, a 1969 song that is one of the earliest instances of harsh rasping vocals in a song, predating black metal by decades. I wish I knew how to dig this kind of stuff up though. It’s easier to find underground stuff from the 80s and 90s. But I found another song like that, this one from 1968.
I heard it because I was listening to a goth radio show, Under the Floorboards on X-Ray FM in Portland, Oregon, via Radio Garden. It was their Halloween show, I wanted to be old school and record the whole show on a blank cassette with an aux cord from my tablet to my boombox (first time in over twenty years I recorded an entire radio show on a tape). And after the show they have a classic rock show called Heavy Metal Sewing Circle,where they try to play the more obscure rock music, and this song played. I was captivated. I couldn’t stop listening to all nine minutes of the song. It’s dark, eerie, and psychedelic. It’s almost kind of proto-goth. That tune on the pipe organ just keeps playing over and over in my head. I’ve heard this isn’t the original version of the song, which was done by a band called Donavan, but the original doesn’t sound nearly as creepy. And as far as I’ve heard Vanilla Fudge doesn’t have another song quite like his either. They could have jump-started goth early if they did.
Pitch After Dark ~ Coexist
Pitch After Dark came back on Halloween with a new album, Dark and Severe, which includes not only new music but remastered versions of all their previous tracks, which really are an improvement, the originals sound more like demo versions by comparison now. That’s the great thing about being goth on Halloween, a lot of bands try to shoot for Halloween album releases, you might hear from some bands you haven’t heard from in a while.
Pitch After Dark, a band out of Nevada, first came to my attention with the song “Trapped Inside”, the perfect Covid quarantine anthem. And that song sounds even better on Dark and Severe. This song was the first of the new ones to catch my attention, with its poignant lyrics about coexistence and acceptance. Reminds me of the situation in the Caucasus region, like many songs do.
The singer of North Pope actually messaged me after my last blog. Love it when a singer notices me! I had briefly seen their music shared by some of the goth music YouTube channels I follow, but I was inspired to do a deep listen to their album Strange Times, released last August, and I highly recommend it. Quite a few of them felt poignant to me, the album has a theme of weltschmerz throughout, lamenting on the state of the world and humanity. North Pope is one of the recent bands that continue the proud tradition of French coldwave, a particular genre that France has excelled in since the 1980s
This was a fun track to listen to during the lead up to Halloween this year. It was released as a single on October 6 by Mexican darkwave group Blood Dance. It’s just an all around fun song for goths to revel in their favorite time of the year. I’ll listen to it throughout the year too, because Halloween never really ends for me.
This song is off a compilation that was released on the 5th of this month, Midwest Gothic, featuring bands from the midwest United States such as from Ohio and Kentucky. I used to be surprised that there were goth bands from that area, but after finding goth bands from Peru, China and Armenia, I can safely say they’re pretty much everywhere.
Anyway, Soma & Seraphim are from Dayton, Ohio. It’s been hard digging up anything about them, but they must be brand new. I found their YouTube channel, became their third subscriber, and their videos were all posted today. If this band gets big I get to be all hipster over it and say I liked them before they were popular! Go give this band some more YouTube subscribers.
I felt like writing this as a way to cope I suppose. Like a lot of these blogs, it’s more for myself. Helps me keep my stories straight. So anyway, my back has been giving me a lot of chronic pain in recent years, especially in the past month or month and a half. Then I have my tailbone issues, aka coccydynia. I finally got an MRI done on my spine, and now, I’m left with trying to piece together how this all happened.
Doctors want to hear that your pain was caused by some dramatic injury, like a car accident or something. But mine kind of happened over time. Like lots of little micro-injuries just added up over the years. They dismiss you if you say it like that though. And because I still (fortunately) look youthful, and I’m short, that just makes it even easier to assume I’m faking my pain because I don’t want to work or something. Damned able-bodied neurotypicals. I feel like I understand ableism a lot more now. It took me a few tries to find a doctor who took me seriously.
