A History of Rock and Dance Music 1951-2008
a book written by Piero Scaruffi
http://www.scaruffi.com/history/cpt47.html
Gothic Rock
Dark-punk 1978-82
TM, , Copyright 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
British punk-rock was flanked from the beginning by a "gothic" movement. The violence and the frenzy of the Sex Pistols were channeled by these "dark punks" into atmospheres and tones that were meant to evoke horror scenes and exoteric rituals. The Stranglers and Siouxsie Sioux (1) were among the bands that started the fire. It wasn't much of a fire, and even Siouxie's most innovative album, The Scream (1978), was mainly a catalog of embarrassing cliches.
Far more abrasive was the sound of X-Ray Spex (1) on their only album, Germfree Adolescents (1978), thanks to the barbaric screams of vocalist Poly Styrene (Marion Elliot) and to the dissonant saxophone of Lora Logic (Susan Whitby).
The more interesting acts of "dark punk" were the ones that sculpted a similarly gloomy and bleak sound but shunned the cartoonish, horror-movie overtones. Notably, the Cure (3) introduced existential anguish (the kind found in Camus' and Sartre's books) into rock'n'roll. Three Imaginary Boys (1979) actually features a deadly cocktail of cynical hyper-realism, macabre expressionism and morbid paranoia. Pornography (1982) capitalized on those premises with a philosophical journey to the center of a fragile, romantic soul (vocalist and guitarist Robert Smith). After the pop conversion of the sprawling but inferior Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (1987), the Cure reached their zenith of pathos on Disintegration (1989), which balances Smith's pedantic preaching with heavily arranged pieces that sound like symphonic poems.
The two albums cut by Joy Division (2), Unknown Pleasures (1979) and Closer (1980), before vocalist Ian Curtis committed suicide and the band evolved into New Order, coined a new kind of gothic, decadent, futuristic and psychedelic rock, and offered an unlikely mixture of Doors, Kraftwerk and Black Sabbath. Eerie melodies, funereal tempos, electronic arrangements and otherworldly dissonances interpreted the industrial wasteland as a personal nightmare. Their career ended with Love Will Tear Us Apart (1980), which was the beginning of a new genre: synth-pop.
Despite its artistic limitations, the genre found a broad audience. Cavernous sound, icy voice, loud drums, martial pace, distorted guitars became as ubiquitous as the rants of the punk-rockers. Existential boredom and suicidal tendencies moved to the forefront, displacing rebellion as the main attraction of punk-rock. The same morbid sensibility inspired bands as different as the Passions, Theatre of Hate (who later evolved into Spear Of Destiny), and the Comsat Angels.
Thankfully, other musicians went beyond the "darkness" and coined new musical languages that were no less depressed but far more creative. They twisted the elements of rock music to manufacture a sense of loss and desolation.
The macabre, magniloquent psychodramas of Bauhaus (1), from the acid-tribal psychobilly Bela Lugosi's Dead (1979) to Lagartija Nick (1982) via the morbid sound effects of In The Flat Field (1980) and especially via the electronic dance pop of Mask (1981), painted the most suffocating atmospheres.
Killing Joke (2) were less mental and more physical than Bauhaus: the dissonant, tribal, apocalyptic spasms of their early singles, such as Requiem (1979) and Wardance (1979), and of their first album, Killing Joke (1980), were as powerful as Pere Ubu's "modern dance". Like the rest of the gothic contingent, during the 1980s Killing Joke wasted their talent setting their visions to a dance beat, but Martin Atkins eventually refounded and revitalized the band with the thundering and barbaric sound of Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions (1990).
The Psychedelic Furs (1) set the gothic element at the border between Roxy Music's decadent spleen, the Velvet Underground's acid threnodies and Van Der Graaf Generator's futuristic melodrama. The result, particularly on Talk Talk Talk (1981), was sophisticated as well as haunting.
All of this was easily topped by the most eccentric of all "dark" bands, the Virgin Prunes (2), that hailed from Ireland with a completely different approach to "gothic", an approach that mixed archaic rituals with avantgarde music. Their grotesque Grand Guignol regressed from the grotesque and hallucinated expressionistic theater of A New Form Of Beauty (1982) to the demonic rituals of Heresie (1982) to the pagan folk-rock of If I Die I Die (1982).
