Ravencrown - Relive the Imagination (2025)

Country: Finland
Style: Gothic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Jan 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

What better to kick off a new year than a Finnish gothic metal band that I haven't heard before? In fact, I don't believe I've heard anything by main man Markus Jussila before, either from Mournful Lines or Kituma. This may be a sort of continuation of the former, playing as often in rock territory as metal, but I won't know for sure without checking out that band, who apparently split in 2024. It just seems clear to me that this is driven by its keyboard melodies, even though it often chunks up with some guitar crunch. The vocals are clean and higher than I tend to expect for a male voice in a gothic band. Overall, I think it sits on the metal side of that ever tenuous boundary with rock but it wouldn't take much to shift it to the other side.

That foundation in melody is obvious immediately on the opener, From the Moment, and it rarely ceases to be the focus, remaining whatever else the band is doing. I say band, but it's Jussila doing everything except whatever guitarwork his Mournful Lines colleague Juha Tervo contributes. The final three songs play a little heavier, Will You? especially getting epic and My Sweet Serpentine a more traditional goth song with an unknown deeper voice joining in duet, but they're still built on melody. Dreams & Hearts opens like a pop song, down to some diva crooning from Jussila, but it's still built on melody. Even Loveless Pyre, which veers firmly into prog rock, is still built on melody.

That introduces two of my favourite angles to this album, but not the third, which is an unexpected steampunk flavour. I have no reason to believe that Jussila intended that specifically, especially as it isn't echoed in lyrics, but it's there rather often. It's there in Loveless Pyre when the keyboards mimic violins and bells that sound like clockwork. It's there in the filters on In Autumn's Embrace's intro which throw everything back to a previous era. And it's there in the opening to Sorrow, which sounds like a harpsichord. Of course, steampunk is more of an aesthetic in music than a genre and that isn't apparent, so take this paragraph how you will.

The first is that prog element in Loveless Pyre. It's the longest song on this album by far, six and a half minutes running a couple more than anything else here, most of the tracks done and dusted in a radio friendly three minutes or so. That allows it to have the longest and most substantial break into an instrumental section and that in turn allows it to get more versatile and inventive. Oddly, I wasn't convinced at all on a first listen, not being sure if I even liked half of it but loving the other half anyway. It does a heck of a lot and it keeps changing as it goes. A couple more listens and this one was my clear favourite.

The songs that sit behind it all show up late, maybe starting with Hollow Anyway but certainly with Zero. Hollow Anyway is slower and more sedate but it finds a strong groove and milks it well. Zero follows suit, adding an epic heaviness that Will You? matches. These two play like symphonic gothic metal and would benefit only from a full orchestra over Jussila's keyboard orchestrations, which I expect wasn't in the budget. They sound great to me and it's hard not to imagine them washing to shore like the waves on the cover art.

The closer is the most traditional gothic rock song on the album, My Sweet Serpentine, and I'd love to know who the guest voice is. Whoever it is sounds great but also sounds deep in the way that we tend to expect any goth rock frontman to sound when singing clean. It isn't merely the deep voice that plays traditionally, the whole drive of the song follows suit. It wouldn't stretch imagination to hear other Finnish gothic rock bands like HIM or the 69 Eyes covering this and it fitting in their set.

There are five or six songs in between Loveless Pyre and the driving songs at the end of the album but they're all worthwhile to varying degrees. I'm not much of a fan of the crooning on Dreams & Hearts but the hook is particularly strong and the guitar solo builds off it very well indeed. I only wish that solo had been longer. I Feel the Emptiness adds a Latin guitar feel, enough that Jussila could have sung it in Spanish and it would have felt natural. It features another effortless melody on the keyboards.

My biggest query about these songs in the middle is why Sorrow was given the single treatment, given that it was the only one and it's hardly the strongest song here. While I'd call out Loveless Pyre as the best song, it's clear to me that My Sweet Serpentine is the single. The only reason that I'm seeing why it wasn't chosen is that it may actually be an old Mournful Lines song redone here, so not new music in the strictest sense.

Whether it is or it isn't, Ravencrown are a decent new band to me for the new year, one to deepen the already deep pool of talent in Finland and add to their thriving gothic rock/metal scene. I will take all the good I can find in 2025 and I'm thankful it started out with my first album review of the year.

Pilots of the Daydreams - Invented Paradise (2024)

Country: Switzerland
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Sep 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

Here's an interesting release from Switzerland that it took me a little while to figure out. It came to me as progressive rock, which isn't unfair. The instrumentality seems to be rooted in prog rock but it often shifts from unusual rhythms and bass lines to a more commercial sound that draws on new wave and goth. The vocals, which are unusually prominent for a singer who's also the band's only guitarist, are often goth too but also dip into prog metal. Songs shift back and forth between these influences, varying the amounts of each until it all starts to feel like a single sound.

The first four tracks alternate between two styles. The title track kicks off like a prog rock band on a Sisters of Mercy kick. There's a drive to the instrumentation but the drums are clearly played by a human being, Biagio Anania, and the sound isn't as reliant on deep groove. It's a sparser sound with the bass reminiscent of Peter Hook's Joy Division years. Marco Predicatori's voice has all the confidence and the presence of Andrew Eldritch and, especially when he deepens it, he even sings similar lyrics. "You're my silent ocean" he sings and makes it sound like three lines.

It's a fascinating voice because it's full of intonation and flourish. He's never just delivering lyrics, he's delivering messages and he's having the sort of fun doing it that lead vocalists aspire to have and guitarists rarely come close to. That he's both in Pilots of the Daydreams means that he's one of those rare creatures who does both well but surely thinks of himself as a vocalist first. I tend to find that the vast majority of people doing both are guitarists who sing not singers who play. Sure, there's a peach of a solo on Perfect Storm that shows he's a very capable guitarist and it isn't the only one, but every single song on the album highlights why he's a magnetic vocalist.

Perfect Storm is similar to Invented Paradise but it turns down the Sisters influence and turns up a prog rock and prog metal side. The rhythms are more unusual. The bassline does more interesting things. The vocals soar more into Queensrÿche territory, Eldritch and Geoff Tate being a surprising pair of influences to mix together, especially if you add some David Bowie to that list. Butterfly in Your Heart returns to the Sisters mindset, but with even more Hook in Walo Bortoletto's bass and a falsetto added to Predicatori's range. Then Euphemia returns to the proggier side once more. It seems like clear alternation.

