No. 18 - The Veils of Ending, Sonsombre (2019)

It’s hard to believe that it’s only just over a year since Brandon Pybus launched his Sonsombre project on Bandcamp, as a mere fourteen months later the band is already rightly at the very forefront of the renascent gothic movement. With his long black frock coat, shades and preacher/state trooper hat, the unapologetically goth Pybus is every inch the reincarnation of a first generation goth poster boy, and with two memorable albums already released with a third imminent, not to mention a further excellent set of songs recorded with Chronic Twilight’s Michael Louis under the moniker Shadow Assembly, he is by far the most prolific artist in a genre dogged by musicians and lyricists suffering from permanent creative block – by way of contrast, Pybus’ heroes Carl McCoy and Andrew Eldritch have recorded and released precisely one new song (Fields of The Nephilim’s Prophecy) between them this decade!

That is not to say in any way that Sonsombre (which is French for "darksound") lacks quality control, with both albums packed full of well-crafted and well-executed songs which reveal that Pybus not only takes musical inspiration from the first generation of goth rock acts in the late 1980’s but also from second wavers like The Wake and Nosferatu and indeed the wall-of-sound acoustics of fellow third wavers Ground Nero. Add to that an appreciation of song and chord structure and dynamics from his long-term dabblings in black/viking metal bands, two of which had also released a brace of albums (each!!) in 2018, and you have a work-rate and sense of musical appreciation that even the late great Prince would have found hard to beat.

As a long-term student and admirer of the genre, it should have come as little surprise that his first recorded goth rock efforts should be so well-formed, and from the first notes of the organ introduction to the explosive opening track (Nocturnal) on Sonsombre’s debut album A Funeral for The Sun, it was clear that this was a project of high musical and lyrical quality and intensity. Nocturnal revealed Pybus’ obsession with late 80’s goth rock pioneers Fields of the Nephilim, owing more than just an atmosphere to Dawnrazor opener Slow Kill (a track the Sonsombre has recorded but not yet released), with the bellowed chorus bearing all the melodramatic hallmarks of McCoy’s much-imitated vocal style, although few have managed to render it with the panache which Pybus effortlessly manages here.

Other tracks on the A Funeral for The Sun, which was effectively an accumulation of demos recorded over the previous two years, reveal a much broader musical palette, with the occasional nod to Pybus’ Virginian homeland, whether in the Cajun guitar on Should I Go On or the slide guitar in the deathrock-influenced A Dance By The Graves, alongside some more straight forward “rockers” which would have crossover appeal to closet metal (i.e. The Cult) fans.

Originally only a digital release, the album was immediately championed by the Finland-based boss of Post-Gothic Records, Oskar Terrormortis, who has done so much to promote bands in the genre over the decade, and was duly re-released on CD in January 2019 containing an extra track, In This Fog, which had a more complete production and which featured heavily on goth internet radio/podcast playlists at the start of the year.

Even before the album had sold out of its initial run of CDs, something of a rarity in the download/stream-for-free era, Pybus announced that he had already completed the follow-up, and the sophomore Sonsombre set The Veils of Ending was released in June to unsurprisingly unanimous acclaim. Still lyrically obsessed with familiar gothic themes (e.g. shadows, mirrors, death etc), songs such as The Future Is Black and Fear quickly made the transition to becoming staples at uber-cool goth club nights across the globe, whilst Between and Matte Black had chord structures and dynamics that would immediately appeal to new-content-starved fans of the genre’s godfathers, The Sisters of Mercy.

Latter tracks of the album such as Mirror, Mirror and Unfit for Ending showed a great feel for atmospherics, reminiscent of both genre-defining first generation acts like Bauhaus (Mask era) and cult second generation artists like Corpus Delicti (particularly their classic song The Lake), hinting at a further development of the Sonsombre sound, which will be possibly more apparent on the new album which, fittingly, will be released at the very start of the new decade on Cleopatra Records, the ultimate accolade for an artist who grew up obsessed with the Californian label’s releases over twenty years ago.

With Sonsombre now operating also as a live band garnering rave reviews for their early US shows and with top European gothic festivals aiming to sign the band up for 2020, Pybus’ prodigious workload will only increase, particularly given his notable success in engineering/mastering releases for the likes of Chronic Twilight and The Kentucky Vampires amongst others, but again it is the sheer quality of his work rather than the unusual quantity of it that impresses the most.