The idea peaked with the abstract, conceptual, dub-drenched sound of Public Image Ltd (21), the band formed by Johnny "Rotten" Lydon after the Sex Pistols split up, and featuring bassist Jah Wobble and guitarist Keith Levene. First Issue (1978) announced a new form of music: ponderous rhythm, distorted guitar, demented screams. Second Edition (1979) is the album that turned punk-rock into chamber music. By slowing down the tempo in a vein similar to dilated acid-rock, and sprinkling Lydon's psychotic monologues with deformed echoes of Jamaican, Middle Eastern and African music, the combo injected a disturbing sense of loneliness and fear into their extended, loosely-structured pieces. That praxis reached claustrophobic intensity on Flowers Of Romance (1981), an album featuring Martin Atkins on drums but lacking Wobble on bass. Lydon's muezzin-like invocations played a "call and response" game with an expanded ethnic instrumentation that felt equally at home with funk syncopation and found noise. The album's funereal lieder roamed Freudian and exoteric labyrinths. Lydon, bard of the psychic depression, set his nihilistic lyrics to a harrowing maelstrom of estranged sounds.
As dance clubs around the country adopted the depressed mood and the freakish look, a more danceable sound was concocted by the new generation of gothic punk-rockers.
The Sisters Of Mercy (1) were probably the greatest and the most influential of this generation. Their lugubrious, demonic voodoobilly, inspired by Suicide and Cramps but propelled by panzer machines, had no equals. Coupled with that instrumental frenzy, Andrew Eldritch's Morrison-ian vocals created a tension that was both stately and devastating. The culmination of their career and the culmination of gothic rock was Temple Of Love (1983), their most visionary and propulsive ceremony. Floodland (1987) added a futuristic and oppressive sound, courtesy of Jim Steinman.
Other horror bands included: Alien Sex Fiend (1), whose album Who's Been Sleeping In My Brain (1983) was more demented than macabre rockabilly, the catastrophic Fields Of The Nephilim, the romantic Gene Loves Jezebel, and the savage Sex Gang Children .
Gothic 1984-86
TM, , Copyright 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Ian Astbury's Cult and Wayne Hussey's Mission wed the sinister overtones of dark-punk with Led Zeppelin's old-fashioned hard-rock. The former were derivative of AC/DC, Cream, Free, Led Zeppelin, Doors and Rolling Stones, although the symbiosis worked wonders in Spiritwalker (1984), She Sells Sanctuary (1985) and Love Removal Machine (1987).
In The Nursery (2), i.e. twins Klive and Nigel Humberstone, were unique in that they interpreted gothic in the tradition of classical music and electronic music. The duo mixed Klaus Schulze's cosmic music and Constance Demby's new-age music and progressed, over a number of formative works, notably the EPs Temper (1985) and Trinity (1987) and the single Compulsion (1987), towards a synthesis of old-fashioned musical idioms, such as teutonic romanticism and central European decadence. Their favorite form, perfected and streamlined on their third album, Koda (1988), used a synthetic orchestra to emulate Wagner's magniloquence over a martial tempo a` la Holst's Mars. The music, clearly more inspired by the classical than the rock tradition, had a melancholy, visionary and sometimes nostalgic quality. Their symphonic staccatos, that indulged in horns and strings, were embellished with collages of samples. Further simplifying their compositions, In The Nursery produced more accessible works such as L'Esprit (1990), and eventually became a case of pompous synth-pop.
Theomania (1988) by the Cassandra Complex offered vehement psychobilly halfway between Suicide and the Velvet Underground.
While mostly a British genre, dark-punk eventually spread to continental Europe too (for example, La Muerte in Belgium and Brighter Death Now in Sweden).
The terror expressed by these bands was the other side of the cynical rage of the punk-rockers. They were two different perspectives on the same vision of life, on the same nervous breakdown. However, "dark punk" focused on loneliness, apathy, claustrophobia, paranoia, and, ultimately, on the need for a cathartic apocalypse.
Gothic hardcore 1980-86
TM, , Copyright 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Los Angeles' punk-rock scene briefly experienced a gothic resurgence which paralleled British dark-punk. While it did not amount to much, bands such as Urinals, 45 Grave, Alex Gibson's Bpeople, T.S.O.L. (True Sounds Of Liberty), Kommunity Fk dusted off the graveyards visited a few years earlier by the likes of Joy Division and Siouxsie Sioux.
