Top 6 Songs of the Month ~ September 2023 ~ Node, Trait d’union, Mannequin Twin
This time of year you finally notice things are getting a bit darker. My music tastes has a way of changing with the seasons, I don’t know if anybody else’s does that. For example, Russian post-punk is best listened to in the winter, it just doesn’t have the same effect in summer. I also feel that way about acoustic, MTV Unplugged type music. It’s Autumn/Winter music. Listening to Molchat Doma in July is a bit like listening to Christmas music in July (except the music is good, just out of place). Summer is for synthwave, shoegaze, and heavier post-punk and deathrock. My music tastes follows a rhythm throughout the year, and this has been true since my teens at the earliest. Part of how I get into contact with these songs is just through listening to maybe around twenty or so new songs a day, and out of those twenty, one or two might strike a cord in me. When it does, I add them to a playlist to sort through later. The ones that make it all the way to the top though are kind of determined by whatever mood I’m in.
We have a very international selection of songs this month. Bands from Armenia, Peru, France, Australia, and the US. And below, in my Top Songs of September Through the Years, I have among other things a short review of Kraftwerk’s Tour de France Soundtracks album which came out twenty years ago now. I am so old.
Trait d’union ~ Marche Nocturne
This song took me on quite a ride the first time I listened to it, I had no idea what it was going to do next. It starts out sounding like it’s going to be some kind of minimalistic electronic music, but it just builds and builds, takes so many twists and turns, and it all works somehow. It reminds me of a hurricane, you start with a gentle wind, and it just gradually gets stronger, dark and menacing. That’s why it was the first song on my recent mixtape Tsovinar’s Fury, which is about hurricanes and such. Also it just makes for an epic opening track to a mixtape in general. But that’s just what goes on in my mind when I hear it, it’s in French and I don’t speak the language, nor can I find the lyrics to translate. Language barriers never stopped me from enjoying a song though. The song title translates to something like “Night Walk”.
Trait d’Union (French for “hyphen”…yeah I really thought it was going to translate to “trade union”) is from Toulouse, France, and this is off their EP 2, which fittingly only has two songs. It came out on October 13, 2022, I didn’t hear it until a few weeks ago though.
This is some great dark post-punk. Like the last song, it has a great atmosphere, they almost compliment one another. There’s a bit of synth in it but the electric guitar on this song is what makes it. It’s just kind of there to accent the music, not front and center like it would be in a metal song or something, but it just adds so much energy to the song. Mannequin Twin is a band out of Salt Lake City, Utah. Mormon goths? This is a brand new band by the looks of things, “Threshold” is the title track of their two-song EP that came out August 28.
Cashiari is an experimental dark electronic/post-punk band from Peru. Peru has a really great goth scene by the way, that goes back to the 1980s with bands like Euroshima and Lima 13. It was a bit difficult to find out more about Cashiari. But they often include trippy little animations for their music videos, such as the one to this song, the title of which translates to “The Girl with the Marble Face”. It starts with this strange knocking sound, then this little crocodile with a lion mane, who looks like Ammit the Devourer from Egyptian mythology if she was bipedal, starts dancing to 1930s music.
My four year old kid loves watching the dance animation by the way, although the rest of the video kinda isn’t child appropriate. My kid’s going to grow up weird like me, so it’s okay. The goth music begins after this intro, but we see the dancing crocodile a few more times throughout the video. And spoiler alert, at the end it turns out that knocking sound was a woman trapped under the floorboards beneath where the crocodile was dancing. I still don’t know if this animation was exclusively made to be the music video for this song or not, maybe I’ll find out more about Cashiari eventually.
I wasn’t able to find a Bandcamp page for Cashiari, but they do have an official YouTube channel.
This is a heavy-hitting 1996 deathrock track from a little-known band out of Australia, Troll. Apparently according to the uploader in the comments on the video, they only ever appeared on some sort of compilation, never releasing their own album. The best bands are always the ones like this, the ones who release like one demo tape and disappear. The YouTube channel Obscured Radio uploads underground stuff like this a lot.