And then Among Wolves and Sheep changes things up completely, kicking in hard like a classic rock song. In fact it kicks in hard rather like a particular classic rock song because I found myself singing along to Montrose's Space Station #5 every time I repeated it. Bortoletto emphasises Hook style basslines and gets some real moments in the spotlight here to make that clear. He's very audible throughout, partly because the production likes it that way and partly because the guitar takes a back seat surprisingly often. Eventually, the Sisters and Joy Division are trawled in as well, but not at the cost of the classic rock.

And that's the sound of Pilots of the Daydreams, because the first half includes almost everything in various combinations and the second half merely varies it across another five tracks. That may well be one reason why most of my favourites here arrive early, but I dig Sleeping Karma too with even more of a deliberating emoting Geoff Tate in Predicatori's vocals and other moments worthy of a note here. There's more Queensrÿche than just Tate in the opening sequence, there's some Rush in the background and Predicatori even finds some Kate Bush late in the song, which is wild.

There's a track before Sleeping Karma and four more after it, none of which let the side down but none of which seem to enforce their presence on my mind, even after half a dozen times through. I wouldn't call them filler because every one of them is enjoyable, but I also wouldn't call any up to the standard of the first half. I do like the riff in the second half of Set These Dreams on Fire and the jangly build in Close Your Eyes, but I tend to forget them until those song repeats and they're right there again. Hypnotised lives up to its name, I guess, and Everything Has an End must have.

Pilots of the Daydreams are new to me, but I like this album and appreciate its blending of styles I wouldn't have thought would work together. They've been around since 2019 and this is a follow-up to their 2021 debut, Angels are Real, an idea referenced in the lyrics this time out too. I wonder if everything here was birthed there or whether this shows growth.

Rosetta Stone - Under the Weather (2024)

Country: UK
Style: Gothic Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Wikipedia

Rosetta Stone are a gothic rock band from the second wave, formed as far back as 1988 but with a surprisingly skimpy output for that long life. Their debut album was An Eye for the Main Chance in 1991 but this is only their fourth regular studio release since then, with two others that may count depending on your personal definitions. Either way, they don't release new albums often but this one follows Cryptology by only four years.

They're very much a pop-oriented goth band who used to feature jingly guitars that have morphed into electronica over the years. I haven't heard them in decades, so my memory may be letting me down, but they sound very electronic now, the three participants (for want of a better term) easily distinguished but all highly prominent. The vocalist is Porl King, who used to play guitar, but likely didn't this time out, and keyboards, which I'm sure he still does. Vocals aside, he's overshadowed a lot of the time by Madame Razor, the drum machine that almost defines the band's sound now.

That leaves Karl North on bass, who reminds of Peter Hook from Joy Division and New Order, both of which would seem to count as obvious influences. Many songs here find Joy Division vibes, not least Words to That Affect, but they're always flavoured by the drum machine, which makes them more electronic and thus more reminiscent of New Order. The bass isn't the first thing that grabs our attention, but it gradually grows until we simply can't ignore it, at which point I found myself actively following it, whatever else was happening.

The best bassline here is surely on Coherence, seven tracks in, but the more we focus on the bass, the more good basslines show up, starting with the opening title track, also the first single. It's a crucial note that my favourite songs are the ones with my favourite basslines. The beats work for me, in the sense that they contribute a needed and worthy aspect to the overall sound, but they don't play better to me on any one song than any other. King's vocals work for me too, but in that same sense. Occasionally, he delivers a line in a catchier fashion, like the choruses to We Turned Away or All the Devils, but he fundamentally does the same thing across all these tracks.

So this became almost entirely about the bass for me, starting most of the way through my first listen, with only the occasional keyboard riff helping to elevate one song over another, as on We Turned Away. That means that Coherence remains my favourite song, because it has my favourite bassline, but then it's probably Host and All the Devils, along with Under the Weather. This feels weird to me, because I can't remember another album where the bass dictates my appreciation this much, so I tried to figure out why.

I think it boils down to Rosetta Stone having such a stripped down sound, which is unusual for the sort of band that's survived for almost forty years intact. With the vocals telling stories and the drums merely keeping beat, it would normally fall to the guitars or keyboards to drive the songs forward, but they don't seem to want to do that. The keyboards are there but they feel more like decoration than rhythm and, if there are guitars at all, I mistook them for keyboards. Thus it falls to Karl North to play his bass like it's a rhythm guitar and a bass put together. It also means that a song is a song, because there's nothing in the instrumentation that can really apply emphasis.

And that's fine, but I tend to prefer my gothic rock denser in sound, whether it's the gothic rock of the Sisters of Mercy or the gothic metal of Tristania. Rosetta Stone aren't interested in density of sound and actively seem to avoided any possibility of crunch. So, while they still sound gothic, they remind me more of Joy Division than the Sisters, but still not as dense, meaning that, while I liked this, I always felt there was something missing.

Sweet Ermengarde - Sacrifice (2024)

Country: Germany
Style: Gothic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Apr 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Instagram | Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

Any goth worth his or her salt knows that Andrew Eldritch isn't remotely interested in recording a new studio album. That means that, if you want to hear new Sisters of Mercy material, you have to either go see them live—because he's still writing and performing it—or make your own. It's clear that Sweet Ermengarde did the latter and it shouldn't shock you if I point out that they hail from Germany because the Sisters have always been massive there. If you doubt me, check out the best live versions of Ribbons online; most of them were recorded in Germany.

It's impossible not to hear the Sisters as this album begins. Fragments has it and Faith Healer, the standout track for me, screams it from the rafters, even if it may owe almost as much to the Cult. As those influences might suggest, Sweet Ermengarde are at their best when they establish this sort of up tempo groove, which is why my favourite songs here are their up tempo ones like Faith Healer, The 5th Horizon and Viscera. There are points in The 5th Horizon where the guitar takes a break but the groove blissfully carries on regardless, as indeed these grooves do long after these songs are over. Lars Keppeler's bass takes over at one point in Viscera and exactly the same thing happens.

Oddly, given that, Sweet Ermengarde seem to prefer slowing things down a little and taking their songs in a gloomier direction. Most of the thirteen songs here are slower than the three that I've called out as highlights and the album slows down generally until the final two songs follow suit in very different ways indeed. I should emphasise that those grooves don't disappear, instead simply unfolding in slower fashion. The bass's moment in the spotlight in the slower Genesee is not light years away from its moment in the spotlight in the faster Viscera only one song earlier.