To take things back to the start, I’ve always had bad posture. I remember being chewed out by my evil band teacher in Middle School almost daily over it. Believe me, I feel bitter over the fact that she was right that I would have back pains when I was older. It always took a lot of extra effort to sit up straight, and doing it for too long hurts. And you know what, it wasn’t my fault. I was diagnosed with autism over the summer. And having underdeveloped back muscles is common with autistic people. Have a look at this Facebook post by NeuroClastic. It sounds like my struggle.
So, I dealt with bad posture my whole life, got crap about it from people from time to time. Lugging around heavy backpacks all through school didn’t help. My attempts to alleviate that by getting a rolling backpack was met with bullying and chastising, of course. And here’s another thing that I think screwed up both my spine and tailbone; when I listened to music, I used to sit in a little chair with my legs and arms crossed, and rock back and forth. For hours on end, day after day. I didn’t go out much. I stayed locked in my dark room, rocking. I didn’t know I was slowly screwing up my body. To date no doctor seems to believe this caused my chronic pain but it’s true, I know it. And it’s another autism thing. It’s called stimming. But like I said, doctors don’t want to hear about little micro-injuries over time, they want to hear that you had some kind of traumatic moment that scarred you for life. Well, I do have something like that.
May 2015, I was in Armenia doing my internship. One of our weekend trips with Birthright Armenia was a bicycle ride from Yerevan to Etchmiadzin, about ten miles. The roads in Armenia aren’t the best. Very bumpy. And after this ride, my tailbone was never the same. I believe I fractured it. And it never healed properly. Over the next few years, I further strained my spine trying not to put too much weight on my tailbone while sitting. And that made things worse. I don’t know how long I’ve had scoliosis, maybe since my teens as far as I know, but I sure have it now.
For the past couple of years I’ve been through physical therapy. Didn’t do anything. Been through several pain killers. Didn’t do anything. Got a steroid injection to my tailbone. First several excruciating tries it didn’t do anything, it finally worked when they went really deep with it. But it’s a temporary fix. And then I went to a chiropractor. It didn’t do anything until around mid-September last month, when the chiropractor decided to go extra rough on me and screwed my back up even worse. And since then it’s just been awful. I can’t do much anymore. Hurts to get out of bed. Last week I got an MRI. To my horror, it was the type where you sit up straight. Sitting up straight and not moving was incredibly painful, and I was in agony for the next two days. It was horrible. I could have tolerated laying down, but not sitting. It’s even worse than standing, which hurts too after too long. Here’s what they found in my MRI:
So I have a bulging disc. Sounds about right. I have a lot of upper back pain too between the shoulder blades. The MRI didn’t find anything there, but the doctor says it may be muscle pain, which I’m willing to believe. Sounds like the plan is more injections, and more physical therapy. I am skeptical this is going to do anything. The injections are going to really suck.
I’m falling apart.
I really have to reevaluate my entire self image now that I can’t do the same things I used to. I’m not the same person I used to be now. A part of me still feels like a kid who’s body happens to be deteriorating. I’m never going to feel like I’m old mentally. Time laughs at all things, including me.
I write this at 3 am at night. Insomnia seems to happen every other night now to me. I’m listening to one of my mixtapes of acoustic rock in order to soothe me. I don’t know when it will succeed in getting me to sleep. My back pain became severe last month, after a chiropractor screwed it up. I have scoliosis, I was supposed to have an MRI last Friday but the insurance decided to fuck around as usual. Maybe it will happen this Thursday now, but I’m not holding my breath. I’m 36 years old, halfway to 72, but I feel like I’m already experiencing physical deterioration. This is my life now. Pain. From the moment I wake up to whenever I’m lucky enough to sleep. I can’t even get on the ground to play with my son. Simple outings have become excruciating because the longer I’m standing upright the worse the pain gets. I can’t get through the day without being medicated. And I can hardly get a full night of sleep. You know, I realize how fortunate I am in a lot of respects. A wife, a kid, a house, food at least most of the time. But I can’t help but be depressed, I feel like my body is falling apart. I feel the bony hand of Death on my shoulder, whispering in my ear that he is coming. Is this a midlife crisis? I never got over my quarter life crisis, back when I realized my entire education was a scam. I could have started writing this blog entry a lot sooner. I usually like to give myself at least a few days to do these. But it was supposed to go up today. I barely have the motivation for my webcomic let alone anything else. I’m back to being right up against the deadline on those pages.
