No. 13 - Revolt (EP), Future Faces (2017)

(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).

Every now and then, a band arrives on the scene seemingly from nowhere yet perfectly formed – no low-fi demo EP, no awkward first album finding a direction. Future Faces are one such band, arriving in 2017 with a first EP (entitled Revolt) of such quality that despite being released on one-man operation Throatruiner Records, it immediately caused a stir amongst the darkwave community.

Just four songs made up the debut release, which in time-honoured fashion (think Unknown Pleasures, Killing Joke or Damage Done) came in a monochromatic sleeve with artwork that made the perfect t-shirt yet gave no clue as to the origin or identity of the band in question.

The band’s Bandcamp page was more helpful, revealing that not only were the band Swiss, but that two thirds of them had previously been in a band called Equus, who a decade earlier had released a couple of albums of very experimental sounds, lengthy instrumental albums combining krautrock and free-form psychedelia likely to shoot off at a tangent without any notice.

Some of those creative features contributed to the multi-layered songs on the Revolt EP, which at seven or eight minutes were way beyond the usual track length of guitar-based post-punk compositions. The somewhat distant echoing male vocal had a lugubrious quality that brought to mind Brendan Perry (Dead Can Dance) or Iain McCulloch which was entirely appropriate for the musical backing but very different from the usual gravel-throated Eldritch mimicry of so many scene vocalists. The music itself featured a stark yet shifting reverberating electronic drum backbeat interwoven with syncopated bass rhythms, over which a classically post-punk reverberated guitar constantly soars, shimmering as it takes it own path away from the main melody to introduce a new segment of each song, echoing the six-string alchemy of The Edge on U2’s incredible Boy debut in 1980.

Clearly surprised by the uniquely positive reaction to the release, the Swiss trio have yet to release any further songs in the intervening two and a half years and have only played a handful of live dates, mainly in their native Geneva area, although their Facebook page reveals that they have been in the studio and that new recordings are imminent. Indeed, it took the band almost a year to produce a video for the EP’s lead (and by far shortest) track Embraces, which showed the bearded trio backlit in blue and surrounded by dry ice in time-honoured tradition.

Whilst there are many other bands who have produced excellent work this decade in a similar melodic and melancholic vein that brings to mind the disparate likes of The Chameleons, The Cure and even early Coldplay, such as Italian groups like Starcontrol and Tanks and Tears, Americans Night Nail or Belgians Slice of Life, no-one has produced a debut with depth, the atmosphere and the sheer musicality of Future Faces’ Revolt EP, which can be bought via Bandcamp.

No. 12 - Walk The Wire, Miazma (2017)

(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).

Regular readers of this countdown may have noted a preponderance of post-punk artists around the middle of the decade, but more recently there has been a welcome resurgence in good old-fashioned gothic rock. After years or even decades where, taking the lead from the so-called Godfather of Goth, Andrew Eldritch,  no-one would admit to being part of the scene, a series of bands have been prepared to unashamedly admit to their love of the classic late 80’s sound and update it for a modern audience.

The shock recent unveiling of two new songs (Show Me and Better Reptile) by The Sisters of Mercy themselves at their recent live shows, the band’s first new material in thirteen years, has rekindled hopes that the quintessential goth act will finally release a follow-up to 1990’s Vision Thing, as promised by lead singer Andrew Eldritch during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

In reality, many fans had long since accepted that there was no hope of the band ever releasing a new album, and several bands over the years have enterprisingly filled the gap, producing an ersatz Sisters sound that mimics the Wagnerian choruses of the Overbombing years. To a greater or lesser extent, Rosetta Stone, The Merry Thoughts, The Merciful Nuns and others have been accused of paying rather too close a homage to Leeds’ finest, although most have gone on to develop their own sound, merely using TSOM as one of my original starting points.

During the 2010’s, with the TSOM recording drought entering its third decade, there has been a revival in the Sisters clone market, with The Cascades reforming and their baritone crooner M.W. Wild releasing a highly enjoyable solo album in 2016 entitled The Third Decade, which featured several songs which bore more than a passing resemblance to The Sisters, even lyrically on lead track So Dark All Over Europe.

