2 posts tagged “gothic”
It always galls me when a new band takes the same name as an old band; for one thing it's an annoyance to have net searches mucked up with the pretender's name, and at worst they end up overwriting the history of the original band. How infuriating that the name of transsexual rock great Wayne/Jayne County's early band, the Backstreet Boys, has been forever tainted by the boy band's appropriation. Apropos of my last post, The Prodigy's band name is now diluted by a rapper who goes by Prodigy. And the metal band Drowning Pool has taken the name of a fascinating band from the 80s. I recently dug up my copy of the original Drowning Pool's Satori double album, released on the Nate Starkman and Son label in 1987 in a gorgeous hand-printed heavy cardboard gatefold sleeve. It's a mix of studio and live recordings spanning several postpunk musical styles--drum machine workouts, renaissance madrigals, funereal dirges--while listening to it I was reminded of Dead Can Dance, but one track sounded uncannily like the Abecedarians. I swear I came up with those references before opening their MySpace page and reading their "Sounds like" list, which begins with Dead Can Dance and Abecedarians! There is a liturgical feel to some of the songs, especially the vocals, similar to music by the more recent Arcanta. Here is "Festival of Healing"--
The members of Drowning Pool have resurrected their own label, Scarface Charley, to reissue their records on CD. Two have so far been produced (Green and Aphonia), with the "magnum opus" Satori still to come. This rediscovery has also opened up new avenues of musical exploration for me, returning me to the punk tribalisms of Drowning Pool labelmates Savage Republic, and introducing me to the similarly-inclined Red Temple Spirits. And all because there's a metal band called Drowning Pool!
Do you ever get a song in your head, that maybe you haven't heard for years, but it won't go away and you just have to dig it out and listen to it again? Sure you do. I've had this symptom this week for "Beat Me 'Til I'm Blue" by Colour Me Pop, an English band from the mid-80's who put out one single (on the misnamed American Phonograph label) and a few tracks on compilation albums. The song has several of my favorite ingredients: prominent slap-bass, bongos, both male and female vocals, and a nice (but short) breakdown:
That doesn't qualify as Gothic in and of itself, but its presence on a Gothic-heavy compilation LP, Breaking the Back of Love, makes the connection. And it's not far from some of the music that bona fide Gothic bands were creating at the time, most notably The Danse Society. Now that I've brought them up in a slap-bass post I have to present their slap-bass song, "Sensimilla." It was released as a bonus 12" with the club hit "Say It Again", in a gatefold sleeve. (A double 12" in a full-color gatefold sleeve; all that packaging cost for just four songs? That couldn't have been cost-effective, what was Arista thinking?) This is bassist Tim Wright's shining moment, laying down a rubbery, funky groove that won't allow you to sit still (and by "you", I mean me), and Paul Nash's syncopated rhythm guitar does a great job to accent the flow. The lyrics are on the embarrassing side (condensed version: "I love to smoke pot"), and I could do without the toasting from "Sooty" Brown (but I guess you have to have toasting in a marijuana song); but it's the funkiest song The Danse Society ever recorded, and therefore it's my favorite.
(I was all set to rip this myself, but it just turned up on New Romantic Rules, saving me the trouble. NRR is an incredible source of 80s music; many of the obscure singles I've been holding onto have turned up in Rambul's amazing 20-volume Lost Hits compilation series. Chances are if you have any favorite "lost" 80s songs, they're in there too.)