What music has been getting me through these rather dark times? Here are a few songs. I don’t know how much I will write about each song. Probably going to try to get some sleep and write a little bit during the day, got to work on my comic page though, top priority besides parenting and such.
((Update: I fell asleep finally around 4ish, woke up just before 8, with another groggy, painful day ahead of me. Gonna have to compensate with a lot of coffee, and some jazz cabbage for the pain if you catch my drift.))
Another thing keeping me in a black place mentally is Armenian news. As Azerbaijan continues to attack Armenia and commit heinous war atrocities while the rest of the world largely doesn’t care in the slightest, I see the writing on the wall for my little country. 4,500 years was a good run at least. Every country gets wiped off the map and forgotten by history eventually. Humanity is headed for extinction anyway. The abyss consumes all. It’s like how no one is going to remember me 200 years from now. So yeah, it’s like I’m reliving the 2020 Artsakh war while being in excruciating pain. Fun times huh? I mean it’s not like I can do anything to change it personally, especially being flat broke. Maybe I should use my “fame” to raise awareness about it, eh? Hah. Not even Serj Tankian or Kim Kardashian can do anything of substance about it. Best I can do is try to avoid looking at the news. I’ve unjoined the Armenia subreddit again.
So, here we go.
Desmond Doom ~ The Dissociation Song
Desmond Doom’s music still speaks to me. Especially this song. It really embodies where I’m at right now, just kind of checking out from the rest of the world. “So dead, zombie through the day. Too fast, in the Milky Way. So numb, pins and needles, man. I’m not really here.” Sounds like me stumbling through my days.
Slow Danse with the Dead’s new EP is awesome, no lie. No happy lie. “Strangers in the Dark” topped my charts last month and it’s still a favorite of mine right now. But lets have a look at this one. It’s saying that happy people only stay happy by lying to themselves. “Happy lives tell happy lies.” I would add that it’s a combination of that and ignorance being bliss. The more you learn about the world the worse it is. I was happiest right before Middle School, age 10 to 11 or so, right before I started to figure out what an awful place this planet is. I was at the perfect balance of intelligence and ignorance at that age. I would binge on books about dinosaurs and ancient Egyptian mythology, the world seemed like a fascinating place, not a terrible place. I didn’t know what the hell a genocide was, back then. I was being told happy lies as a child, and I believed them whole-heartedly until life proved them false. Anyway I’m not good at happy lies. I embrace uncomfortable truths. That’s why I’m not very religious anymore either. You can’t look around this world and believe in the good of a God who rules it. War, famine, pestilence, disease and death, they rule this world. That’s a quote, from Vincent Price in Masque of the Red Death. I don’t see any way to refute it.
Another part of the song I like is where the singer asks why anyone seeks fame if they’re just going to die someday anyway. That’s a thought I like to chew on too sometimes. There will come a day where no one even remembers William Shakespeare. We’re all doomed to be forgotten eventually. Even entire countries.
On my blog entry about my acoustic mixtapes (I need to update that by the way, I made a third tape since then) I mentioned how I could hardly find any acoustic goth music besides maybe The Cure and William Control, it’s mainly 90s alternative rock with the occasional 80s pop song or something. But then I found this guy, Ovmorth, he does acoustic covers of Russian post-punk. And it sounds great, really. When is MTV going to give us Molchat Doma Unplugged? Never, but this is the next best thing. I really like the different feel you get from this version. Brooding and emotional.
