(Over a series of twenty short posts – one per week for the remaining weeks of this decade – I am aiming to highlight in vaguely chronological order some of the most important and influential releases in the goth/post-punk/darkwave genre of the 2010’s).
As the 2010’s have progressed, the darkwave revival seems to have been increasingly been dominated by American bands, and our first band from across the Atlantic to feature in this countdown is Detroit’s Ritual Howls, who like many of the bands covered on this blog started in the early years of the decade and have recently released their fourth full studio album.
As the 2010’s have progressed, the darkwave revival seems to have been increasingly been dominated by American bands, and our first band from across the Atlantic to feature in this countdown is Detroit’s Ritual Howls, who like many of the bands covered on this blog started in the early years of the decade and have recently released their fourth full studio album.
For the typical (post-)punk fan, Detroit conjures up images of Iggy and the Stooges or the MC5, but this particular Michigan trio took their inspiration from a variety of sources, with singer/guitarist Paul Bancell favouring indie rock guitar bands, drum/synth player Chris Samuels coming from an industrial background and fuzz bassist Ben Saginaw previously playing in a psychedelic doom band. Their 2012 eponymous debut album, released on the delightfully-named Urinal Cake label. Unsurprisingly contained songs in a variety of styles, with Year of Fear getting proceedings underway with a jangly melancholy darkwave pop vibe and following track Cemetery Guards then straying into The God Machine’s gothic post-rock territory. It was the third track that would retrospectively give the biggest clue to the band’s future direction, with Keep Those Stones Up Boys creating a broad cinematic soundscape topped with the reverberating melody of Bancell’s “dark twang” guitar, reminiscent of everything from Hollywood Western soundtracks to Nick Cave swamp/murder ballads or the uber-cool of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game. With other tracks veering from JAMC style dark psychedelia to low-fi experimentalism, the album was praised for its creativity but lacked any cohesion or sense of identity, a flaw only partially rectified on 2014’s follow-up.
With a more electronic percussive background to reinforce the post-punk credentials, Human Leather kept a dark vibe thanks to Saginaw’s edgy bass lines and Bancell’s emotive vocal on the likes of Taste of You, with the “dark twang” guitar effects again very much to the fore. Although the song-writing and production were clearly stronger than on the debut, Human Leather still sounded like a band in search of their own definitive sound, although the stand-out track, the claustrophobic My Friends, blended the upbeat psychedelic groove with the more filmic elements successfully.
The Ritual Howls sound finally reached
maturity on their third and best album, Into The Water, with opening
track Scatter The Scars containing all the elements which made the
previous albums such a rewarding listen but adding a stronger melody and a
greater range of vocal effects and samples to the string bending guitar, the scuzzy
bass riff and the Joy Division backbeat. Nervous Hands, Bound By Light
and Park Around The Corner have a similarly downbeat sleazy feel,
creating the feeling of band who have finally found a way to meld their
disparate musical roots into their own distinctive sound.
After the excellent 2017 EP Their Body continued the band’s dark descent into the sleazy world of film noir, such as on the atmospherically maudlin closing track Blood Red Moon, Ritual Howls returned this year to end the decade with their most confident and ambitious release to date, Rendered Armor. The more commercial tone is set by opening track Alone Together which set their trademark “dark twang” to a more conventional radio-friendly alternative pop song structure, more in the style of legendary 80’s Belgian band The Neon Judgement. It remains to be seen if this direction will prove to be more successful in terms of sales, but the critical acclaim continues to grow for the band, as does the number of bands clearly influenced by them.
The best of these (to my ears ) is German duo Suir, whose 2018 sophomore album Soma aimed for a similarly widescreen sound, particularly on the epic Warsaw, a track which featured on many “Best Of..” lists last year.
Ritual Howls’ music can be bought on their Bandcamp page, likewise Suir.
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