No. 20 - Stranger and Lovers, Stranger and Lovers (2019)

(Over a series of twenty short posts – one per week for the remaining weeks of this decade – I have 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. This is the final post in the regular series).

When planning out the twenty releases to feature in this countdown of the top twenty most important darkwave/goth/post-punk albums of the 2010’s, I reserved this final slot for an album from this final year, but such has been the quality of new music in 2019 that I ended up starting to write about four very different acts before finally settling on the wonderfully atmospheric gothic darkwave of Mexico band Stranger and Lovers.

My initial choice was the Dutch band Red Velvet Deception, a duo whom I somewhat unkindly christened “The Goth Proclaimers”, who followed up the immense promise of their 2016 track So Low with a wonderfully tight LP Like Rain in June of this year. Taking elements from the more commercial end of the 80’s underground (The Cure, New Order) and adding a driving rhythm section of drum machine and insistent bass lines intertwining telepathically with reverberating guitar riffs in the style of Second Still, Like Rain featured a really strong set of songs led by catchy single Serpent. Band members Arjen Zomers and Roy Orbon also innovatively streamed their rehearsals live on YouTube, allowing fans all over the world the pseudo- experience of enjoying their songs played live. Like Rain is certain to feature on many “best of the year” lists over the next month or so, which should help to raise the profile of this high quality release.

A second candidate for my final pick of the year was August’s Chinese Voodoo Dolls, the latest album by scene veterans Der Himmel uber Berlin, a Trieste band which boasts one of the scene’s most innovative guitarists, Davide Simeone. Usually lumped in the “deathrock” category due to Simeone’s unusually angular chord progressions and the claustrophobic atmosphere their songs generate, DHuB have developed over the decade into one of the scene’s most consistently exciting bands, with their last two albums (2017’s Amnesia as well as Chinese Voodoo Dolls) gaining wider prominence having been released on the influential Unknown Pleasures label.

Far from running out of ideas, Chinese Voodoo Dolls showcases Simeone at his thrilling best on a series of songs which take the listener on a breathless ride through the darkest shadows of the gothic genre whilst never too far away from the spirit of punk. The hard-gigging band supported the release with a series of compelling videos, such as this one for Dead Bodies Everywhere, which capture some of the anarchic spirit of their live shows.

September saw the release of a third album which briefly looked like securing the final slot on this rundown of the decade, with Antipole’s sophomore effort Radial Glare. Antipole is the project of Trondheim-based artist Karl Morten Dahl who has created a sumptuous feast of an album, with eleven varied songs built around his trademark heavily reverb-ed staccato guitar riffs redolent of vintage The Cure over a dreamlike coldwave backbeat with low key vocals provided by Paris Alexander, Marc Lewis and Eirene. Anyone wanting to unwind and let an album envelope them (in the same way as a vintage Cocteau Twins or Dead Can Dance LP did) could do a lot worse than succumb to the charms of Radial Glare. In thirty years’ time people will rediscover Antipole in the same way that the likes of The Sound and The Chameleons have belatedly gained the recognition which they deserved all along.

But ultimately I’m still an old goth at heart - well, all over to be honest -  and the eponymous debut album from Mexico’s Stranger and Lovers, released on cassette only earlier this month, got my shoulders shimmying and finally won the day. The band is the latest project from Dave Noise, previously guitarist in The Exils and The Sisters Ray, who played a strand of dark shoegaze spacerock, but the new band have a wonderfully full post-punk sound that neatly sums up the best of the past decade.

The band’s songs have been drip-fed via YouTube during the year, with debut video Masochistic Love starting with a haunting riff reminiscent of Lebanon Hanover’s Gallow Dance before the song structure modulates in a style familiar to fans of She Past Away, with a lugubrious vocal adding an air of dark menace. The next release, Black Beach had more of a film noir feel, with a distinct Ritual Howls dark twang feel, although the vocal on this track bares a distinct resemblance to Sonsombre’s Brandon Pybus, although the overall impact was just as powerful as on the debut track.

It was the third track which was released in September, Juliette, which confirmed that Stranger and Lovers would be my new favourite band. Again the introduction successfully works in the same area as She Past Away, but with a stronger, deeper and more evocative vocal, and there are some great chord modulations particularly going from the bridge into the chorus, and as with Masochistic Love there were also very welcome vibes of both The Sisters of Mercy and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry.

Further broadening their musical horizons, the next single Dark Line released in early October went right back to the vampiric slow-burning delight’s of Bela Lugosi’s Dead, a tribute to Mexico’s first silver-screen vampire, German Robles. With Nephilimistic arpeggios over a simple coldwave synth bass motif and another echoing meandering vocal, Dark Line was another resounding success and whetted the appetite for what was to follow later that month.