Few albums stood out. One of the earliest gothic bands, the Flesh Eaters (1), led by the literate and visionary Chris Dejardins (the "Divine Horseman"), recorded A Minute To Pray A Second To Die (1981), featuring the Blasters's Dave Alvin and X's John Doe, an album that sounds more like Poe-like poetry set to roots-rock than a punk album.
Christian Death (1), the sinister creature of vocalist Rozz Williams, penned the arcane, atmospheric ballads of Only Theatre Of Pain (1982), which would be influential on the future of gothic rock.
Gothic music was virtually reinvented by Black Tape For A Blue Girl (13), the brainchild of keyboardist Sam Rosenthal. Mesmerized By The Sirens (1987) was the manifesto of his electronic chamber music, while Ashes In The Brittle Air (1989) signaled Rosenthal's increasing reliance on electronic keyboards. A Chaos Of Desire (1991) was the first full realization of his vision, a magical balance of orchestration and voices, of pathos and contemplation, a cycle of baroque ballads for chamber ensemble and atmospheric electronics that was appropriate for both Freudian nightmares and Greek tragedies. As the music became more ethereal and displayed a stronger neoclassical quality on This Lush Garden Within (1993), Rosenthal coined an art of mental paintings with the imposing Remnants Of A Deeper Purity (1996). Its melancholy madrigals, set in bleak and desolate landscapes, and performed with the austere aplomb of sacred music, downplayed the litanies and emphasized the drones replacing the sense of eternal damnation with a sense of eternal mystery. The experiment begun with this album's five-movement concerto For You Will Burn Your Wings Upon The Sun was pursued on As One Aflame Laid Bare By Desire (1998), which reached even deeper into the human psyche. The sumptuous beauty of The Scavenger Bride (2002) marked a culmination of this program of progressive emancipation from musical conventions.
1989-1994
Gothic Rock
Nordic gothic
TM, , Copyright 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
The gothic brand of punk-rock ("dark-punk"), that had seen the light in the heydays of the new wave, redefined gothic rock as a deeper and stronger mood than the one originally served by Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper. Gothic rock was, first and foremost, an attitude, and remained such during the 1990s. In the 1990s, that attitude was refined by a generation of musicians that could take advantage of improved studio technology and electronic instruments.
Somewhat surprisingly, the leadership moved from Britain to the United States. Britain's gothic was limited to late purveyors of apocalyptic folk such as Rose McDowall's Sorrow, for example on Under The Yew Possessed (1993), and Michael Cashmore's Nature And Organisation, for example on Beauty Reaps The Blood Of Solitude (1994).
Germany's gothic school was far more imposing. Aurora (11), formed by Project Pitchfork's members Peter Spilles and Patricia Nigiani, crafted two of the eeriest and most powerful works in the genre: The Land Of Harm And Appletrees (1993), typical of their bleak and majestic overtones, overflowing with memorable melodies and eclectic arrangements (symphonic, acoustic, danceable, dirge-like, and so forth). The apocalyptic lieder of Dimension Gate (1994) covered an even broader territory, evoking both medieval religious music and ancestral tribal music, mimicking at the same time cosmic, techno and new-age music, sounding like a meeting of Popol Vuh and Dead Can Dance in Sven Vath's studio.
Das Ich (1), i.e. vocalist Stefan Ackermann and multi-instrumentalist Bruno Kramm, composed Staub (1994), a symphonic work of heroic proportions.
