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Continuing our Halloween month theme, we turn to masters of post-industrial, electronic brilliance Coil and their Musick to Play in the Dark series. With these albums, Coil announced, they were leaving behind their old style of "sun music" and transitioning towards "moon music." I'm sure that makes sense to someone, but I will not worry too much about it because the music on both these albums,, solar or lunar, is among the strongest of their extremely impressive career.
There's definitely an atmosphere of the sinister here, and they spare no expense in creating spooky atmospherics throughout. The opener, "Something," is just the title word spoken in a whisper again and again, slowly fading in surrounded by wind sounds and subtle electronics. The second track is a full fledged electronic workout that bears all the hallmarks of later-day Coil hired gun and analog synth wizard Thighpaulsandra. His utterly unique approach to playing the synthesizer is endlessly entertaining and a regular feature on most Coil albums from this period. Think of a more demented Tangerine Dream and you get the basic idea.
Te showstopper on the album is the eleven minute "Ether." Its arcane references to the creepy, old-fashioned drug are chilling enough, but towards the end it becomes downright terrifying when John Balance intones the line "I'm going upstairs to turn my mind off... to turn my mind off... to turn my mind off" over a gradual fading backdrop of dark ambient sounds until only his desperate rasping remains. It's tremendously effective and one of the scariest songs I've ever heard.
The rest of the album remains strong throughout. Volume One of the series was a little uneven, and it's nice to see that that mistake has not been repeated here. The closer, another eleven minute track call ed"Batwings: A Limnal Hymn," is oddly the most sedate and straightforward track here, with no vocal processing for Balance and minimal instrumentation, yet it's strangely effective. It's unsettling without being over the top, and send the listener off into the night feeling just a little unnerved and eager to get home to a safe, warm bed.
No other band has ever really sounded like Coil, and it's wonderful that they have such a prodigious and varied discography. It's only a shame that the members died so young and were unable to leave us with even more great music.
Well, it's October again and in honor of my favorite month crowned gloriously by my favorite holiday, I'll be spending this months featuring albums with a decidedly spooky feel.
The first of these is by Fields of the Nephilim, a gothic rock group influenced by the occult and spaghetti westerns, fond of performing in black cowboy outfits. Elizium is their second album, showing dramatic advancement over their solid, but not outstanding debut. I'll go out on a limb and say that I personally consider this to be the finest goth rock album ever produced. It's a strong statement, I know, but allow me to elaborate.
Whereas the band's first album was song-oriented, Elizium is much more sweeping in scope. The first four tracks all flow together to form one fifteen minute suite ranging from somber atmospherics to uptempo, but still quite dark, rock, then back to brooding stillness. The guitars are drenched in reverb, the drums boom in the distance and the singer's voice croons in a deeply smooth, yet sinister drawl. There is even a grainy sample of infamous occultist Aleister Crowley to ratchet up the creepiness.
I should take a moment to comment on the production which, although the song writing is very strong, is the main reason the album succeeds to spectacularly. I'm not sure how they got the effect, but the whole thing sounds like it's being played on a bonfire-lit hilltop several miles away across a foggy moor. The effect is as eerie as it is exciting.
The opening suite, collectively known as "for Her Light," is followed by a more subdued eight-minute track called "Submission," which is essentially a bass guitar workout for the singer to talk ominously over. Various vocal effects sch as echo and elaborate panning keep things unsettling throughout.
What's striking is how catchy these songs manage to be, and how much they rock, without disturbing the uncanny atmosphere. The eleven-minute rocker "Sumerland (What Dreams May Come)" is relentlessly entertaining throughout, and for me is the highlight of the album, while the final two tracks wind things down in a dreamy, hallucinatory way that makes you wonder whether you imagined the whole thing.
Music that tries to be spooky is always of danger of stumbling into a great many treacherous pitfalls, but Fields of the Nephilim manage to simultaneously avoid being campy, contrived or overly abrasive, a feat for which they surely deserve a great deal of praise.