Ssshhhiiittt! ~ Восемь
“Mom, tell me, why did I become an adult?”
Hilarious band name. It was fun putting that in the blog title too. I bet they get past the censors on the streaming platforms spelling it like that. Anyway, heard this song on one of those Russian Doomer Music compilations, liked the sound of it so looked it up and found this with an English translation. And damn, it sounds like something I could have written. “I’m growing older faster and faster, and fitting in with people less and less.”
The band is from Rostov, Russia, and the song came out in 2016.
This version specifically is the one I’ve been feeling lately. “Pennyroyal Tea” is a song about being in chronic pain on a bunch of different medications, and having bad posture, among other things. Yes there’s the heroin withdrawal element to the song too, but since I am in chronic pain I’ve felt like gravitating toward the song anyway (trust me, I’m not self-medicating on anything that hardcore). Another song kind of like that is “Falling Apart” by Insane Clown Posse, where it’s a song about drug withdrawals but I relate to it through physically feeling like shit for all different reasons. Anyway I dug this particular demo version of the song up when I was working on my acoustic rock mixtapes. It’s more raw than the album version, and Kurt Cobain sings in this uncharacteristically low voice that he almost never sings in. He sounds like he’s suffering. “I’m so tired, I can’t sleep.” Love that line. Kurt Cobain should have made post-punk music. He would have made a great goth. Anyway, this song sounds like a mess, I feel like a mess.
I can’t believe I’ve been with my wife for ten years. We got married in 2016, but we made sure it was on the dame date that we started dating on, in 2012.
2012 was a very different era. I was in Grad School. Deborah was a friend of my sister Erika’s. They had gone to school together, and I was four years older. She had just split up with her ex-boyfriend, and my sister played match-maker and set us up for a blind date. I had met Deborah on a couple of different occasions, when she visited my sister’s apartment, but I never expected that we would be together. My own love life had been nearly nonexistent before this; four years earlier I had a four month long relationship that had ended with us being incompatible, which I now realize since my diagnosis this year was because I was autistic, and she was neurotypical. Anyway for many years there was some doubt in my mind that I would ever be compatible with someone. I’ve always been socially awkward, shy and introverted. Being set up on a blind date by my sister was probably the only way I would have met the right girl.
Deborah had to deceive her father to come see me, because he was very overbearing. She lived in Stockton, California while I was going to school in Fresno, living in a dorm. She told her father that she was spending the night at my sister’s, and then my sister dropped her off at the Amtrak train station. I tried my best to be gentlemanly, offering to carry her luggage, giving her a kiss on the hand as she disembarked. It all went quite nicely. We hit it off from the get-go. The next year I rented us an apartment rather than a dormitory so we could live together. I proposed to her on our two year anniversary on a trip to the summit of Mt. Diablo, using a necklace I bought when I was in Armenia as we both preferred necklaces to rings. And in 2016, two years later, we were married. In the meantime I had to make a big decision, whether to follow her to Florida or not. And I did follow her there. We’ve been through thick and thin together these past ten years. We had our son together in 2019, after having been together for a little over six years.
Deborah has been my guiding light all these years. She’s been an inseparable companion against life’s slings and arrows. We’re a team. It’s interesting to think how the decisions you make when you’re in your teens and twenties set the course for the rest of your life. And there’s no way to predict the outcomes.
Anyway, we celebrated our tenth anniversary (the day after a hurricane at that, and not the first storm we’ve had to brave together in ten years) by going to a kratom bar, and getting kabobs at a Middle Eastern restaurant. We have a tradition of going out in our wedding outfits on our anniversary. After all why just wear it once? We also got some free baklava from the restaurant for dressing up.
Time to regain any goth points I lost with that last blog entry! Well, I like to think being a goth is a little less strict than being a metalhead. I’m allowed to listen to non-goth music sometimes, right? Maybe not, I dunno. I’m just a poser. I can live with that.