Pybus’ already legendary catchphrase, “Stay goth!” has certainly been a far easier status to maintain since he emerged onto the scene little more than a year ago, revitalising a love for power chords in a genre that had been increasingly dominated by artists using just a picked or arpeggio-ed guitar style (which Pybus also uses when appropriate). Sonsombre’s releases are available via Bandcamp and other outlets.

Those who love bands with a sound partially inspired by Fields of the Nephilim should also think of checking out current UK act Guillotine Dream, or earlier bands Dronning Maudland and Sweet Ermengarde.

No. 17 - Damage, Kill Shelter (2018)

If any project sums up the mutually supportive and appreciative darkwave community, it’s Kill Shelter, whose debut album Damage was released at the end of 2018 and soon sold out its initial CD run. The band is essentially the studio project of Scottish remixer Pete Burns, who over the past three years has also curated (along with Christian Schaefer) the highly influential Rule of Three blog on Facebook, which highlights in each edition (of which there are now more than fifty) three artists on the darkwave scene deserving of a wider audience.

Burns/Kill Shelter also became increasingly in demand as a remixer, and as a keen student of the genre he decided to put an album together that would not only showcase his own talents as writer, performer and producer, but also utilise his growing contacts book to produce a set of songs which is a veritable “Who’s who?” of some of the emerging artists of this third generation. Whilst each song featured Burns on sequenced synthesised bass and arpeggioed guitar, the lyrics and vocals on top of the multi-layered tracks were added by a multiplicity of artists all working in different strands of the "wave" genre.

The album's opening single In Decay drew universal praise and catapulted the project to the forefront of the post-punk zeitgeist, on the back of a sound that was reminiscent of The Sisters of Mercy in their mid/late 80’s heyday, yet very much rooted in modern studio technology. With a classic descending gothic bassline, a wonderfully icy guitar line from Antipole’s Karl Morten Dahl, and a great dark vocal from Delphine Coma’s Ashe Ruppe, In Decay was an update on the classic goth sound for a new generation, and like the album, the song featured on most “Best Of …” lists at the end of the year.

Those attracted to the album by the lead single were rewarded with a broad sweeping summary of the current scene, from coldwave to gothic rock. Fans of the latter would have been best served by No Regrets, featuring a chorus of Nephilimistic bombast belted out by guest vocalist undertheskin, whilst those with a more club-based background would have enjoyed the Alan Vega-esque beat of Get Down, featuring Cramps-style riffing from the golden age and a slightly detached crooned vocal by Canada’s The Shyness of Strangers (Vadim Christopher), whilst for many the undisputed highlight of the album was Bodies, replete with in-your-face distorted keyboard riffs as phat as The Prodigy’s on Invaders Must Die and the most wonderfully chilling one note vocal by Australia’ Buzz Kull (Marc Dwyer).

The sweaty masculinity of the above tracks was successfully counterpointed by more gentle, fragile coldwave tracks, such as Kiss Me Goodbye featuring French chanteuse Helene from Hante on vocals, or Sever, sung by New Haunts’ Alice Sheridan. Burns keeps the quality of songwriting and production high over the album, endowing it with more of a holistic feel than might be imagined when looking at the sheer variety in style of the guest vocalists on display.

Burns, who has a highly successful career in digital marketing as his day job, has returned the favour for many of the bands who helped out on Damage by subsequently remixing some of their new tracks, and has hinted that for the follow-up to Damage he will try to cast the net wider, with the debut’s success potentially opening doors to more ambitious collaborations with some of his musical heroes.

The mutually supportive and self-helping darkwave community has given the genre real resilience as the mainstream continues to be robustly indifferent to its ever increasing charms, but high quality projects like Kill Shelter’s Damage will surely help to pave the way to a brighter future for many of his collaborators.

Damage is still digitally available via this link.

No. 16 - Blood Lust/Eponymous LP, The Kentucky Vampires (2017/2018)

(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).

Goth. The G-word that dares not speak its name. Famously, he main high priests of the movement Andrew Eldritch, Robert Smith, Jaz Coleman and a myriad of others have always strenuously denied having anything to do with the much-maligned musical movement.

But recently, in the latter years of the current decade, all that has changed, with a plethora of artists mainly from the USA embracing the term “goth” and its associated sounds and imagery. These groups grew up venerating Nosferatu, The Wake and Type O Negative as much as Joy Division or the Banshees, and draw inspiration from both the genre’s ultra-creative birth and its more mature self-confident refinement to move the movement on a stage further in this third generation. One such band is The Kentucky Vampires, whose very name leaves no doubt as to their musical style, even discounting the bats and coffins which accompany their band logo on their album sleeves and tour t-shirts.