That line in the chorus, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me!” is very relateable. I wish I could find out more about this band. This might have been their only song anyway.
Node & Melineh ~ Իմ Թագուհի (Im Taguhi)
Out of the very few Armenian bands I know of that might fall under the definition of goth (or at least goth adjacent), Node of Yerevan, Armenia is the one that releases music on the most consistent basis. Here she has collaborated with a singer named Melineh to cover a song originally by Lilit and Karen Karapetyan. The title translates to “My Queen”. It’s a love song from what I can understand. The chorus goes “Where are you where are you where are you my queen?” It’s kind of synthpop music but there’s a kind of darker undertone to it. The vocals have this vibe I don’t think I ever hear in English language songs, just the things Melineh does with her voice.
I don’t see this song on Bandcamp, but the artist does have a page there.
Essentially a song about the repeal of Roe vs Wade last year, and how it was done for the sake of the economy rather than all that religious smoke screen. The wealthy need more human cattle, basically. “Forced birth, on a scorched Earth, this isn’t Disneyland, you’re in a pro-life death camp”. That chorus goes hard, really does. I love that there’s a Florida map in the background on the album cover too. This state is fast becoming a fascist dictatorship with theme parks. You know sometimes this country does feel like one big theme park, in that everything is overpriced, based on fictional stories and fake as fuck. Wherever you go you’re either a customer or an employee.
I don’t know how I missed this album when it came out, in October of last year. Damian Hearse has had several releases since. This is the title track.
In the middle of my black metal phase at age 17, Kraftwerk came out with their first new album since 1991, Tour de France Soundtracks. So I took a break from the darkness to listen to that. My friend who I had converted into a Kraftwerk fan and I took the bus across town to Tower Records to buy it on the day it came out, as was the fashion of the time. As psyched as I was for it at the time, in retrospect, the album left much to be desired. The only song that sounds like classic Kraftwerk to me is “Vitamin”. I don’t really like the title track (although it can be fun to replace “tour de France” with “underpants” during the chorus), or all those songs with the heavy breathing throughout. “Aerodynamik”, while it has a catchy beat, bores me now. And little did we know this would essentially be the final Kraftwerk album, besides those 3D remix ones that came out later which don’t really count. It was a sad way for this legendary band to go out. Ralf Hütter is basically just parading around Kraftwerk’s corpse at this point, it died when Florian Schneider left the band.
1. Dornenreich ~ Nicht um zu Sterben
2. Kraftwerk ~ Aerodynamik
3. Cradle of Filth ~ Suicide and Other Comforts
15 Years Ago ~ September 2008
When putting together my Year mixes, I realized the late 2000s-early 2010s were terrible times for goth music. You might have a decent release now and then but mostly the genre was (un)dead. I’m glad it came back, but I think this explains why my music tastes at the time were erratic. But I found a few new-to-me songs.
1. She Wants Revenge ~ Tear You Apart
2. Mortiis ~ Underdog
3. Type O Negative ~ September Sun
10 Years Ago ~ September 2013
I was still going through the CDs I had purchased at the Ayria concert the previous June. The Break Up was a good band, too bad they broke up. Eisbrecher had a new release at that time as well, but after this I by and large moved on from that type of music.
1. The Break Up ~ Her Fire
2. Eisbrecher ~ Verrückt
3. Ayria ~ Friends and Enemies
5 Years Ago ~ September 2018
This was an exciting moment, as I found out there was an Armenian band that did at least semi-goth music, The Deenjes. They have quite a few good songs, I still listen to them pretty regularly. Statiqbloom is a good industrial band, they sound like Velvet Acid Christ. And Werner Karloff is a German living in Mexico City who does sort of EBM type of music. “They Live” does reference the movie of the same name.
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