Of course, the effect is different. In the faster songs, we plug into the grooves and move along to them, even if we're sitting in an office chair listening at work. Even the most restrained listeners will find themselves tapping their feet to the beat, which, I should add, is delivered by a drummer here, Mischa Kliege, not a drum machine with a fancy name. In the slower ones, we don't do that. Instead we open ourselves up to their moods and let them fall onto us like warm rain, soaking into our essence and shaping our mood. They're slow and gloomy but not depressing, so their effect is affirming and enriching rather than bleak and suicidal.

That holds for everything up to Silent We Mourn eleven tracks in. Every track up to that one fits in one of those two moods and it would end naturally at that point as a decent fifty minute album, a third for Sweet Ermengarde, even if their line-up has changed considerably across each. Only two of five members made it from 2013's Raynham Hall to 2016's Ex Oblivione and only one remains in place for this album eight years on, that being Lars Kappeler on bass. Drew Freeman may be the vocalist now, for instance, but it's his debut with the band, because Kuba Achtelik was the singer in 2013 and Daniel Schweigler in 2016.

However, the album isn't over. There are two tracks left, the longest two on offer, and they skew the impressions of the album that we take away with us, on account of them being last. Embers Fall is slower again than anything else that came before and notably so. It's so slow that it becomes an acutely personal song as if Freeman is singing only to me. And, even though it takes a progression of gradual slowing down and runs with it, it also launches into something very different a couple of minutes in. Until now, the entire album has been gothic rock, but for twenty seconds, it's extreme metal, with frantic drumming from Kliege and harsh backing vocals from guest Nino Sable. Then it launches back into slow gothic rock, returning twice more for twenty second blitzkriegs.

And, if that sounds like a real anomaly, then there's Of Her Heart's Ocean, an eleven minute dirge to wrap things up. This is less a song and more of an ambient installation piece. It's achingly slow, it's full of atmosphere and it's peppered with occasional industrial ambience. It's not without its merits and my avant-garde tastes rather like it, but it's highly anomalous here. It feels like we've just been to a pretty decent goth gig, expended all our energy and now we're walking out of the venue. Except that, even though the door is right there, we never actually reach it because time has stretched and the building is ever so slowly twisting and contorting around us, as if it's ready to collapse and kill us all but, even with the light right there, we're not ready to leave yet.

That's a really weird way to wrap up an album that started out like the Sisters of Mercy, so I'd love to know exactly what the band had in mind. In the meantime, I hope they don't take another eight years to knock out another studio album. If they've found a stable line-up at last, maybe we'll see another one in the next few years. Oh, and kudos for the band name, which is a real H. P. Lovecraft deep cut.

Mourning Sun - Bahía desolación (2023)

Country: Chile
Style: Atmospheric Doom Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 8 Dec 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

Here's something really interesting. It came to me labelled as atmospheric doom metal, though I see that they've used avant-garde doom metal themselves. That's not unfair as the opening title track kicks off, but much of this moves a long way away from metal, if not necessarily from doom, a miasma of bleakness pervading the album whatever style it's adopting. Bahía desolación means Desolation Bay and it definitely feels like the people of this remote outpost want a horror movie to happen to them and are depressed that it hasn't yet.

Mourning Sun hail from Santiago in Chile and this is their second album after Último exhalario in 2016. The band clearly belongs to its vocalist, Ana Carolina, who has a singular vision of what she wants it to sound like. She's the only consistent point between that debut album and this one, and even though it was released as recently as 8th December, nobody else playing on it is apparently still in the band today. I see a different line-up documented, as of 2023 with Ana Carolina the only continuing name. Then again, there's a lot here that I don't believe is played by the people that I see listed.

That's because there are two angles to this sound that aren't coming from the regular line-up of rock instruments, the typical two guitars, bass and drums. There's orchestration here right from the outset on the title track and there are sections in songs that feel avant-garde classical, never foreground but often interesting in the background, whether it's piano or strings or horns. Given that the other angle is electronica, it's very possible that all that orchestration is generated from synths, but someone's playing them and I have no idea who.

In fact, whole swathes of this album play to me like electronica. Distant Pulse is only the first one, its first three minutes free of metal and most regular instrumentation. Ana Carolina's voice floats over electronica, clouds of synths providing the backdrop and a piano providing melody. The piano prowls in Deep Downward, No Escape too, which waits a long while to provide some metal crunch, unfolding for the longest time as a dark take on synthwave that isn't the traditional darkwave.

As the album reaches the end of its first half with Ecstatic Magellanism, I felt that the overall tone had shifted into post punk. The crunch shows up a couple of minutes in, as it tends to do on many of these songs, but Ana Carolina continues to sing an ethereal post punk that owes more to vocalists like Siouxsie Sioux and Lisa Gerrard than anyone in metal. She finds some power at the tail end of this one, stretching herself in a direction that she'd steadfastly ignored for four songs otherwise.

She's more vehement in Ad Misericordiam too, pleading from the outset, but she begins Substral Allure as if she's a singer/songwriter and delivers uncharacteristically standard rock vocals late in Inner Crux, as if she's suddenly turned into a diva performing in a talent show. And, of course, the next phrase shifts her right back to ethereal vocalisation. For someone who clearly has power, she consistently avoids using it, preferring that light and airy but somehow still substantial approach.

I'm talking a lot here about Ana Carolina because this is clearly her vision and she shapes it with a fascinating vocal performance to which everything else reacts. However, she's not alone here and the backing musicians, as patient as they must be given that they're only called for when needed rather than all the time, are required to make this work.

Hermaunt Folatre delivers a heavy bass in Distant Pulse that's all the more obvious because of the lack of guitars above it. Those guitars, played here by Rodrigo Morris and Ramón Pasternak, get a few moments to shine, like when they leap out of a keyboard haze early in Ad Misericordiam with jagged chords, or when they deliver melodies in Deep Downward, No Escape in the vein of British doom/death. That leaves Vincent Zbinden Carter on drums, who is as notable for not hitting beats as hitting them. It's fascinating to listen to Ad Misericordiam from his perspective, because there are so many things he could have done that he doesn't and they bolster what he actually does.