The undisputed king of the Sisters-influenced market however is Swede Kristian Olofsson, who records under the project name Miazma. The one-man-band multi-tracking in the studio has been a feature of the third wave of artists, and over a series of releases spanning over a decade, Olofsson gradually refined his vision, increasing the overt gothic references on albums like Dressed In Black (which included original compositions entitled Walk Away and More) before releasing his meisterwerk, Walk The Wire, in January 2017.

The album’s sound is firmly anchored on the Overbombing years of TSOM’s big club hits like Lucretia My Reflection and More, particularly on the title track and on the single More Than Miles, with the metronomic buzzing basslines and chugging guitars giving way to melodic choruses with repetitive baritone refrains, very reminiscent of the Vision Thing years, but also of bands such as 69 Eyes and Type O Negative on tracks like Monster and Far Away.

Released on Gothic Rock records, always a promising sign, the CD received rave reviews but like many releases in the genre inexplicably only sold in the hundreds, with ultra-conservative old-school goths refusing to countenance anything recorded after 1992, even when it follows the exact sonic template of their favourite artists.

Hopefully Miazma will continue the move away from parody and pastiche as they continue to develop their sound, with songs like A Kiss Away and Kallt showing that their forte resides in mid-paced melodic melancholia. In the meantime, however, Walk The Wire stands as one of the most accomplished goth albums of the decade, and well worthy of a place on this countdown.

Miazma’s back-catalogue (or at least the recent parts of it) are available from the band’s Bandcamp page.

No. 11 - Second Still, Second Still (2017)

(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).

One feature of the latter part of this decade has been the vast number of new bands from all corners of the globe citing post-punk guitar bands as their main inspiration, in particular the likes of The Chameleons and The Cure, but often also slightly more obscure names such as The Sound, Sad Lovers and Giants or Modern Eon. The latter’s album Fiction Tales is often cited as a forgotten classic album of the early 80’s, and the name of its opening track Second Still was appropriated by Californians Alex Hartman and Ryan Walker for their third-generation post-punk band.

Bassist Hartman and guitarist Walker had met in 2007 and through a love of the French coldwave and English post-punk bands began to record together, laying down hundreds of hours of ideas based around fast-paced tightly interwoven duelling of reverb-drenched staccato guitar lines and bubbling bass riffs, effectively replicating the ingredients of the niche Robert Smith/Steve Severin project The Glove but with results more akin to their “day job” bands, and therefore reminiscent of Hyaena era Banshees with a cranked-up metronomic Doktor Avalanche replacing Budgie’s languid looping beats.

Years of low-fi rehearsals honed their craft, meaning that by the time (after several false starts) they finally met the right vocalist for the project, the classically-trained Suki (formerly singer with psychedelic shoegaze act Sua) in New York in late 2014, they were already tight enough to make an immediate breakthrough. The debut EP Early Forms was released in early 2016, and immediately and understandably drew enthusiastic comparisons with Garlands era Cocteau Twins as well as with the Banshees, with standout track Two Reasons an excellent example of their sound at this stage. Spidery McGeoch/Guthrie arpeggios and a syncopated bass motif provide a lush soundscape for Suki’s dreamy vocal on a song that has 1983 written all over it.

The following year saw the release of their self-titled LP, a stunning collection of songs (including two from the original EP) that brought a breath of fresh air to the genre, mixing a strong female vocal with the up-tempo dark melodic accompaniment that harked back to the guitar-driven coldwave sound of Baroque Bordello, Tanit, Jad Wio and Mary Goes Round in France in the late 1980’s. Final track Judgment (sic) with its thrilling changes of direction and underlying sense of menace is an excellent example of the energy and melody that underpins the album as a whole. Unsurprisingly Second Still won many “LP of the year” plaudits (including on my own list), and brought an invitation to produce a Part-Time Punks session (released as an EP in early 2018 and featuring a version of For Against’s Echelons).

A further EP Equals broadened the sound’s sonic palette a little further, re-introducing a more overt Banshees guitar and a harder-edged sound overall, with a harsher drum sound higher in the mix, notably on the track Automata, which encouragingly strayed more into Whispering Sons territory, whilst other tracks went more towards the dark coldwave pop of Dubstar or the string-bending claustrophobia of Curve.

