So in the month-long post holiday hangover of January I’ve listened to a lot of music, but very little of it seems to have stuck with me, save for these songs. I was unable to make it to a nice round number like 10. It’s that time of the year that gets neglected on “Best Songs of 202x” lists, so I mustn’t forget the songs on this list come December. We just had another Bandcamp Friday a couple days ago; I remember hearing some doubts that the tradition would be continuing into 2022 but after an absence in January it is back. So I got to finally buy some albums that had been sitting in my shopping cart for a while. If you missed it this month though then hopefully there will be another in March. The “Is it Bandcamp Friday?” website says there will be one.
Anyways, here we go.
The Palest Grey ~ In This Room
My good friend (well, I have been to a couple of their DJ nights) Azy Bats of Obscura Undead, is in this Florida-based, old school style deathrock band. You know, a couple of goth Facebook groups have deleted my blog posts for some reason, even when they don’t appear to go against the rules, but Azy has always been very supportive, so out of appreciation for allowing me to post my music blogs in the Obscura Undead Facebook group, and encouraging me to continue to write these blogs, I will give The Palest Grey the number 1 spot this month. And not just because of that either, but because the music is damn good too. Their debut album was released just mere days ago from this writing.
The album is traditional deathrock with lots spooky fun added here and there (see the track “Terror-go-Round” for instance) . I chose this song, “In This Room”, as an early favorite on the album, but I’m sure after more repeated listening, more songs on the album will come to the forefront. “Lamplight” and “Suicide” are favorite tracks as well. The shrill Spanish and English vocals in “In This Room” pair well with the gloomy deathrock guitars in a way you wouldn’t expect. Spanish always seems to go well with his type of music.
You can find their debut album, Always Haunted, here:
Morosinthe is my kind of band right now, fitting in with a lot of my other favorites in this subgenre of very gloomy post-punk sometimes called misery goth, with acts such as Forever Grey and Slow Danse with the Dead. When I’m not chasing my lost youth by listening to 90s grunge once again, I listen to this kind of music. I’ve been doing a deep dive into Morosinthe’s discography, and this is catchiest song I’ve discovered from this band yet. It’s the first track off their latest album, Black Seraphim, which came out in June 2021. I always thought Tatiana was a pretty name. There is a second “rehearsal” version of the song that has a slower tempo, but I actually prefer the finished product; unusually for me since I find that I often prefer demo versions.
Boy Harsher has been making waves in the past month with their newly released soundtrack to the horror movie they’ve filmed, The Runner. I still need to see the movie, but I find it intriguing that they decided to make a movie, I can’t think of another non-mainstream band that’s done that. Anyway this video appears in the movie. It’s got a very artsy, post modern vibe that borders on the ridiculous, with this muscular guy covered in silver paint doing various poses in the background behind the singer, who is dressed in some sort of spandex one-piece. It’s a catchy song though, and reminds me of the 1980s. As we know the 80s never really died, they were just in hibernation for 20 years or so. Along with their usual fare, the album also includes instrumentals inspired by John Carpenter scores, being of course a soundtrack album.
I covered the remix of this song last year after it appeared on the Unearth’d compilation, but I finally decided to seek out the original, and it doesn’t disappoint. It’s got kind of a cowboy goth vibe going on, with whistling in the background, which was also present but a bit more subtle in the remix. It’s always interesting when I hear a remix before I hear the original song. My brain wants to think of the remix as the original. I might ultimately like the remix best but it’s refreshing to hear the original version. As with “Tatiana” earlier, it’s short and I wish it were longer. This is off their May 2020 album Phantasma.
Noktva is a post-punk group out of Italy.Their debut album Like Seven Forgotten Tales came outjust this past December. Italy is a great country for goth music I’m coming to realize. This is a solid post-punk track that just builds and builds into an emotionally-charged chorus powered by a passionate singer, and manages to hold its own for over 6 minutes to the point where you don’t even realize how long the song is. There’s a reason this song is the first single from their debut album, which also has a nice music video to go with. It’s a head banger to be sure.
An yes, my old standby. This song might not be new-new, off their December 2020 album Dance with a Crucifix, but I’ve begun to appreciate more after multiple listens. It’s catchy, about as up-tempo as Slow Danse with the Dead gets, and it’s about deceptive spiritual leaders. Think rip-off tarot card readers, “mediums” who claim to speak to dead loved ones, pastors of mega-churches that become millionaires off church donations. Of course as always, “there’s a fee to pay”. There was a previous version of this song, hence this is Volume 2. I like this version best though, it has the best beat, and you can hear the lyrics better.
The band Idles was a chance discovery for me, someone shared it in a Facebook group and with nothing else to do in that moment I gave it a listen. Rather than post-punk, they’re just punk. Perhaps I’ve been moving toward that genre more and more over the past few years, which is funny because I did have a short punk phase when I was 13-14, before my metal phase, so I guess I’ve always liked the genre but I haven’t explored it much. Anyway, this song is about being a cog in the grand machine of capitalism. The video features a guy banging his head to the beat of the song on everything at his office job, in his car (where the beat of the song is replaced by the car horn), at a grocery store, and at a bar, obviously sick of the day-to-day grind. I wonder what they meant by the term “Mercedes Marxist”. A rich leftist, perhaps? I’ve heard the term “limousine liberal” used before to describe a rich person who plays lip service to social justice causes while continuing to live the glamorous rich life and exploit the lower classes. Perhaps it’s like that, although a Marxist is different from a liberal. “Our revolution’s dead”, the lyrics say. It reminds me of a lament of the baby boomer generation, who tried to have a revolution in the 1960s with the hippie movement until they graduated college and had to get jobs, and then over the years the majority of them gradually became conservative, or centrist at most. I am not sure if that’s exactly what the song means. But it’s a good anti-work song.
The Chalkeaters ~ Crushing Thirties (feat. Johnny Gioeli)
Quite outside my usual genre, but this song plays on my nostalgia for the early 3D Sonic Adventure video games on the Sega Dreamcast (which have not aged nearly as well as the 16 bit games and I actually have very little desire to replay, but regardless a tinge of nostalgia remains). It features Johnny Gioeli, the singer of Crush 40, the band that contributed several songs to the soundtracks of those games. In this song Sonic has hit his 30s, and must deal with crippling depression, joint pain, weight gain, not seeing his friends anymore, having “no time to live, no time to learn”, and an angry hammer-wielding wife. The song plays to a generation that grew up with Sonic but are now in their 30s and lamenting their rapidly vanishing youth, like myself. It comes with an impressive animated music video that might fool you into thinking it’s official. One of my favorite moments is seeing adult Tails with his soul-crushing desk job. Poor Tails, I can relate.
