Monday, December 12, 2011

In Goth Daze

I was exposed to this album in High School back in 1994 when it came out. It's not what I care the most about, but you can only write about Human Centipede 2 so many times and when I write about Michael Savage's show it doesn't get many hits.You can get the CD on Amazon for something like 5 bucks at this point. The compilation released by Cleopatra Records contained both then current bands (Switchblade Symphony) and bands who had been and gone from back in the 80's (Executive Slacks from Philadelphia, Specimen). The sound of bands from the 80's and bands from the early 90's wasn't radically different, it was much a continuation. The definition of the term "gothic" in music seems to have shifted radically in places since the release of In Goth Daze. There's a label out of Germany that's been putting out these compilations I've been curious about lately called Gothic Spirits1-14 and Gothic Romance 1-4. A lot of the music on them are not bands that sounds like what was called "goth" in the 80's and early 90's much. They contain bands that are much closer to being an operatic metal, bands like Nightwish. The better part of 20 years after it's release, I can see quite clearly that many of the tracks from this album have gotten 20,000 plus hits on Last.fm, which indicates that the audience for this material is alive and well. In fact, just today a blog I wrote got a hit from someone looking for the lyrics to "Last Remains" by Carcrash International featured on this collection. A month before this CD came out, i studied with the author Rick Moody, who was then featured in Details and everything at the time. I've blogged about Rick Moody, and blogs I've written about bands then released on Cleopatra Records get more hits then on Rick Moody. If you consider all the bands that remained unsigned or had trouble getting club gigs at all, that's really impressive that decades later that these bands still pulling in listeners. This collection still listens well, not everything of that era or genre does to me. For example, the same record label at the time was re-releasing chunks of the old Psychic TV catalogue, which I've written about being painfully sick of. It could be the case that you could hear the full album by some of the bands on this one and be deeply disappointed, and that you would find that some of these bands really only did one or two good songs. As a kind of brief "best of" for smaller goth bands from the years 1980-1994, it's fairly representative. The same label Cleopatra put out many such compilations, this one is probably the most memorable or my favorite. There's another one called The Whip which is fairly good. I wouldn't say that In Goth Daze is completely comprehensive. It doesn't have all those ambiguously Nazi bands like Death in June, nor does it have all those new age sounding "ambient" bands that appeared on Projekt Records. There are other collections floating around of those. The Projekt bands I know did not sell many records relatively speaking anyway, so I don't know how many people really care about those bands anyway. Cleopatra grabbed a nice cross section of bands for this one. Carcrash International were highly derivative of Joy Division, but if you have to be derivative of someone, make it the greatest ever. That's probably the biggest musical criticism I can make of any band on this completion. People make fun of the overstated romanticism and melancholy of gothic music. It doesn't compare to the self-absorption of indie rock, then again, what does? Tight, simple- delay effects on the guitars, maybe a drum machine beat, and lots of make-up and hairspray. That to me means rock and roll of my youth. This album is probably better then anything that's come out since.

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