It's fair to say that this isn't remotely what I expected going in and it took a while for me to adjust to what Mourning Sun are doing. Halfway through Distant Pulse, I was pondering on how this could be seen as metal, let alone doom metal. There's a long electronic midsection to Ad Misericordiam where the entire band could have popped down the road for a pint without missing their moment. The same goes for most of Inner Crux. I wasn't expecting avant-garde classical textures either and moments of Vangelis and Dead Can Dance.

It haunts me though and I want to see how Ana Carolina built this sound. It's clearly time for me to seek out the debut. For now, I want to listen to this one much more. It's a fascinating, exquisitely original grower of an album.

Liv Kristine - River of Diamonds (2023)

Country: Norway
Style: Gothic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 21 Apr 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Following very much in the vein of her 2021 EP, Have Courage Dear Heart, this is Liv Kristine in her gothic rock mode, approaching and sometimes embracing pop at one end of the spectrum but also thinking a little about crunching up into metal at the other. While we might expect a lot of Theatre of Tragedy here, the gothic metal band she co-fronted for a decade, given that every original song here was written by Tommy Olsson, who spent three of those years as a guitarist in that band, it's only really approached in a couple of tracks, like Our Immortal Day and Maligna, and never with a real intention to go there.

Oddly, the first words we hear aren't Liv's. There's a male voice on the opener, Our Immortal Day, that functions less as a duet partner and more as an introduction. It belongs to Østen Bergøy, the clean voice in Tristania for a decade who's now with Long Night, also Olsson's current band. He's a perfect presence in this opener, setting us up for what Liv has to bring and supporting her with his velvet voice. My favourite duet partner here is Fernando Ribeiro of Moonspell, who lends a deeply Andrew Eldritch-esque voice to the title track. Liv's husband and sister also show up, the former a tender partner on Pictured Within and the latter less obvious on Love Me High.

The album starts off well with Our Immortal Day but escalates to No Makeup and Maligna, which I would call out as the two standout tracks on the album. The former plays like a waltz, a wonderful groove that's slower than the songs either side of it but contains so much detail to keep it skipping forward elegantly. The latter is a strong song, with symphonic metal in the vocals but goth rock all over the music, upbeat and driving like the Sisters of Mercy, and with tough lyrics about an abusive relationship. It's almost surprising to hear Liv drop an F bomb but it's perfectly placed here.

I've mentioned the Sisters a couple of times now and that's appropriate but there's another name I should throw out too, because this takes a few journeys into pop music, of the progressive sort we might associate with Kate Bush. When the songs are up tempo, we tend to hear the eternal beat of Doktor Avalanche behind them, even if Liv's isn't far off what we'd get if we inverted Eldritch's, the light to his dark. However, when the songs slow down and get playful or introspective, Kate Bush is the influence we hear. She's there on Maligna but she's unmistakable on Gravity and especially on the closing cover of Cyndi Lauper's True Colours.

Liv has always had a crystal clear quality to her voice, as if it's made of air and ice. Gravity is such a tailored song to that crystal aspect, turning her ethereal, as if she's indeed "flying with gravity", as the lyrics suggest. It does heavy up a little late in the song for emphasis, but True Colours is her voice solo with only piano accompaniment. These are songs painted in shades of white, beautifully rendered, and they're a far cry from the gothic metal I first heard her sing but just as worthy.

If you've been paying attention, you'll realise that the majority of the songs I've mentioned so far arrive early in the album and that's because it is a little top heavy. The first four songs are close to being the best four songs, the only one matching them in my mind being the title track, which still sits on the first side, wrapping it up before the tender ballad Pictured Within kicks off the second. That doesn't mean that the remaining songs are poor but the best of them can't match the worst of the first half, which I guess means In Your Blue Eyes because it's the only other song there.

Pictured Within is very well done but it doesn't grab me. True Colours is a stellar cover but it's just Kate Bush singing Cyndi Lauper without any further depth to it. If you twisted my arm, I might call out Shaolin Me as the best second half song. It sounds like a Shaw Brothers movie as it begins with a synth note building the way Pink Floyd might do it. The song grows and somehow floats, as if Liv has found the zone in a kata and nothing else exists but movement. I could imagine her singing in a blindfold for this one.

And so this is another 7/10, the same rating I gave Have Courage Dear Heart. However, there's far more of it, being a full length album, Liv's sixth solo effort and it certainly flies higher. I could have easily stretched to an 8/10 for the first half but it can't sustain that level in he second so that 8/10 surely drops to a 7/10, but I wouldn't go further. Even the least song here is still enjoyable even on a third or fourth listen, even if I'm tempted every time through to cut Pictured Within short to leap back to the beginning.

The Damned - Darkadelic (2023)

Country: UK
Style: Gothic Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 28 Apr 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

The Damned are one of those iconic bands who have been around forever and may well have done everything. Their early days, starting in 1976, including releasing the first British punk single, New Rose, and the first British punk album, Damned Damned Damned. A decade later, they moved into goth and, eventually, into a more psychedelic take on both punk and goth. They're an idiosyncratic band, partly because of that unique blend of styles and partly because it all sits behind the iconic smooth voice of Dave Vanian, the band's mainstay since their inception.

Vanian has kept the band alive ever since, through they've never been particularly prolific. This is their twelfth studio album in a career that's now closing in on half a century, their first since Evil Spirits in 2018. It's a varied affair, as you might expect, veering from punk to goth and back again, with psychedelic sections here and there and a surprising dip into what sounds to me like fifties pop.

I've read that they aimed for the seventies here a lot, but You're Gonna Realise and Beware of the Clown both sound older to me, like they're fifties songs shifted into a goth punk style, almost as if these are covers of songs that didn't exist until now. Western Promise is the most fifties, because it's a ballad at heart, with Vanian's croon at the fore and a smoky use of brass late on. In between the fifties sound I'm hearing here and the seventies sound they aimed at, there are songs such as Follow Me that have a sixties garage rock drive to them, in addition to the seventies punk that saw that as an influence.

Perhaps surprisingly, I tend to dig the more extreme songs here. I've been struggling for a couple of weeks with illness, my energy levels sapped, so I've been listening to this album for much longer than I'd normally allocate a new release and it's become something of an old friend. It's telling to say in that context that I haven't tired of any of these songs, though some are clearly better than others. While I didn't have the energy to write it up sooner, it wouldn't have been difficult to turn it off and I simply didn't want to. It's a strong album that doesn't get old.

