Album Review - Damaged and Damned (Guillotine Dream)

Guillotine Dream is a UK-based three-piece who specialise in old school 80’s-influenced gothic rock, with guttural vocals, ‘proper’ drums and booming basslines that hark back to the days when the likes of The Sisters of Mercy and Fields of the Nephilim caused a temporary blip in the long-term decline in hat sales. Whilst bands like Type O Negative, Moonspell and Sweet Ermengarde kept the flickering flame alive in the intervening years, a new wave of bands like Sonsombre, The Kentucky Vampires and The Black Capes have jolted the genre back into full-scale reanimation, with Guillotine Dream amongst those leading the charge in the movement’s birthplace, the UK.

The band’s new album Damaged and Damned is now available on “stream-before-you-pre-order” trial on Bandcamp, with a self-released CD version to follow after the current pandemic crisis saw the cancellation of the planned summer release on Secret Sin Records, and is the follow-up to last year’s well-received EP, Something Shining, Something Bright. The teaser track Vermillion from the new set got rave reviews in the online global goth community on its release on YouTube earlier this month, and the album certainly doesn’t disappoint, offering up a variety of powerful tracks which never stray from gothic rock into gothic metal, one of the traditional pitfalls of the genre, and which have a deliberately slightly raw and muddy production to retain the excitement of live performance.

Damaged and Damned begins with a punchy statement of intent, Like Every Other Ghost, which features the “ringing” guitar tone of the last EP Something Shining, Something Bright in an up-tempo opening which begins with a galloping bass and rolling drum patterns underpinning a song vaguely reminiscent of Laura-era Fields of the Nephilim in tone, with Arc’s vocal firmly in the whispered bellowing style initially made famous by Carl McCoy. Immediately though, the band’s increased sophistication is revealed in the subtlety of a multi-layered middle section before the song reaches a suitable finale.

The Nephilim influence is even more apparent in the album’s title track which follows and which evokes the Stevenage band’s Phobia, which was itself in turn based on Motorhead’s Ace of Spades. The scuzzier descending bassline here is definitely more in tune with Lemmy’s band’s earlier recordings though, and gives a clear indication of the forceful nature of the group’s all-too-rare live performances.

The more melodic guitar tone is back on the epic Hidden Rooms, which is subdivided into two parts either side of another track, Ashes. Hidden Rooms I is classic mid-tempo gothic rock with a spacey texture, Arc’s vocal again mixed slightly low to add to the air of mystery, whilst (as on several tracks on the album) some of the guitar part sounds almost like a live-in-the-studio jam over a solid rhythm section. Hidden Rooms II is initially a slower crepuscular delight, building the tension slowly until the pace gradually increases, not unlike in the Nephs’ Last Exit For The Lost.

Ashes is more angular, having the kind of more tribal drumming and Banshees-esque two-chord progression associated with deathrock, and its powerful, more rudimentary charm will hopefully help to open up new markets for the band particularly on the other side of the Atlantic where this genre is particularly appreciated and where Christian Death still cast a long, dark shadow...

The second Hidden Rooms introduces a more introspective section of the album, with Detoxed featuring a slightly cleaner vocal, showcasing Mapk’s uplifting lyric expressing the resolve and hope of a life freed from the clutches of alcohol, over a slightly plaintive musical background. Landslide is probably the most musically innovative track on the album, featuring inverted riffs and syncopated rhythms in the main verse sections, followed by a more regular beat in the chorus initially, before the two combine in the climax of one of the most refreshing tracks on the album.

The final trilogy of tracks up the stakes further, with a church organ adding to the spooky atmosphere of the opening of Leave Me Here, another slow-burning song with a FOTN feel, this time bringing to mind the classic At The Gates of Silent Memory – in fact the lyric “At the Gates” features prominently in the most dramatic section of the song. Again, the subtlety involved in the song’s construction is apparent as it moves through different textures and sections, and the band again show restraint in the opening section of the genuinely disturbing The Haunted Generation where the echoing string-bending guitars blend perfectly with a graveyard vocal in a journey through “the shadow of fear”, creating the perfect setting for the album’s piece de resistance and closing track Vermillion.

Every great goth album has a really bombastic closing track – Some Kind Of Stranger on First and Last and Always, Can’t Lose You on Bloody Kisses, Mercury on Blood or Dawnrazor on, erm, Dawnrazor – and Guillotine Dream subconsciously use the latter as a template of their own meisterwerk, with Vermillion featuring a vaguely familiar drum pattern, a shroud tense-as-tripwire suspended guitar and an anguished vampiric vocal to bring what has been a very satisfying album to a truly epic conclusion.

Singer and guitarist Arc recently told me in an interview, “It contains lots of the things we love about goth, but with a rawer, punkier edge this time,” and repeated playings of the album certainly confirm both aspects of the statement. Damaged and Damned is available here and is highly recommended to fans of no-nonsense old-fashioned guitar-driven gothic rock. The CD costs a mere £10 with a paltry £2 p&p within the UK.