Earlier in the month I came across a two part video series about goth music from Peru, from the 1980s to today. My wife is half-Peruvian, hence my interest being piqued. That led me to two of the songs on this list. It’s amazing how this style of music has spread to so many countries. I do wonder if there are any Armenian post-punk bands I haven’t come across yet. I continue to hear more from Georgia.
I am still always bombarded with more music than I can get around to listening to because I’m subscribed to too many music channels on YouTube. So what I do is go to my subscriptions and like every song I see, and then go through my “like” list and listen to them all back to back and just unlike the songs that I’m not feeling. The list starts to become curated, until the next flood of music anyway. Which is almost every day. These are just the songs that stuck with me.
Slow Danse with the Dead ~ Strangers in the Dark
Slow Danse with the Dead is back with a full EP, Strangers in the Dark. I always love when SDWTD does a full EP, if only because it takes me a while to save up enough singles to do a full CD mix. Even then I had room for another album on the CD after I got this one off Bandcamp, from the very next band on the list.
This is a spooky, dancey tune. The mention of “dancing down the corridor” makes me feel like this is some kind of sequel song to Ministry’s “Revenge”, the only other song I can think of with the word “corridor” in it. But that’s just my brain being weird. I still need time to really sit and do a deep listen with the other tracks, this album is just a day old. It just so happened I was in a position to buy it immediately this time. Had a little extra money from a certain story contest I did very well in. Not that it’s expensive, I’m just always broke, and spend all my spare money when I don’t need it for food on music and VHS tapes. Anyway, enough stream of consciousness. (These are more like journal entries than actual reviews.)
Every once in a while, I’ll discover a new YouTube channel that just makes me feel like a kid on Christmas morning. Every Desmond Doom makes is perfect. I was led to the channel by the algorithm somehow, to a video that was of his newly-released album Surf Goth, which has a hilarious cover of a goth guy in a trenchcoat standing on a surf board. That’s what it feels like being a goth in Florida. The singer himself is from Australia. I’ve noticed that some of the guitar riffs in post-punk can sound a little bit like surf rock, or else the James Bond theme. So I think that’s what the album title alludes to. And then he’s got these awesome goth covers of “1979” by Smashing Pumpkins and “Tomorrow Comes Today” by Gorillaz, which were true contenders for this spot on my list. It’s hard to pick a favorite.
I don’t speak French, and Google Translate was unhelpful. But the voice of the singer is endearing somehow. Kind of cute. I like how she says “que tooiii” (twaaah). This was one if those songs among the sea of other songs I listen to that got stuck in my head, earning itself a spot here. The album this song is from came out in March 2021, and it’s available on cassette. I love collecting newly released cassettes.
Here is one of those Peruvian bands I mentioned earlier. They sing in English, so you would never know the band was from Peru just by listening to them. They sound like a UK post-punk band from the early 80s. In fact, I get the strangest feeling that I’ve known this song for years when I really only recently heard it. That familiar guitar riff. It’s like some weird de ja vu, Mandela effect sort of thing.
But the album When it Burns Like Snow came out in 2015. The whole album is good, I listened through the whole thing. A bunch of songs on it are just as good as this one.
Ahuman Age is a group from Italy. This song is very catchy indeed. I like it whenever the singer repeats “Every time I kiss your lips”. It’s infectious, I like it. This song came out in December 2021, on the album Disco Vampire. That puts a fun image in my head. Like of a historical fantasy book set in the 1970s about a group of vampires that prey on helpless dancers at the disco.
Here’s my second Peruvian goth band this month. There were lots of others that I still need to get to, but immediately this song stood out as well as the other. I think what really made this song stick in my mind was the music video. A woman follows a man through a cemetery desperately trying to get his attention, but he doesn’t react to her. He then lays some flowers at a grave and walks away. To her horror she sees a picture of herself on the tombstone, meaning she’s dead. Stories about someone realizing they’re a ghost are pretty chilling, to me.
You know I don’t think this band is on Bandcamp. I wasn’t able to find them. This song came out in 2002. All I could find was the band on Discogs.