But it's the songs at the extremes that have stayed with me most. Western Promise is the softest piece here, so probably the least likely to engage me but it's a firm favourite. At the other end of the spectrum, The Invisible Man and Motorcycle Man stand out as rockers. The former is a strong opener, a punky goth rock song that ramps up halfway and gets even more interesting. While the back end's going rockabilly, the front end's getting mystical. Motorcycle Man changes too, from a truly emphatic opening with a riff so punk that it's almost metal—no, it's not the Saxon song—to eventually become a laid back sort of beach song.

They're far from all that's going on here though. Bad Weather Girl ratchets down the tempo after the opener and adds a spooky keyboard backing. It's dark carnival music with an old school guitar solo right out of psychedelic rock. Walk the Dead is very seventies, trawling in a prog atmosphere remiscent of Pink Floyd and occasionally Genesis. Apparently Captain Sensible, on his third stint in the band, learned that fans were having Damned songs played at funerals, so decided to write one specifically for that purpose. Overall, it's as pure goth as this album gets.

Roderick closes out the album in fascinating style, as unusual as Leader of the Gang isn't a couple of songs before it. The latter is all about the meteoric rise and fall of the un-late and un-lamented Gary Glitter and feels as seventies as it should. The former, though, opens up as spoken word with accompaniment. It's a dramatic horror performance that becomes a song, Vanian's voice backed by a solo piano, only to transform into a ritual chant in Latin. Then it builds substantially to strings, with ebow guitar from producer Thomas Mitchener and more trumpet from Chris Coull, as enticing here as on Western Promise. And, with all that said, it's often rather like an unconventional James Bond theme. There's a lot here.

Now I have energy back again, it's going to feel odd moving on from this new old friend to listen to something else, but I'm a few weeks behind on my reviews and need to at least attempt to catch up a little and get back on track. I've always liked the Damned but I've never really dug properly into their work, merely enjoyed it when I've noticed it. Clearly, I should be paying more attention. The joyous jam in the second half of Girl I'll Stop at Nothing is worth the cost of the album all on its own, and that doesn't scratch the surface of what it has to offer.

The 69 Eyes - Death of Darkness (2023)

Country: Finland
Style: Gothic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 21 Apr 2023
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I'm sure there's something superstitious I could read into it, but Death of Darkness is yet another thirteenth album. My second review each day is always of a more established band than my first, a deliberate approach that allows me to cover new bands and keep up with the old ones, and this, by sheer coincidence, is a third thirteenth album in a row after Holy Moses and Kamelot. Tomorrow's will not be a fourth. I just checked.

This time, it's the 69 Eyes, a Finnish band who have only ever had one line-up change in their thirty-four year career, but who have moved through a number of genres in that time, starting out more in a glam rock style but moving gradually towards gothic rock, with occasional ventures over onto the other side of the ever shifting rock/metal boundary. This is gothic rock, in a western style, but it also delves rather palatably into pop music on the ironically named Gotta Rock. Sure, it's a rock song but most of it builds with a prowling bass that wouldn't be out of place on Michael Jackson's Thriller. Needless to say, lead vocalist Jyrki 69 doesn't sound remotely like Jackson.

He sounds a lot more like Andrew Eldritch nowadays, with a deep and deliberate voice that chants and echoes at us with a teasing hint of breathlessness. Last time out, on 2019's West End, one song in particular screamed the Sisters of Mercy and the same applies here. It's Call Me Snake and it's an upbeat song with a gorgeous groove and a memorable chorus. Call me Snake, Snake, Snake... It has to be said that I much prefer the modern 69 Eyes when they're upbeat and energetic, but that only really applies in full on two songs. Call Me Snake is the best of them but Drive isn't far behind and it doesn't surprise me to discover that it preceded the album last year as the lead on a three track EP, with Call Me Snake sharing its grooves.

They're at very different points on the album. Drive shows up after the broody opening title track but Call Me Snake doesn't arrive until it's called on to kick off the second side. That places it after Gotta Rock, as well as California, with a Cult-like drive, and a particularly notable track called This Murder Takes Two. It's notable for its guest appearance by Kat Von D, which works well, her voice contrasting neatly with Jyrki's, but also because it has an alt country murder ballad vibe, filtered through goth. It's quite a memorable piece, much more low key than Call Me Snake or Drive, but a highlight nonetheless.

Even with Call Me Snake kicking it off, the second side doesn't feel as strong as the first. The other standout there is Dying in the Night, which feels like a Billy Idol song, with an incessant drive from bass and drums, but with the guitar dialled way back. It's all vocals and beat, which isn't the worst decision on this song, but I did miss Bazie's lead guitar. It's there on Something Real, with another Billy Idol sort of vibe and a faster pace. The albums wraps up with Sundown and Outlaws, a further Cult-esque song and another slower song to showcase Jyrki's resonant voice and what I presume have to be guest synth melodies.

And so this is another decent album, as we might expect from the 69 Eyes, but it's not the killer it could have been. I should run it past some of my goth friends to see what they think of it. It may be that they really dig the slower material and relish every new release the band puts out. I like it too but the metalhead inside me always wants them to speed up. When they do, on songs like Call Me Snake and Drive, I'm in Heaven. Until Eldritch figures out how easy it is nowadays to self-release a full length album while retaining complete creative control, it's these songs that satisfy my need for new Sisters material. Only after those can I truly settle into the slower, more offbeat stuff on a modern 69 Eyes album.

Dark Princess - Phoenix (2023)

Country: Russia
Style: Gothic Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 20 Jan 2023
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If I'm understanding correctly, Dark Princess was formed in 2004 as a solo project for lead vocalist Olga Trifonova, who may have created the first album on her own. However, there was certainly a band for the second album, which is when Stepan Zuev arrived on keyboards and backing vocals. It looks like they released four albums in total before splitting up in 2017, though Trifonova actually left after three, so the fourth is with a different lead vocalist, Natalia Terekhova. She returned in 2020 when the band reformed with a new line-up to support Trifonova and Zuev, each new member recruited from the latter's other band, Sangvis, who play melodic death metal and metalcore.

This is the first product of the new line-up and it's a far cry from those genres. This is gothic metal, mostly heavier than we'd call gothic rock but with occasional dips back to that side of the fence, at points when electronica joins in and the drum sound shifts. The intro to The Pain I Need adds violin too and could have been taken from a Dead Can Dance album. The song settles into rock and then heavies up to metal, before ramping back down to that intro sound at the end. That's not unusual for this album.

