Saturday, September 10, 2022

Top 6 Songs of the Month ~ SDWTD, Desmond Doom, Under the Rain

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.)

Buy it here!


Desmond Doom ~ Now That You’re Gone


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. 

Here’s the album:


Potochkine ~ Eros


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.



Under the Rain ~ Sitting in the Dark




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 ~ Black Tie


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. 




La Devociรณn ~ Isabel




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.

https://www.discogs.com/artist/6619827-La-Devociรณn



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