However, it was Sweden that came to rule European gothic. Roger Karmanik, the mastermind of Brighter Death Now and the founder of the Cold Meat Industry label, was the inspiration behind Sweden's gothic scene. Deutsch Nepal's Deflagration Of Hell (1991) was still under the influence of industrial music (the genetic source of this scene), but soon Scandinavia coined an original language: the "sound constructivist" school, that merged elements of ambient, gothic and industrial music, and, in general, relied on atmospheric keyboards and sometimes classical instruments to create terrifying visions of the otherworld; a genre that often sounded closer in spirit to classical music than to rock music. The works of In Slaughter Natives, such as Sacrosancts Bleed (1992), were feasts of excesses, relying on heavy-metal guitar and stormy beat-boxes as well as Gregorian litanies, Wagnerian choirs, martial drumming, etc. Love Is Colder Than Death's Teignmouth (1991) bridged the ancestral and the modern, the middle ages and cybernetics, ecstasy and hedonism, via a sequence that led from monk psalms, funereal tempos and organ drones to disco beats and bombastic arrangements. Mortiis (1), the brainchild of Emperor's bassist Haavard Ellefsen, transposed Klaus Schulze's symphonic grandeur and Brian Eno's majestic ambient ecstasy into gothic music, particularly with the two lengthy suites of The Songs Of A Long Forgotten Ghost (1993). Ordo Equilibrio (1), the project of multi-instrumentalist Tomas Pettersson, specialized in the glacial, desolate electronica first pioneered on Reaping The Fallen (1995). Arcana (1) refined the neoclassical, symphonic style on Dark Ages Of Reason (1996). The most abstract project was Morthound (Benny Nilsen), who sculpted the electroacoustic suites of This Crying Age (1991).
The master of nordic landscapes was Peter Andersson, known as Raison D'Etre (2), who experimented with both the "industrial folk" style of Prospectus I (1993), a set of psalms for string section and percussion instruments, and the "dark ambient" style of Within The Depths Of Silence And Phormations (1995), his most daring collage of samples, drones, monk-like chanting and futuristic electronics; a progression that led to the six neoclassical and mystical suites of In Sadness Silence And Solitude (1998).
Swedish composer Henrik "Nordvargr" Bjorkk was an original founder of Maschinenzimmer.412, or MZ.412, an outfit that helped define metal-industrial music with works such as In Nomine Dei Nostri Satanas Luciferi Excelsi (1995). Violence remained the common denominator of his subsequent projects: Folkstorm, best represented by the brutal sound of Information Blitzkrieg (1999); Toroidh, that debuted with the "European Trilogy", each episode being a romantic collage of wartime soundbites, notably Europe is Dead (2001); and Hydra Head 9, whose devastating wall of noise Power Display (2002) topped anything he had done before. The bleak electronic works released under his own name, Henrik Bjorkk, such as I End Forever (2004), The Dead Never Sleep (2005) and Vitagen (2005), on which he mastered the techniques of musique concrete, applied the same philosophy of terror to post-industrial droning music.
Swedish duo Abruptum (Marduk's multi-instrumentalist Morgan Haakansson and vocalist-guitarist Tony Sarkka) specialized in exhausting improvised meandering trance-metal pieces such as the 51-minute Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectere Me (1993), that leaned towards abstract cacophony, and the hour-long In Umbra Malitiae Ambulabo In Aeternum In Triumpho Tenebrar (1994), that leaned towards droning gothic ambience.
American gothic
TM, , Copyright 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
In the United States, gothic rock was anchored around the label Projekt, founded by Black Tape For A Blue Girl's mastermind Sam Rosenthal, which mainly recruited bands in Arizona and California and promoted a similar, "classical-oriented" approach to atmospheric music.
Lycia (22), the brainchild of guitarist and vocalist Michael Van Portfleet, achieved a solemn and profound synthesis of cosmic electronics, synth-pop, psychedelic-rock, and industrial music. Ionia (1991), featuring Dave Galas on keyboards, coined Van Portfleet's favorite setting of ghostly vocals floating in a soundscape of electronically-processed guitar tones and glacial orchestral counterpoints. A heavily-layered instrumental backbone sustained the emotional tension of the formally impeccable A Day In The Stark Corner (1993): on one hand, a lyrical, idyllic, dreamy undercurrent that percolated every fibre of the music; and, at the same time, a haunting and harrowing sense of despair, hinting at inescapable supernatural forces. The monumental The Burning Circle And Then Dust (1995), with Tara Vanflower on vocals, completed the moral Calvary of the previous works: a less catastrophic atmosphere revealed an ocean of somber melancholy, a foreign sense of beauty that underlined a process of self-discovery. This album codified Lycia's message, halfway between a philosophical treatise, a religious prophecy and the last thoughts of a dying man. By now free of the semiotic burden of his two masterpieces, Van Portfleet proceeded to sculpt the abstract ballads of Cold (1996), in a vein that evoked Dead Can Dance and that amounted, de facto, to a repudiation of his gothic roots.