Generally speaking, the album aims at the elegance of gothic music, everything on offer polished mahogany and brass, with a clean symphonic metal lead vocal from Trifonova. Zuev doesn't join in on every song and how he does so depends on the material. He showcases a harsh vocal in support on the opening title track and especially on Falling to Fly, but he's also able to shift to a clean vocal, as he does on The Light and My Chance, to name but two. On a first listen, it was the heavier songs where he stood out most, but gradually I realised he was there a lot more than I'd initially heard.

I can see why this used to be a solo project, because Trifonova is certainly the most obvious aspect of the band's sound and almost everything else seems to be there to support it. That extends to an odd lack of opportunities for the backing musicians to move into the spotlight and shine. There's a decent guitar solo on Taste of Freedom from Denis Burkin that almost surprised me and there's a strange break between it and the rest of the song, as if they had no idea how to connect the two in a seamless manner, so just stopped and started again. The similar solo on The Light doesn't segue well either but it's much more effective, both as a solo and as part of a song.

Of course, then there's another solo on the next song, My Chance, which is shorter but seamlessly integrated, and then another one on Your Flame that's likewise, with a reprise no less, and it feels all of a sudden that this is a guitar band. However, once the solos are over, the guitar is lowered in the mix and we're back to a predominantly vocal outlook. And that's fine, but my biggest concern here is in the lack of hooks. Trifonova sounds wonderful and everything she does is melody but I'm not going to be waking up in the morning with any of these songs playing in my head and that's even more important if the focus is going to be so ruthlessly on the vocals.

What I found most odd here was that my favourite songs are the heaviest and the lightest. Anyone who's read a lot of my reviews won't be surprised to hear the former because, while I like bands to vary what they do and keep their albums interesting, I also dig the heavy stuff. However, the latter is a lot more unusual. I don't dislike soft and subtle music and I don't dislike ballads as a matter of course, but I do tend to be less fond of lighter material on heavier albums, which is Not Enough in a nutshell.

However, I'd place it alongside Falling to Fly, with all those harsh backing vocals, as my highlights here, because Trifonova is a delight and in her element in an aria that allows her to exercise some more subtle elements of her talent, like intonation and playing with emphasis. The orchestration behind her isn't entirely unpredictable but it has some nice subtleties to it too. That it heavies up in the third act is merely a bonus. It would have been a highlight for me even if it hadn't.

I wanted a little more from this album than the band seemed willing to give, but it's a decent and welcome return for a band who have been gone from the studio for over a decade.

Mono Inc. - Ravenblack (2023)

Country: Germany
Style: Gothic Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 27 Jan 2023
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I hadn't heard of Mono Inc. until I caught sight of the cover art for their eleventh album, The Book of Fire, and checked it out. I'm glad I did, because that's a peach of an album that got a 9/10 from me and only just missed out on Album of the Month. I'm especially glad I did, because I don't think that I'd have done the same with the minimalistic cover art for this follow-up to their first German number one album. I'm listening now because I know what music they make and I want to keep on hearing more. Apparently, the German people do too, because this only came out last week and it currently sits at the top of the album chart there already, above fellow new entry Uriah Heep just three places below them.

I liked The Book of Fire from its opening track but fell for their sound on the next one, the urgency of Louder Than Hell pointing the way towards my reading this as the Sisters of Mercy gone power metal. This album is certainly consistent with that, but it's a little more subtle than last time out, the opening tracks full of commercial gothic hooks on steady driving beats. However, the first that grabbed me the way the previous album did is Princess of the Night three songs in.

No, it's not the Saxon song, but it may be just as memorable. It's one of those Mono Inc. songs that sounds immediately great but still grows as the hooks take grip on our brain and we find ourselves humming them on our way to the bathroom ten minutes later. It doesn't hurt that it sets out with excellent guitarwork from Carl Fornia. Mono Inc. tracks tend to rely far more on their hooks than their riffs or solos, but this would be a different band without what Fornia brings to it.

To prove me wrong, the next song is Angels Never Die, which starts out with piano, remains much slower and more focused on keyboards and adds a perfectly timed vocal contribution from Katha Mia, otherwise the band's drummer. As the song features Sanz, I initially thought it was the name of the guest vocalist, but Sanz are an all-male band on the same label as Mono Inc. They don't add the female vocal but they do add extra punch to the song throughout. It's a different highlight to Princess of the Night but it's another highlight nonetheless.

And so's Heartbeat of the Dead, which features a neat shift from electronic beat to Mia's drums. It's as driving as The Last Crusade last time out and this sort of relentless but never fancy beat is the absolute heartbeat of this band, above Martin Engler's vocals and every other contribution. I would be tapping my feet and banging my head even if I could only hear the drum track. The rest is just a bonus, every layer adding more depth and meaning and fleshing out the material from that solid grounding to the Mono Inc. sound we know and love.

It took me a while to warm to the title track, but I got there. The beat is a little slower and there's a crazy repetition going on in the lyrics but it does actually work. Now, it may get annoying with a lot of repeats, but it hasn't yet. Lieb Mich restores that driving beat and Engler (and Mia) shift to German for one of only two tracks here, the other being the tasty ballad that wraps up the album, Weidersehen Woanders, which is built on cello and piano. Lieb Mich goes with guitar to emphasise the beat and that isn't the only Rammstein touch they play with, because the explosive ramps up are another, such as in Angels Never Die. Never Alone is a more singalong ballad, until it does the ramp up, but with a little less explosive impact.

I don't think Ravenblack is quite as good as The Book of Fire, but it's a strong album nonetheless. I liked it immediately and like it more after a second listen. It's remains strong on the third and the title track's repetition hasn't got annoying yet—I'm watching for that moment! It's easily an 8/10 though, with a strong consistency over fifty minutes. However, nothing leaps out me the way that Louder Than Hell did last time, the closest perhaps being Princess of the Night and After Dark, with guest appearance from folk metal band Storm Seeker. So, no second 9/10 from me but a still highly recommended 8/10 for Mono Inc., who are at the top of their game right now.

