Sunday, July 17, 2011

Music Review-Switchblade Symphony-Serpentine Gallery



It was a few years ago that I wrote an article for a small new York music publication called Balladry in which I said something to the effect that most rock and roll bands of any musical interest where on the Cleopatra Records catalogue during the mid-90's. I would probably recant everything I said in that article. So much so, gothic/industrial music no longer speaks to me. It would be hard for me to disagree that Joy Division had created a masterpiece in the Closer album, but at that point the term gothic music didn't exist or wasn't prevalent. Joy Division was the first on really, and I read somewhere a million years ago that the term gothic music appeared in a radio interview with Joy Division. By the time I was a teenager goth had been an institution of teenager self-pity and angst for a decade. At that point, Nine Inch Nails had managed to get widespread mainstream success, but smaller labels like Cleopatra and Projekt records had scores of bands that never did that well on them. I was a fan of this kind of material in my teens, but then in my 20's I feel I tried desperately to hold on to something which was no longer something to hold on to. Goth had not aged well. It wasn't the annoyance that indie rock had become, but few things in life are and that may have been in part because goth did not have the same exposure over the decade or so past. If they played lesser goth bands everywhere you went in Williamsburg that might have become equally obnoxious. If you have to rediscover or re-examine an album by a gothic band from the time period I'm talking about that had something resembling talent, check out the band Switchblade Symphony's first album Serpentine Gallery.
Do not pay money for this album. Every single track on it was posted to YouTube. It's an interesting little album, I can't imagine someone giving it so many repeated listenings that you would need it downloaded.
Back in the 90's when I was in New York I had a roommate that was like 8 years older then me who made the joke about this album that he kept expecting Ozzy Osbourne to start singing. There is a little bit of a metal element in there. They did use a guitarist but all of the other instruments where electronic, the beats are all drum machine. Then there was what was really the definitive musical signature of Switchblade Symphony which was the use of two female vocalists. These were not just any two female vocalists, these were two female vocalists with a fair bit of technical abilities. These are vocal parts that would be difficult to emulate. Probably for that reason, Switchblade Symphony never got that aggressive or noise-oriented- the production had to be fairly clean so you could hear the vocals clearly.
There was there lyrical fascination with fairy-tale subject matter. The children's song "London Bridge is Falling Down" was incorporated into the song "Gutter Glitter". I kind of think that was a bunch of stupid goth chick nonsense and they were probably not being nearly as profound as they though they were being. There might be a campy quality to it at this point. The album was released in 1995, I recall some of the tracks are rereleases from even a few years before that, so what are you going to do? I recall their second album as being weak. Alas, as soon as a thing is a breathing artistic entity it is often quickly dead. I would go as far as to say that Serpentine Gallery is an overlooked a album, a kind of neglected classic or semi-classic. That's a lot coming from em at this point. I think even at one point I in conversation said I preferred Switchblade Symphony to the Velvet Underground. That's a good thing to say, because it will drive the people that play in indie bands and work at little record shops insane. They take all that way too seriously, many of those people are wing-nut leftists in the dumbest kinds of ways, and indie rock doesn't need to get good press ever again.
This albums okay, give it a listen.

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