Any fears that the band may be just another clunky, faintly embarrassing pastiche of goth’s darkest delights are swiftly allayed with even a cursory listen to their music, which is a unique take on the genre. Built firmly around the rough-edged deathrock guitar of Zac Campbell and its interplay with the somewhat detached melodic vocal of Abbas Marler, the Vampires’ carefully-constructed songs revolve around suitably dark lyrical material whilst avoiding overly-cliched references or obvious subject matter.

Steeped therefore in the gothic musical traditions of the first and second waves, Campbell (who both composes the backing and plays all instruments) constructs songs with the simple complexity of a spider’s web, each goassamer thread shimmering and interconnecting to form an overall structure that is as strong as it is hauntingly beautiful. Central to each song is a driving bass-led rhythm section topped by a spooky buzzing guitar riff that evokes a misty graveyard at midnight, over which floats Marler’s confident, melancholic vocal line which owes as much to Morrisey and Stipe as it does to Steele and Eldritch.

Their instantly recognisable gloomy cinematic sound was first heard on the 2016 single Bitten, but the release which really began to spread their fame by word-of-mouth online was 2017’s mini-album Blood Lust which featured half a dozen songs which also formed the basis of the following year’s self-titled debut LP.

Lead track Spider and The Fly has not only a catchy melody but also a fascinating lyric which recounts bloodthirsty tale of 16^th century Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory, famed for allegedly being responsible for the torture and death of hundreds of young women.

Tracks like Hex and Welcome To The Lot also featured the band’s signature sound, with Campbell’s heavily reverberated fuzzy riffs the perfect foil for Marler’s plaintive, almost folky vocal inflections, an irresistible package dripping with the creepy atmosphere of Hammer Horror films that shone through the slightly loose studio production.

Daughter of The Morning Star, the new feature song on the 2017 expanded version, also features a lyric about alleged female involvement in the occult in mediaeval Europe along another strong melody, this time about witchcraft in Italy, meaning that the songs go way beyond the usual “flickering flame in the mirror” goth tropes (not that there’s anything wrong with that, occasionally).

Unsurprisingly, on the back of the tremendous critical success of the debut LP, The Kentucky Vampires have recently signed with Secret Sin Records, home of Angels of Liberty amongst others, whose first act was to bring out a lime green vinyl edition of the album which is selling well.

A follow-up album is promised within the next couple of months, but in the meantime the band have just dropped a new EP Blood and Tears on Bandcamp, the first to feature new bassist Motuvius Rex, but with the equally important recruitment of Sonsombre’s Brandon Pybus on mixing duties, giving the new songs both extra sheen and extra power whilst retaining the band’s distinctive sound. Whilst lead track Holy Heretic continues the good work of the debut album both lyrically and musically, the most interesting track for me is Our Love Has No Goodbyes, a smouldering slow burner of a full-on unashamedly gothic rock classic, and the shift away from a relatively repetitive song structure and one-dimensional guitar tone of old-school deathrock sits very well with their revamped sound . Third track A Different Shade also has a softer focus despite a grungier feel, as the band show their ability to broaden their musical palette whilst retaining their original appeal, and whet the appetite for the forthcoming sophomore album.

The Kentucky Vampires’ highly-recommended output can be sampled and ordered via their Bandcamp site.

No. 15 - Modern Cults, Holygram (2018)

(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 current darkwave/post-punk/goth scene, though relatively buoyant, seems to be very self-contained, in that the many bands/bloggers/DJs around the world are all appealing to the same small group of cognoscenti, with very few outsiders finding a scene which has been largely ignored by the mainstream media.

Breaking out of this third wave bubble seems to be proving very difficult for even the most commercially and critically acclaimed artists on the scene, who still count themselves lucky to sell out a vinyl/CD pressing run of under a thousand, and who even when promoting a fourth album can find themselves playing in small clubs to audiences that can be measured in the dozens.

Some of the most creative and potentially more mainstream acts have therefore taken the same route as the first wave of bands and accepted support slots which will allow them to play to and win over audiences who have really come to see a band from a different genre. Kaelan Mikla, for example, have just signed up for an extensive 2020 tour with metal band Alcest, whilst last year German bright hopes Holygram toured with 80’s synth nostalgia act Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. The Wirral band were of course themselves once at the cutting edge of alternative music four decades ago, but it is to be hoped that some of those who came to relive their youth and hear some familiar top ten hits from the past in fact went home singing the praises of the young darkwave act who were touring their first full album, Modern Cults.