This sadly turned out to be a pre-cursor of their future direction, with sophomore album Violet Phase continuing the move away from a guitar-based sound on some tracks and featuring a stricter coldwave beat with a sumptuously produced sequenced keyboard backing, with the best tracks (such as Idyll) combining both elements, but they have now more in common with quirky dark coldwave pop acts like VOWWS or Drab Majesty (a very saturated end of what is a limited market) than with the Cocteau Twins. Whilst their sound has undeniably progressed with every release, it could be claimed that in the process they have lost many of the elements that made them so unique in the first place, although the song-writing remains as well-developed as ever.

Second Still’s music can be bought on an impressive variety of formats via their Bandcamp page.

No. 10 - The House of Bastet, Penance Stare (2017)

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).

The breadth of the post-punk genre during the 2010’s is probably best illustrated by the huge musical gulf between the last band to feature on this countdown (Ritual Howls) and this week’s object of focus, UK one-woman-band Penance Stare.

One feature of many of the current wave of goth/post-punk groups is their ability to verbalise their own soundscape, and this is certainly the case of Esmé Louise Newton, sole member of Penance Stare, who (during an 2018 interview with excellent local online music magazine @narc ) brilliantly described the full metal racket which she manages to coax out of her studio set-up thus: “When I started Penance Stare, it was clear how goth/post-punk has become a very narrow, codified sound that has been largely unchanged for around forty years. Noticing the similarities between the more downtempo, depressive approach of Lycia, and the slow sections of some of my favourite black metal songs made me realise that the boundaries between dark musics tend to be pretty arbitrary and meaningless. With that in mind, drawing from anything from death industrial to witch house seemed fairly uncontrived and natural for this project. I wanted to put all of my influences on top of one another instead, noise overlaid with atmosphere until they are inseparable.”

I for one was utterly transfixed from the opening string-bending bars of Persona Non Grata the opening track on debut cassette EP The House of Bastet, which after a stark echoing drum machine intro, unleashes a mighty FX-pedal drenched guitar assault, effortlessly marrying the dark arpeggios and nonchalant sheets of dense guitar fog of Killing Joke’s Geordie with the angled modular shards of genius of John McGeoch, although the latter is more apparent on the Night Shift-influenced final track of the all-too-short-debut, the wonderful Bleaken. The pummelling riffage and dark melancholic beauty of the music is perfectly topped off by Newton’s distant, echoing, ethereal vocal, sounding like a plaintive Liz Fraser trapped in the studio next door, shown to best on the most moody track of the four, Moon In Scorpio. Like several other artists featuring in this countdown, Newton’s background in black and doom metal and her ability to analyse and deconstruct the genre’s tropes and core elements has allowed her to build a multi-layered aural assault that is as emotional as it is powerful, and her helpful listing (on the Bandcamp page for this incredible EP) of all elements of her set-up only hints at the pure musical alchemy that goes into Penance Stare’s profoundly affecting music.

Any thoughts that Newton may subsequently mellow the band’s sound were immediately banished (no pun intended) by the opening track (Banishing) on 2018’s full-length follow-up, Scrying, which featured the same dark, doomy gothgaze as the earlier EP. Each track is carefully crafted around a repeated heavily reverberated de-strung guitar riff, a punishingly metronomic drum machine backbeat and the swirling barely-discernible female wailing vocal, with each song featuring a more pleasingly circular structure than the extended jams of the debut EP. “Please listen after dark for best results”, the advice on the Bandcamp site for the album needlessly read, as the more immediate tracks like You Have Wronged Me and Cemeteries Near Me immediately conjured up the atmosphere of tarot card and Ouija board sessions by candlelight. Unsurprisingly, further unadulterated critical acclaim followed, and Newman began the difficult task of bringing the huge Penance Stare sound to the stage, incongruously playing low on the bill in front of tiny audiences in small pub gigs in her adopted homeland near Newcastle.

The most recent Penance Stare release, Solanaceae, came out at the beginning of this year, and sees Newton producing (frustratingly) shorter snatches of sound, more experimental fragments of beautifully dark and heavy trance-like noise still leavened by her hauntingly dulled vocal stylings. As usual, the limited-edition cassette version sold out almost immediately, although the entire digital Penance Stare back catalogue can be purchased on Bandcamp for the ludicrously generous price of £4!