Ardours - Anatomy of a Moment (2022)

Country: Italy
Style: Alternative
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 8 Jul 2022
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When I asked the Melodic Rock Merchant himself, Chris Franklin of the Raised on Rock radio show, to pick a blatant omission from my reviews in 2022, he gave me a couple of albums to choose from: Manic Sinners as his rock pick and Ardours as a metal pick and, as always, he chose well, because I thoroughly enjoyed both. However, while Ardours do have some serious metal credentials, given who put it together and who they've played with, I wouldn't call this particular band metal.

They were founded in 2015 by a couple of Italians, Mariangela Demurtas and Laurent Kris. She's a vocalist, most recently for Norwegian gothic metal band Tristania, though she didn't join till 2007 so isn't on my favourite album by them, World of Glass. Of course, they sadly split up last year, but there are a couple of Tristania albums out with her voice leading them. Kris is a guitarist, who put almost a decade into Italian black/gothic metal band Cadaveria as the Lynchian pseudonym, Dick Laurent, with a couple of albums and a whole string of singles to his name. They both have other bands, but this is a fascinating side project for both with this their second album.

I'm calling this alternative, partly because it's genre-fluid, moving from new wave to straight rock and back, but always with at least a tinge of the gothic, and partly because it avoids committing to one side of the ever-flexible rock/metal boundary. This is far more rock than metal and sometimes more pop than rock, but Kris's guitar especially ventures over to the metal side on occasion with a rpiping solo now and again to keep the door open to their collective roots, like on Identified and Chasing Whispers. It's a tasty mix. Would I have liked it to be a little heavier? Sure. Do I care that much? No. This is already good stuff.

I've only mentioned two people thus far, as they're the core of the band, but I believe that Tarald Lie, the drummer in Tristania, is involved here too, presumably playing drums. However, I have to wonder how many songs he's on, because these drums often sound like they've been programmed rather than played. That's most obvious on the title track and early in Dead Weight, as the album shifts into clear electronic mode. Dead Weight begins with programmed drums but then seems to move onto a regular drumkit and there are points where both seem to be happening at once.

Someone's certainly playing keyboards too, because they're the first thing we hear when Epitaph for a Spark opens up the album, but I don't know if that's Demurtas, Kris, Lie or someone else. It's done very well though, enough so that this would work if the guitars and whatever drums are real were removed entirely and this became goth-tinged electronic pop music. It's the keyboards that provide the melodies here to underpin Demurtas's voice and this album is at its best when they're doing that incredibly well. I do like Epitaph for a Spark, but Insomniac is the song that has stuck in my head the most, with Identified not far behind it.

The elegant Secret Worlds, which wraps up a killer opening quartet with patient melody and some lovely vocal runs, is another highlight but then we shift into less immediate material. That's not to say that the rest of the album isn't good, because it is, but it's more subtle and worthy of deeper exploration.

Initially, I wasn't particularly fond of that approach, hitting us with three catchy gems straight off the bat and a more elegent gem, then asking us to dig deeper, but over multiple listens, I think it's a pretty good approach. It merely relies on us not quitting when the hooks calm down after Secret Worlds. If we keep listening, we'll be rewarded, especially once we've cycled through the album a time or three. Unannounced eventually joined my highlight list, though I didn't really notice it on a first time through. And that's why this album keeps getting better for me. Thanks, Chris!

VV - Neon Noir (2023)

Country: Finland
Style: Gothic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Jan 2023
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Anything is going to seem light after listening to Wormrot, but this new album from Ville Vajo has a pop sensibility to it that's immediately obvious in the electronic drums and synths. If you don't recognise the name, Vajo, who goes by VV nowadays, is the former frontman for Finnish goth rock/metal band HIM. He and Mikko Paananen co-founded the band and remained there throughout a twenty-two year career, a few more if you count their brief earlier time as His Infernal Majesty. It shouldn't surprise that this sounds like HIM, but it's softer and poppier for the most part, with an occasional power up to the old HIM sound.

Perhaps anticipating his older fans worrying about that, he kicks off with a song that does bounce up to the heavier HIM sound, without ever becoming metal. That's Echolocate Your Love and it's a decent opener, just as Run Away from the Sun is an elegant melodic alt goth rock follow up with an agreeable dark croon from VV. I shouldn't even mention him any more, because everything here is him. He wrote the songs, plays every instrument on them and sings over the top. So whatever I say from here onward reflects on him alone. Nobody's stepping in to save the day or bring the quality down.

To my mind, this album truly arrives with the title track, though, three in. There are other strong songs here, but this one comes across as the most perfectly formed to me. It starts out with folky guitar, adds a succession of layers and then finalises the groove when the vocals arrive. It feels as if he's often duetting with himself, which is another layer, I guess, but the result is textbook stuff. It's almost hard to say anything specific about it, because it works like a black hole and just sucks us into it, however many times we listen. Does that mean it's smooth or just perfect?

Everything else sounded good on a first listen, but nothing felt as essential. On a first repeat, the songs all start elevating themselves, which tends to mean that it's a highly consistent album that has depths to explore. Loveletting is a tasty treat on a second listen, beginning with a heartbeat, a keyboard sound right out of seventies Jefferson Starship and an HIM crunch. It's a lighter track, almost ethereal folk at points, but it's a haunting piece. I could imagine Kate Bush covering it. The Foreverlost won't leave me be either, with a sound a little like All About Eve covering the Sisters of Mercy, soft but driving. Salute the Sanguine has a delightful heavier intro and it never quite loses it.

And so it goes. The majority of these songs play in that intersection of a slew of genres. They're alt rock, they're goth rock, they're folk rock, all drenched in those quintessential HIM melodies, with a dark romantic flavour to Vajo's lyrics. "Let's take the scenic route through Hell if you want to see what I see" he sings on Echolocate Your Love, but it's a romantic sentiment rather than emo rant or Hellraiser-esque perversity. Everything is fundamentally nice but with a dark twist, like a young lady who warms the heart of your grandma after spending four hours putting on her goth persona and scaring the neighbours.

I've only listened through a couple of times thus far, which is enough to confirm this as a light but strong album. It's everything that HIM do so well but with the guitars turned down and the synths turned up. And, while that still sounds like it reads as negative, I should underline that it isn't. It's exactly what it needs to be and it's exquisitely formed. Just as some of these songs stood out on a second listen, I'm pretty sure that others will on a third and a fourth. They're all good songs, even over nearly an hour, but they're so consistent that we have to sit down with them and get to know them to truly appreciate what each one brings to the table. It's an easy 7/10 but it wouldn't shock me if I up it to an 8/10 later.