Death Song, with its heavy musical debt to The Sisters of Mercy’s Alice was an instant success, clocking up nearly two hundred thousand views  through the Darko: Post-punker FB page alone, more than some of the bands featured in this countdown have garnered in their entire careers. Although the debut album is so far only available for sale by cassette to personal callers only (!), the band have licensed the main five tracks to Spotify with other platforms to follow.

Mexico has long had a vibrant gothic scene, and anyone who has seen footage of gigs by bands like The Sisters of Mercy there will have been impressed by the sheer enthusiasm of the sizeable audience for the band’s performance. It is therefore only fitting that the capital city should now boast the band most likely to become one of the biggest in the genre as the healthy scene looks ahead to the start of its fifth decade.

No. 19 - Divergence, Ground Nero (2019)

(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).

It is often said that the early post-punk music grew out of Britain’s industrial decline, a way for frustrated young people to deal with the sudden decline in the mining and textile industries that had brought prosperity to the North of England for nearly two centuries. Whilst the still-busy forges of the West Midlands had literally given rise to heavy metal (via Black Sabbath and Judas Priest), the goth scene emerged from the counties whose landscapes had been transformed by the rise and fall of the England’s “dark satanic mills”. Andrew Eldritch himself was frequently quoted as referring to “the M62 sound” of the guitar bands from towns and cities along the East-West motorway that runs from Hull to Liverpool via the likes of Leeds, Bradford, and Manchester, all characterised by a slight melancholy that reflected their decaying surroundings. In the same interviews, Eldritch would often extol the virtues of Fleming-speaking Belgium, where his own band had early notable success (which continues to this day), and the industrial landscapes of Limburg, the province that borders the Ruhr saw a contemporaneous rise in post-punk bands in the early 1980’s. 

The Neon Judgement’s Factory Walk is an early industrial classic, and bands like Aroma di Amore, Front 242 and Portrait Bizarre were at the forefront of what became the darkwave, EBM and coldwave movements respectively. The latter band featured Gwijde Wampers on vocals, although his contribution to that band is almost unrecognisable in his current band Ground Nero, which formed in the second half of the current decade with the aim of “creating 80’s gothic darkwave, making use of modern sound tech, re-staging it with “wall-of-sound” arrangements.”

As a veteran of reading band press releases, I took this description with a pinch of salt until I heard the track Dark Descent from the debut EP Beyond released at the end of 2016, being instantly mesmerised by the afore-mentioned dark atmospheric “wall of sound”. Here was a group of musicians steeped in and respectful of the history of the genre yet able to create a fresh new take on the classic gothic sounds of bombastic swirling keyboards, descending basslines, snatched samples of political speeches (very F242!), guttural baritone vocals and a guitar sound so broad, deep and varied that only Killing Joke’s Geordie sprang to mind by way of comparison.

Other tracks on the debut release had a similarly full sound (so much so that the band gave the engineer equal billing in the list of band members), with lead track Run From Your Relatives being picked up by goth DJs around the world and helping to spread the band’s fame amongst the darkwave community, a phenomenon which was given a significant boost when Oskar Terrormortis came across the EP and arranged a physical release on Gothic Rock records.

A change of label to legendary German imprint Danse Macabre saw the band release a second EP, Scales in early 2018 which saw a development in the band’s sound. Bannockburn introduced a slower pace and a more angular guitar sound, but Plethora was the stand-out track, with a sequenced bass-line, reverb-drenched picked coldwave guitar riff, typically lugubrious vocal and a big chorus that was strangely reminiscent of Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call-era Simple Minds.

Buoyed by a hugely positive critical response, the band returned to the studio to record their first LP, Divergence, which was released in the Spring of 2019 and has certainly been one of the stand-out albums of the year for me. The sheer versatility of Peter Smeets’ guitar playing, from industrial chugging through Pink Floyd solos to KJ-esque modulated arpeggios, provides real variety in the songs across the darkwave genre, with the insistent drum-machine beat and regimented bassline from Peter Philtjens underpinning the sound. So many bands operating in this area fall down on the vocal front, but although his delivery can occasionally be a little pitchy, Gwijde Wampers is a charismatic frontman whose back-of-the-throat baritone has often been compared to Ian Curtis, both a reference point and a highly revered figure in this genre, and his clear and confident delivery of lyrics which serve as a clarion call for the current state of capitalist human society at the crossroads help to elevate this album further above the competition.

Heaven Sent and Divergence are probably the stand-out tracks in terms of immediacy and alternative dancefloor potential, whereas the angular Savannah and the in-you-face bombast of Alacrity have a harder edge and showcase Smeets’ talent to the full. With Wampers’ spookier delivery lending They Knew a more aggressively dystopian air and Jabez and Kitezh also drawn from a broader musical palette, Divergence is a tremendous LP from a band at the top of its game which showcases how much the post-punk genre has to offer as it passes its fortieth birthday.

Ground Nero’s work can be heard and ordered via their Bandcamp site.