The Goth/Post-Punk Revival Blog Top 50 of 2020 - Pt 2, 45 - 41

 If the first five selections in the Goth/Post-Punk Revival Blog Top 50 of 2020 hinted at the sheer range of music produced by artists working within and on the fringes of the genre, this next five should underline the depth of talent and their collective desire to constantly expand the gothic sonic palette. Taken together, our first ten selections have featured artists from Chile to Turkey and from Mexico to Belarus as well as more traditional goth hotspots like the UK and the US, and everything from solo projects to bands featuring scene veterans. The goth/post-punk scene is truly a global phenomenon, with the ultimate democracy of Bandcamp and YouTube meaning that anyone with genuine talent will quickly impress the many scene influencers, that small army of DJs, bloggers, vloggers and label bosses who are constantly promoting their latest finds.

So on with countdown, starting at number 45...

45 Kiss Of The Whip – Girl Made of Stars

KOTW is a one-man project from Baltimore musician Tristan Victor, and one of the more immediately goth-friendly artists on the currently very overcrowded minor key synthwave scene. High quality but simple song construction, sotto voce vocals, a memorably nagging guitar riff and the ambiance of a late-night Berlin underground club fuel this future dancefloor anthem, from autumn’s album We’re Not Here which features much more of the same, most notably on the excellently slightly off-kilter title track.

  

 

44. Molchat Doma – Otveta Net

Otveta Net is taken from Monument, the Belarusian trio’s third album, recorded and released during the pandemic, a release which solidifies the band’s place in the upper echelon of artists operating in the more melodic end of the coldwave genre. Metronomic drum machine beats and clean, mournful reverb guitar lines are the perfect backing for the bleakly romantic lyrics, the key elements of a seemingly universally appealing mix which has seen Molchat Doma rise from the relative obscurity of Minsk to all the best playlists in a relatively short timeframe and YouTube view counts that run into many millions, making them one of the big players on what is clearly the most popular strand of the genre at present.

43. Night Nail – BRNO

Tearing up the more traditional goth-tinged darkpop format that helped previous album LA Demons garner universal praise in the months after its release, the distinctive vocals of Brandon Robert and the musical backing of Justin Deaktivere have been put through the mixer (literally) by Kill Shelter’s Pete Burns to create a more diverse and ultimately more satisfying (if at times less immediate) end product which will appeal in particular to fans of the likes of Depeche Mode. More introspective than the previous album, March to Autumn from which BRNO is taken was (like many 2020 releases) an album which rewarded repeated playings (something many of us had plenty of time for this year), showing that Night Nail are in it for the duration.

 

42 Chaos Bleak – Grey Lady Walks

It’s a real personal pleasure to be able to include for the first time in one of these rundowns one of the real unsung heroes of goth, Trevor Bamford, who almost single-handedly kept the UK scene going as the flames threatened to extinguish in the early 1990’s with his Nightbreed label that ultimately brought the legendary Suspiria track Allegedly,Dancefloor Tragedy. Trevor’s own projects, from the competent early second generation band Every New Dead Ghost to the more recent Death Party UK have been reliable staples of the British goth scene, and side project Chaos Bleak seeks to reanimate the corpse of early 80’s positive punk, evoking the spirits of the likes of Play Dead and The March Violets. Grey Lady Walks, the projects eighth single released on Halloween, chugs along with a descending bassline, an underlying sense of menace and a beat which will get many quinquagenarian shoulders shimmying.

41 Detoxi – Beyond The Grave

The proto-gothic sound of 1981 is alive and well with Californians Detoxi, their 2020 release Beyond The Grave building on previous works with a spooky romantic tale which builds on the claustrophobic drama of legendary bands like UK Decay, play Dead and Sex Gang Children with some outstanding guitar work but with the thrilling addition of a naggingly melodic but distant vocal. It's one of those songs that you just know is going to be great from the opening bars then just gets better and better. If there’d been a whole album’s worth of this, Detoxi would have been rivalling the likes of Altar de Fey and Horror Vacui for the accolade of Deathrock release of the year, and in any other year this song would easily have made the Top 20.