As has often been the case this decade, the debut album was in fact a kind of compilation featuring re-recordings of the best tracks from previous releases along with new songs – Belgian band A Slice of Life and Italians Der Himmel uber Berlin have adopted a similar strategy – which in the case of Holygram meant a fuller release for the tracks on their October 2016 self-titled EP that first brought them to the attention of modern post-punk fans, Still There and Distant Light. The former, starting with a classic two-note darkwave reverb guitar riff, revealed their more dark pop sensibilities, with a slightly distant melodic male vocal over an insistent beat.

It was the latter though which marked them out from the increasingly crowded coldwave/darkwave masses, however, revealing their shoegaze and krautrock roots, adding a more distorted FX-drenched guitar sound over an ultra-repetitive bass beat, like a more refined Alien Sex Fiend or a more blissed out Jesus and Mary Chain.

The Modern Cults LP, produced by Soft Moon knob-twiddler Maurizio Baggio at  also featured new singles A Faction and Signals, which both got heavy rotation on alternative radio stations around the world, whilst She’s Like The Sun had a very welcome psychedelic undercurrent whilst retaining the band’s keen ear for melody which is likely to ensure that, along with their comparative youth, they will stay at the forefront of the darkwave movement and be amongst the best placed bands to break through into mainstream consciousness.

Holygram's music can be accessed via their Bandcamp site

No. 14 - Forever Waiting, Suffering For Kisses (2018)

(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 main feature of the past ten years musically has been the fragmentation of the scene, with the likes of MySpace, Soundcloud and in particular Bandcamp allowing artists to bypass record companies and the media and put their music directly in front of fans by uploading it to the platforms in question and tagging key words/genres to attract fans of similar bands.

The simultaneous growth of digital home recording technology has enabled the rise of the “one-man band” whether the likes of Ed Sheeran in the mainstream or the thousands of artists in the darkwave/goth/post-punk spectrum ploughing their own furrow, and my latter selections in this best of the decade round-up will be dominated by such acts.

The first artist whom I personally followed on a track-by-track basis in the early years of the 2010’s was Stockholm-based Eric Sparkwood who operates under the name Foghorn Lonesome, and whose music was described as being influenced by "Depeche Mode and The Sisters of Mercy" on his Soundcloud page. With falling basslines, a lugubrious pace, lush synth backgrounds and a half-whispered baritone vocal telling tales of lost love and regret, FL began to create a worldwide cult following, with the distribution of pin badges featuring the band’s very gothic crown of thorns logo (think The Danse Society) and the creation of a fangroup Children of the Horn, where followers were encouraged to upload their own photos, artwork etc, which ultimately resulted in the fantastic video collage (sadly now unavailable) which accompanied the most memorable song Always the Undertow. With songs added on almost a monthly basis, by the end of 2014 Sparkwood had enough material for an eponymous debut digital album. Half of the album, was made up of more upbeat, dance-oriented synth pop, and Sparkwood has continued the move in this direction over the past five years of very sporadic releases.

Another one-man band operating in a similar sonic area is Suffering For Kisses, the cold/darkwave project of Oregon-based Tony D’Oporto, whose stark and monochromatic debut set Forever Waiting  on Bandcamp gained him a large following upon release in 2018. D’Oporto’s deadpan vocal over a spartan backing of bass and drumbeat with occasional swathes of synth brought comparisons to Joy Division, with dark lyrics about isolation and rejection. Several of the tracks had previously been released as stand-alone tracks, such as the self-descriptive Beautifully Dark, featuring a wonderfully light guitar cameo courtesy of Mark Hjorthoy.

Photos of crying angel graveyard statues, titles like Pretty In Black and In The Night and D’Oporto’s chilling vocals all added to the strong gothic vein running through what is essentially a dark synthpop project, but it was his ear for a multi-layered less-is-more arrangement and his strong melodic composition which made Forever Waiting one of my most-played albums of the decade, with simple ideas such as She’s Gone Away being executed with a subtlety that only added to the pervading sense of melancholic gloom.

The prolific D’Oporto has already produced a follow-up EP and two further singles which retain the same song-writing style, although the power of the light-touch guitar and bleak atmosphere which made the debut such a dark delight has in general been reduced by the lusher arrangements where synths are more to the fore, although he remains an artist worth following.

D'Oporto is one of many artists who have benefitted from the ability to use digital technology in teh recording process and digital platforms to reach fans directly, although the sheer number of groups and individuals using this route will always make it hard for them to reach a mass audience. 

Suffering For Kisses music can be bought via their Bandcamp page, with a similar situation for Foghorn Lonesome via their page.