Review: Wenches, Witches and Vampyres: The Very Best of Two Witches 1987-1999
There are a lot of good bands from Finland that don’t get much attention in the U.S. A lot of gothic/industrial music of the 80’s -90s was never really reviewed much of anywhere. I’ve tried to find criticism and reviews of this music, a lot of it I couldn’t even find reviews of on-line. One really example of an album like this is Wenches, Witches and Vampyres: The Very Best of Two Witches 1987-1999 an excellent collection of the bands career. Incidentally, I understand exactly how absurd this band is and that is part of my reason for liking them. I was a fan of goth music in the 90’s, but I didn’t know this band's music well until many years later.
Two Witches are a goth band from Finland that never pretended or tried to be much of anything else. They’re akin to other gothic bands like Christian Death in their lyrical preoccupation with religious and occult themes. To some extent they’re also one of those goth bands like Sleep Chamber that plays up the connection goth music has to S&M/fetish culture. They went straight for the songs about vampires. They really dressed the part with the gothic fetish outfits. There are of course, two witch looking women in the band, but the singer developed complications in the direction of male pattern baldness fairly early on. They never had any qualms about being into the vampire gimmicks and costumes whatsoever. I like that about them, the extremity of their gaudiness.
Musically though, their commitment to a fairly ahead goth band is one of their real strengths. There is that subgenre of gothic bands, which Two Witches are not- that attempted to go a neo-classical route or try to sound like they were from the medieval ages, such as Dead Can Dance or Atraxia. However, most goth that has been is more like punk in being a less-is-more approach. Often the drum machine parts, keyboards and guitar riffs on goth albums are relatively simple. The track “Cat’s Eyes” has a simple drum machine beat, some keyboards and I think some guitar as the backdrop, but it’s a perfectly full sound. The whole rock and roll thing tends to work best when it’s a straight, hard, sound. Skinhead bands and goth bands intuited that well. It would be falsely reductive to say that these bands could not play. There is nothing sloppy about what Two Witches and bands of their ilk did. Two Witches went for a foreboding sound not unlike other small-label goth bands of the era. They put digital delay and echo type effects on their guitars, although at some points the little musical trick that they used a lot which is to leave a heavier guitar parts with a lot of space after them so that the reverb just hangs there. The singer has a real, mournful, low voice- which is like a variation on Andrew Eldritch of Sisters of Mercy or Ian Curtis form Joy Division most of the time, but he occasionally he gets pretty nuts with his whole “I’m a vampire” thing. They use electronics sparingly and in minimal atmospheric ways- the keyboards and electronic beats are there sometimes, but they are generally a guitar-based band. The females in the band sing occasionally, most of the time it’s the bald guy. He had some pipes though. In particular, the lairing of guitar sounds on this album is very effective. This is a very rich textured sounding album with a lot of color on it, but they weren’t working with much. The band was probably never was a huge money-maker, and they only had some minimal electronics, guitars with a few effects pedals, a bass, drums and their voices to work with. They were able to create a big sound with a great deal of space with what they worked with regardless.
They certainly have their whole lyrical thing with occult and religious imagery, their whole thing with vampire erotica or whatever it is. The singer gets pretty breathy and perverted sounding, although I’d likely sound the same way if I was in a goth band with two Finnish women in it. The only track which does sort of annoy me is “Holy Land (I Don’t Need Your)” which sounds fine, but the singer goes on an anti- Christianity bit rather predictably, decrying Christianity for having previsions against homosexual and lesbian acts and for other reasons. When bands do that it becomes simply another bully pulpit. I’m not big on music with messages. They must secretly love Christianity because they are obsessed with invoking its iconography and decrying it. It is perhaps a kind of inverse love/hate deal sort of like S&M is. That song is the one track on the album I don’t care for much.
I’m not sure were exactly the future of bands like Two Witches lies. It could be that they remain in relative obscurity. It could be that they are rescued form obscurity or it comes to be that they are understood to be ahead of their time at some point. I could see this band and others like it becoming fashionable in the future for some reason.
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