Arizona's contingent also featured: Michael Plaster's Soul Whirling Somewhere (1), whose Everyone Will Eventually Leave You (1995) was a cosmic and neoclassical update of Dead Can Dance's sound, a fragile polyphony of ethereal madrigals bridging Constance Demby's symphonic new-age music and Harold Budd's celestial ambient music; Lovesliescrushing, whose Xuvetyn (1996) bordered on ambient music; Julianna Towns' Skinner Box, also influenced by Dead Can Dance on The Imaginary Heart (1991).
Remnants of the army that followed Christian Death in Los Angeles included Faith And The Muse and Cradle Of Thorns (1), who penned the barbaric psychodramas of Feed Us (1994), woven around the contrast between the death-metal growl of a male singer and the operatic contralto of his female counterpart (Ty Elam and Tamera Slayton), and propelled by a mixture of disco-music, punk-rock and industrial rhythms.
Johnny Indovina's Human Drama (1) rose above the gothic scene of Los Angeles. A mostly-acoustic work, The World Inside (1991), introduced not only fairy-tale atmospheres and neoclassical passages but also the archaic undercurrent that resurfaced on Songs Of Betrayal (1995), a philosophical meditation that achieved anthemic overtones as well as plunged into suicidal dejection. These works were so heavily arranged that each song sounded like a symphonic poem, when it was not as spare and austere as a chamber sonata.
Offshoots of that school were to be found in Chicago, such as Padraic Ogl's Thanatos.
In San Francisco, the gothic clubs of SOMA reveled in the music of Switchblade Symphony, and especially Children Of The Apocalypse (1), who recorded the exoteric Ta 'Wil (1997).
In Australia, Darrin Verhagen's Shinjuku Thief (2) assembled collages of industrial, ambient, jazz and dance elements on Bloody Tourist (1992) and achieved the magniloquent orchestral gothic of The Witch Hammer (1993).
Bauhaus
In The Flat Field
4AD, 1980
- , . , , , - -, , , .
: Mask, 1981, The Sky's Gone Out, 1982, Burning From The Inside, 1983
The Cure
Seventeen Seconds
Fiction, 1980
Three Imaginary Boys - ,
Seventeen SecondsFaithPornography, The Cure . A Forest , .
: Faith, 1981, Pornography, 1982, The Head On The Door, 1985, Disintegration, 1989
The Birthday Party
Junkyard
4AD, 1982
- , , , . ( ) . .
: Prayers On Fire, 1981
Virgin Prunes
If I Die, I Die
Mute, 1982
. , . - - -.
: Heresie, 1982, The Moon Looked Down & Laughed, 1986
Christian Death
Only Theatre of Pain
Epitaph, 1982
. - , death- 45 Grave. , .
: Catastrophe Ballet, 1984, Ashes, 1985
Cocteau Twins
Head Over Heels
4AD, 1983
. , , . . .
: Treasure, 1984, Heaven Or Las Vegas, 1990
Xmal Deutschland
Fetisch
4AD, 1983
- -. Siouxsie & The Banshees, Bauhaus Joy Division, --.
: Tocsin, 1984
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
From Her To Eternity
Mute, 1984
- , . , , , . Birthday Party.
: The Firstborn Is Dead,1985, Kicking Against the Pricks, 1986, Your Funeral...My Trial, 1986, Tender Prey, 1988, The Good Son, 1990, Henry's Dream, 1992, Let Love In, 1994, Murder Ballads, 1996
The Cult
Love
Beggars Banquet 1985
. -. -- U2. , Love -- - -.
: Dreamtime, 1984, Electric, 1987
Dead Can Dance
Spleen And Ideal
4AD, 1985
, Dead Can Dance, . , , , .
: Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun, 1987, Serpent's Egg, 1988, Aion, 1990, Into The Labyrinth, 1993, Spiritchaser, 1996
Sisters Of Mercy
First And Last And Always
Warner Brothers, 1985
, , , 85- , . First And Last And Always, -, , , .
: Floodland, 1987, Vision Thing, 1990
The Mission
God's Own Medicine
Mercury, 1987
, 85- Sisters Of Mercy, , - -, , , -.
: Children, 1988
Fields Of The Nephilim
Dawnrazor
Beggars Banquet, 1987
- -. Bauhaus The Cult. .
: The Nephilim, 1988, Elizium, 1990
ll About Eve
ll About Eve
Phonogram, 1987
- . , -, , .
: Scarlet And Other Stories, 1989