Christian Death - Evil Becomes Rule (2022)

Country: USA
Style: Goth Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 May 2022
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I've had a taste for goth since before I found metal, because I was fascinated by the indie charts in Smash Hits when I was listening to bands like Adam and the Ants. However, I didn't have access to a lot of it back then and, by the time I did, I'd moved into much heavier material, so I've kind of stuck around on the fringes of it ever since, bumping into it again and again when other interests have a goth adjacent status, especially steampunk. So I've been aware of Christian Death for a long time without actually hearing more than an odd track here and there. This is my first album of theirs.

I find their sound very interesting, because it's clearly goth rock but with obvious nods to a slew of other genres. The Alpha and the Omega, which opens up the album, is a great example because it plays Valor Kand's deep and rich vocal over a slow and melancholic backdrop of strings, reminding of Nick Cave, back when he was still with the Bad Seeds. It doesn't have the elegant poetry of Cave though, and when it heavies up, it isn't strictly to a noisier emphasis, as Cave did on Loverman; it's almost electro-industrial in a Nine Inch Nails vein.

They stay slow and melancholic, but keep enough of a bounce in their step to avoid getting overtly doomladen. Everything is dark but nothing is suicidal dark. It's characterful dark and it's simple to track the sound back to the beginnings of the genre. And, quite frankly, they were there, in quite a different form to be fair, but Christian Death dates back to 1979 when Rozz Williams founded them as a teenager. It's obvious that they were listening to Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees but also plenty of the American underground too. I hear the Swans here, not least because Maitri has quite the vocal presence here in addition to her work on bass and keyboards, but I'm sure there's a long list of others that I'm not qualified to recognise.

By the way, Maitri is one of two long term members of Christian Death. Valor Kand is the other, an acquisition in 1983 when Williams ditched his entire line-up and brought in another band, Pompeii 99, which Kand had co-formed, to become the new Christian Death. He took over at the point that Williams left in 1985 and Maitri joined in 1991. I'm not even sure who the drummer is this week but it doesn't seem to be a long term position for anyone. It's worth mentioning that Williams formed a separate version of the band in the early nineties, releasing three albums, before taking his own life. So this may be the seventeenth or twentieth album for Christian Death, I think, depending on how you count.

There's enough here that three listens isn't remotely enough for me to choose a favourite track. I dig most of what they're doing, though the experimental title track gets a little much. There are a few groove-ridden songs like Blood Moon that remind me of the Sisters of Mercy meeting Inkubus Sukkubus. There are quirkier Nick Cave-like songs, The Warning leaping out as a pristine example. Beautiful sounds more like Siouxsie and the Banshees, which may underline why I prefer Maitri's vocals to Kand's, not that I don't appreciate the latter too, especially on more subdued songs like Who am I, a two parter that wraps up the album. Pt. 1 is very Nick Cave, but Pt. 2 is stripped down, wilder and experimental. It captivated me on a first listen and did the same thing with each fresh repeat.

Clearly I should listen to more Christian Death. I know I have a bunch here, so it's just comes down to finding the time. I have no idea if this is representative of what they've done for so long but, if it is, it's easy to see why they're considered the founders of American gothic rock, or deathrock or whatever else they want to call it. It's also easy to see their sound influencing alt rock darlings like Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson, though I prefer Christian Death's older school sound certainly to Manson, who I've never got into. I think that suggests that this album is a good place to start. I hope so.

Death SS - X (2021)

Country: Italy
Style: Industrial Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 29 Oct 2021
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Death SS have been around since 1977, with a couple of breaks, though they haven't crossed my radar often since then. With this tenth album behind me, I'm eager to hear their early work, not that there is much of that. Their debut, ...in Death of Steve Sylvester (the SS of the title, which does not appear to have any Nazi connection), didn't show up until 1988 and they only managed three more before the year 2000. Given that they split up for four years a decade or so ago, they've clearly been busier in the 21st century than previously.

I heard that they had moved over time from heavy metal to doom metal to industrial metal but, even if that's true, it's not the whole story. This album starts out as traditional heavy metal, reminding me of Mercyful Fate but with Alice Cooper at the mike rather than the falsetto of King Diamond. It's hard not to see this as "horror music" too, the organ and effects at the outset of Zora guaranteeing that if the chanting monks in The Black Plague didn't trigger that thinking a song earlier. The industrial side manifests in Under Satan's Sun, effectively so without ever taking over.

Just as I wouldn't call this an industrial metal album, even though there's industrial in it, there's one other influence I kept hearing that doesn't take over and that's gothic rock. This is not a gothic rock album either, but there's often a driving anthemic groove that reminds me of gothic rock, especially the Sisters of Mercy. It's here on The Temple of the Rain and The World is Doomed but it's most overt on The Rebel God, which nails its groove so well that it's impossible to ignore it once it gets going. It's initially just a good song but, by the time it gets past its first chorus, it's the sort of good song that'll have you looking up from the bar and suddenly finding yourself on the dancefloor.

So far into their career, I have a feeling that Death SS wrote this with all their different styles in mind, but the shifts can be a little jarring. It's not so bad in the first half, as we move from heavy metal into overt horror rock, then though the gothic industrial drive back to the most emphatically heavy metal song, Ride the Dragon. After that point, it's a bit more awkward.

Suspiria (Queen of the Dead) is clearly horror rock, with characterful bookends—a harpsichord and an accordion at one end and more accordion, female voice and violin at the other—but it's slower, much slower, and more textured. It's notably gothic, drenched in velvet and fog, and it feels like the texture is the point, far more than the music itself. It's less a song and more a backing track to whatever Steve Sylvester will be doing on stage at the time. Heretics continues that and, like Suspiria, it sounds great but doesn't stay with me past the end of the album, unlike The Rebel God and The Temple of the Rain, which carry on playing in my head.

The World is Doomed hearkens back to those two, but with a little less effect. It's a lesser version but still a step up at this point of the album. And then we return to the most obvious Alice Cooper number on offer, which is Lucifer. It doesn't take any stretch of the imagination to picture the godfather of the genre covering it and making it his own. And so this ends decently enough but in a way that I struggle to see as anything but a doomed attempt to bring the album back to its early levels. The first half is a 7/10 for sure but the second half is more like a 5/10, so I'll split the difference and give this a 6/10.

Plastique Noir - