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!