So many songs I had to use the back of the J-card.
For the convenience of whoever is reading this, I’ll break it down by the Gregorian calendar, even though I did the whole tape by the ancient Armenian calendar. I’ll try to say a little something about each track, and link to it on YouTube (I don’t want to try to embed that many videos). If you follow the links and find yourself liking any if the music please consider supporting the artist and purchasing their music. Might be hard with some of the older tracks.
Side A
August
- Sin Razón Zoocial - Crucifixion - Some insane Mexican post-punk from 1990. The singer goes crazy later on in the song and shrieks like Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit when he’s melting due to the Dip. Specific reference, I know.
- Allie Frost - Abandoned Ghost - An eerie song about death. The whisper at the beginning talking about how ghosts are souls that didn’t walk into the light after death is particularly jarring.
September
- Trait d’Union - Marche Nocturne - I love how this song just builds and builds. I almost didn’t like it at first but I’m glad I stuck around. It’s like a brewing storm.
- Mannequin Twin - Threshold - This song carries a lot of passion as well as darkness and melancholy, which came along at the right time for me last September.
October
- Cashiari - Oscura Noche - This song came around just in time for Halloween for me, such a haunting and spooky track. Cashiari is a band out of Peru, and they make lovely music like this along with some artistic and macabre animated music videos.
- Blurpz - Escape - “Cuts me like a kniiife.” A very moody post-punk track from 1983. At this point in the year I was dealing with a lot of emotions and moodiness, that this song was perfect for. It’s a beautiful and underrated song.
November
- Rob Zombie - Phantom Stranger (slowed + reverb) - This one was kind of a passing fad I guess. I liked Rob Zombie back in my early teens, but only his first two albums really, before he, much like the pro-wrestler The Undertaker with a similar undead gimmick, became a patriotic redneck zombie biker, and started to suck. I just thought the intro to this song sounded so badass being given the “slowed + reverb” treatment.
- Slow Danse with the Dead - Are You Tortured? - This song should have been #1 in November, history has vindicated it. Slow Danse with the Dead is still one of my favorite still-active bands, and made a few appearances on this tape. In this song SDWTD captures their signature “misery goth” style. Sometimes the answer to their question is yes.
December
- FEVR - I’ve Had Enough - A breakup song that I fortunately don’t relate to on a personal level, but it has this cold and dreary melancholy sound to it that was perfect for December. Some great seasonal depression vibes.
- Conjunto Vacío - San Benito - Some dark Mexican post-punk from 2022, carries kind of a similar energy as the previous song. Very wintery. It’s in Spanish, which I don’t speak, but I just listen to the sound of the song.
January
- Tout Debord - Les Gens Sont Les Gens - Okay, I mostly liked this song because of the cute little “beep, beepbeepbeep boop, beepbeepbeep boop” sounds throughout. It just amused me, and got stuck in my head for days.
- Flue - Sometimes - A 1983 post-punk track with vaguely Middle Eastern influences. I couldn’t pass that up. The band Flue was from Holland though. Actual goth bands from the Middle East are sadly pretty rare. If only this song had started a new sub-genre.
February
- Obsidian - Night Director - I saw this band live in Tampa a couple years ago opening for Twin Tribes, and they seem to be doing just fine, I liked this track even better than the songs on their previous album. They have been improving.
- Metawave - Ausencia - Oh goody, another Middle Eastern-sounding goth song. It sounds more authentically Middle Eastern than Flue, although the band is “Franco-Portugese”. It’s a song about how fleeting life is apparently. But very dancey regardless. Great for goth bellydancing. And that ends Side A. Made it over half the year on one side; that means a whole extra ten minutes to spare, and bonus tracks!
Side B
March
- Tango Mangalore - Re-Vamp - This little-known band fronted by a Greek fisherman who sings about how much he craves the sea and hates living on land released a new album early this year and it was great. This is the title track off the album. It’s about, of course, craving the sea and hating living on land.
- Scary Black - The Fallacy of Worth - A therapeutic goth song with a positive message. “Don’t believe them if they say you’re not worthy.” I have wrestled with the fallacy of worth myself in the past. Don’t let your self-worth be determined by the opinions of others, or by capitalism or religion or what have you. Word on the street is Scary Black is going to have a new album soon, which I look forward to. This was released as a single by itself, it could end up on the new album.
April
- Kalte Nacht - The Last Breath - I had been waiting for this band to come back since 2020. Their new album was a blast, as expected, and this was the lead single from it which got a music video. A very dancey track that makes for a great intro track.
- Tango Mangalore - Thelema - Another song from their Re-Vamp album. Apparently an anti-Aleister Crowley song, but I didn’t really pay much attention to the lyrics, it’s just catchy.
May
- Mekong - Danse Danse - This is just one of the prettiest post-punk songs I’ve ever heard. All the little guitar riffs here and there accenting the song. It even uses the cool spelling for “dance”. Mekong’s other songs on the album don’t quite sound like this, tracks like “Picture of Wrong” on the same album are a bit comical. But I love this song. I would show this to someone who didn’t know what post-punk was, alongside early The Cure.
- Slow Danse with the Dead - The Hermit - I was shocked that Slow Danse with the Dead decided to write a song about my life. Pretty much every word in the lyrics could be about me. I mean I’m a hermit that somehow managed to get a wife and son, but still a hermit at heart. My bedroom is the safest place to be.