Sopor Aeternus is the name under which German transsexual Anna Varney records, and the Ensemble of Shadows are the ghostly spirits that provide her with her inspiration. Yes sir, top 40 this ain't.. "Dead Lover's Sarabande" was released in two parts, the second being rather superior in my view. Both are worthy of notice if you're into this sort of thing though.What is this sort of thing, you ask? Well, it's best decribed as very dark chamber music with vocals. The instrumentation consists of cellos, violins, trombones, french horns, vibraphone and a number of other orchestral instruments with only the barest smatterings of acoustic guitar, but played in a classical fashion. The style is that of the most mournful of classical requiems, and Varney's vocals croak along in German, rarely varying from a near sob (except for the occasional nightmarish shriek.)This is melodrama at a level you're unlikely to encounter anywhere else, and at times the overwrought emotion approaches the comical, but most of the time it's just spooky and unnerving. The first track is, appropriately enough, a cover of the Nico song "Abschied," so Varney's influences are pretty clear. Other songs like "The Dog Burial" are very unsettling indeed, with lurching rhythms, twisted melodies and demonic vocals. Elsewhere, the proceedings step back from the edge of terror, content to be merely depressing, such as the English-sung "No One Is There." The lyrics are not any more cheery than you would expect from the title. There are, however, a handful of more upbeat moments, such as in the masterfully developed "Procession / Funeral March." This is an all instrumental number that takes a simple melody and elaborates on it over the course of its seven minutes. It's quite captivating, and the rhythm is propulsive (although the style is no less dark than anything else here, really.)Both volumes of the "Dead Lover's Sarabande" are ideal for Halloween parties and Vampire: The Masquerade sessions. It's hard to get any more Goth than this, but the music is undeiably beautiful in its tragedy and there's nothing else quite like it for complimenting a melancholy mood. I believe this disc (along with several other Sopor Aeternus albums) was recently reissued, so anyone wanting to pick up a copy should be in luck.
Happy October everybody! It's my favorite month and my favorite holiday, Halloween, is just around the corner. Consequently, I'm going to dedicate this month to reviewing "scary" music, so maybe you'll get some ideas for a nifty Halloween playlist.Nico is, of course, mostly known for her vocal contributions to the first Velvet Underground album, but few people kept track of her after she left the band. Her first solo album was a pleasant, but hardly groundbreaking affair, filled with folky songs by Lou Reed and Jackson Browne, as well as a forgotten Bob Dylan gem. It's a good record, but in no way prepared listeners for what was to come.On "The Marble Index" Nico started writing her own songs. She hired John Cale to produce and went into the studio armed only with her own voice and an old harmonium she had somehow acquired. The result was a set of terrifyingly bleak, avant garde pieces comprised mainly of the drone of her voice, the drone of her harmonium and the drone of Cale's viola. It's hard to understand the inspiration for such a strange transition. The style of the music here seems to come out of nowhere, and it really sounds like nothing else. Maybe if you had been in Germany's Black Forest in the twelfth century, you might have heard some Grimm's fairy tale witches chanting something like this, but apart from that I'm at a loss.Elements of medieval music are certainly present, and I have long contended that "The Marble Index" is the first Goth record. From the funereal quality of the music to Nico's perpetually blonde hair being dyed black for the cover, I'm sure that legions of depressed, black clad, clove cigarette smoking teenagers were deeply inspired by this. Unfortunately, most of the music they would end up churning out pales in comparison to the original.Cale's production is worthy of mention. He's smart enough not to try to polish up the raw edges of these songs too much, letting his avant garde credentials take over and stepping in only to add some gloomy piano and percussion effects. The overall quality of the sound is somewhat murky and muted, and this indistinctness add to to the mysterious, frightening atmosphere. I dare anyone to listen to "Facing the Wind" in the dark and not get the chills.Nico's next album, "Desertshore" is just as good, but she was never again as raw and confrontational as she is here. This is a stunningly original record and although it's not the most accessible album ever, in my view every music lover owes it to themselves to check it out.
