The Goth/Post-Punk Revival Blog Top 50 of 2020 - part 9, 10 - 6

 

Into the Goth/Post-Punk Revival blog Top 10 with five very solid albums which do not disappoint. All start strongly and as with all classic albums, get even better, saving the best until last and ending with a fantastic finale that always marks out a classic album. As befits this blog, the top ten artists are all primarily guitar-based and feature driving basslines, strong vocals, insistent beats and guitar FX aplenty.

 

 

10 The Wake - Figurine

Second-wave superstars The Wake almost single-handedly resuscitated the genre at a point where it seemed to be dying a natural death in the early 90’s with their stunning Unmasked album, splitting in the mid-90’s before reforming around a decade ago and releasing a couple of low-key singles and making a much higher profile splash with their 2020 comeback album Perfumes and Fripperies. Whilst early tracks on the album like Marry Me delighted those simply looking for God’s Own Medicine part 3, the reworkings of those intermediate singles Rusted and Emily Closer, plus the album’s outstanding final pairing of the Pumpkins-influenced Big Empty and the bombastically slow and stately Figurine hint at an exciting new direction for the band responsible for classics like Nazarene, Watchtower and Harlot nearly three decades ago.

9 Delphine Coma - Tension

2018’s debut album Leaving The Scene established US act Delphine Coma as major new players in the darkwave world, with lead single Is This Forever making many end of year lists. Sophomore set Tortuosa, released this year on Swiss Dark Nights took things to a new level, with singer Ashe Ruppe’s vocals, heard to great effect on Kill Shelter’s In Decay (number one on this countdown two years ago), enhancing a wide range of strong darkwave pieces from upbeat tracks like Secondary Eyes to more introspective songs like the album-closing Tension, a wonderfully-atmospheric Bowiesque slab of drone-led gothgaze/darkwave.

8 Guillotine Dream - Vermillion

80’s goth fans Guillotine Dream were as well-known for their sense of humour as their Nephilimistic musical charm until this year’s wonderful Damaged and Damned album which showed them increasingly evolving their own sound. Recorded in just two days, the album had a wonderfully raw live-in-the-studio feel best exemplified by album-closer Vermillion, released as a teaser single with a great Blair Witch-style video. Wonderfully overdriven guitar, growled vocals, dirty bass and Dawnrazor drums combine spectacularly in a perfectly spooky piece of magically pure gothic rock.

7 Mayflower Madame - Vultures

Some albums have an intensity and a flow which forces you to stop what you’re doing and focus solely on the emotionally-draining aural assault on the brain. Siouxsie and The Banshees’ first two albums had that effect on me in the late 1970’s, Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain was another example from the mid-1980’s and Norwegian band Mayflower Madame’s 2020 Prepared for a Nightmare on Icy Cold records is a future classic in a very similarly dramatic and overbearing vein to the latter, with its latent psychedelia and shoegaze tendencies. The album’s claustrophobic intensity is heightened by the sequencing of the songs which take the listener on a distorted journey through a restless night full of nightmares, half-woken visions and the intense relief of reawakening to the relief that the night is over. Wilfully singular in their approach, Mayflower Madame are a deeply rewarding obsession.

6 Raskolnikov – Faut pas chier Albert Roche.

One of the YouTube comments on the full album upload of Raskolnikov’s Lazy People Will Destroy You album states that the author has been listening to music for over thirty years but had never before found an album where they loved every track. Such hyperbole does not sound misplaced when streaming this outstanding album which showcases a variety of musical styles, leading one to presume that the band has a varied record collection spanning the entire forty years of the post-punk genre, from The Cure and The Chameleons through Spiritualised and Ride to Muse, Interpol and Editors, with even more commercial influences like Coldplay and Snow Patrol thrown in. Whilst this might sound like a nightmarish pick’n’mix hybrid, the reality is a wonderfully melodic and well-paced set of original songs which defy the usual pigeonholing and deserve a wider audience.