June
- Dead on a Sunday - Dammit (After Dark) - This is a goth cover of the song “Dammit” by Blink 182, apparently to the somewhat similar tune of “After Dark” by Mr. Kitty. I am less familiar with the latter song, and Blink 182 was never one of my favorite bands, but I did hear them on the radio a lot back in the late 90s. I knew well the song “Dammit”, or as I probably would have called it, “I Guess This is Growing Up”. It’s a catchy, upbeat, happy pop-punk song that captures the spirit and energy of youth, while perhaps having some melancholy lyrics which you wouldn’t notice unless you were really listening, but it was never really my type of song. It never even made it onto my old mixtapes at the time. But this version. Wow. Suddenly the “I guess this is growing up” chorus feels like it’s being said from the point of view of a jaded 30-something adult who has had all the dreams of their youth beaten out of them, has to work a soul-crushing 40 hour a week job to barely scrape by, has no free time and lost most of their friends. I can’t help but feel both versions of the song capture the spirit of the Millennial generation at two different stages in their lives, even if the original song isn’t my cup of tea.
- Slow Danse with the Dead - Today is a Good Day to Die - I was thinking perhaps “The Hermit” would be the best song of the year by Slow Danse with the Dead, but I was mistaken. This song here has such badass energy. It’s almost a metal song, insofar as it’s the first time we hear a metal-growl from the lead singer Johnny Montoya during the chorus. And I wonder if the corridor in this song is the same corridor mentioned in their song “Strangers in the Dark”. Is there a lore I should be following? Anyway, now that SDWTD is an official band rather than a solo-project we are getting a different sound out of them, a little heavier sometimes but more polished.
July
- Vomito Negro - Bone Cutter - I went on a binge of the extensive discography of Vomito Negro (“Black Vomit” in Spanish, before you ask) this summer and found a lot of great tracks I had been sleeping on previously. Vomito Negro has been around since the late 1980s, one of the pioneering industrial bands. This song in particular is off their 2017 album, Black Plague. It’s very catchy.
- Cashiari - Sombrio Reflejo - A song I had overlooked previously from the Peruvian goth band. It has their typical spooky sound and haunting, whispering vocals. Then about a minute and a half in the tone shifts a bit, becoming slightly heavier but not by a whole lot. It’s a darkly psychedelic song like most of their work.
Bonus Tracks
- Vivabeat - Working for William - The #3 song for June. No idea who William is but this song is super catchy and was stuck in my head for like two weeks. It’s a New Wave track from 1980 that I discovered while building my 1980s playlist. I always have a hard time finding good music from the year 1980 because disco wasn’t dead yet and there wasn’t much goth music, so I get excited when I hear a song I like from that year.
- Vomito Negro - Chicago Cave - From their 1989 album Shock. I am unaware of any caves in Chicago, and have no idea what the song is about, but it’s so catchy, and I love joining in with the singer and singing “the Cave, the Cay-yave” in a Cookie Monster voice during the chorus.
- Nemuer - The Gates of Duat - This song got robbed of the #1 and #2 spot because it was September and there was heavy competition. Nemuer is a pagan folk band that up until now mostly did Norse pagan stuff but decided to do an album based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead in reconstructed ancient Egyptian language. The results are incredibly badass, I definitely recommend giving it a listen. It had its fair share of detractors but they’re just jelly (I specifically remember one comment saying “this is what happens when goths watch too much National Geographic”, which was cruel but also admittedly funny). The music video for this song is awesome too.
- Have a Nice Life - Bloodhail - And this song got robbed in October because of Cashiari and Blurpz. Have a Nice Life is pretty famous in some internet circles but I only recently listened to their 2008 album Death Consciousness, which is a modern classic but very depressing. It’s kind of post-punk mixed with shoegaze and maybe even some emo, but tolerable emo at least. This was my favorite song of theirs. It’s very emotionally deep.
- Glis ft. Ayria - Dream Chaser - Ayria came back! Or rather, Jennifer Parkin did guest vocals on this song by Glis. It was good to hear from her again, probably my favorite song I’ve heard from her in a long time, hopefully another new album is forthcoming.
Anyway, what a year it has been! And at least my list won’t get crowded out with everyone else’s year-end music lists in December. Maybe I’ll write some more about music, even do monthly blogs again. Let’s just see if I can get ahead on that webcomic. I guess the trick to these music blogs is to work on them little by little so it isn’t such a daunting task. Anyway, hopefully someone discovered some new music thanks to my little mixtape here.
And you know what, because I’m feeling generous, here are the first two songs on this year’s tape!
August 2024/Նավասարդ 4517
- dreDDup - Garden of Dead Friends - dreDDup is a Serbian industrial band I have been getting into lately, been around since 1997 and still making music. This song came out in 2011, but all their music is new to me at this point. It’s a very spooky tune, I love the melodies in it, very unique. The climax at the end of the song is awesome too.
- Damien Hearse - Negative Mental Attitude - Damien Hearse is a darkwave/industrial band from Florida, and I can feel like I can tell, because he sings about very relevant current political topics (“Pro Life Death Camp” is one such song, about the repeal of Roe vs Wade). This song is about how you could technically give into your darkest desires (stabbing your landlord in the neck, strangling a senator and dousing them with gasoline to light them on fire), like it’s always an option, there are just severe consequences. It’s a strangely motivational song. Don’t worry I’m not going to do it
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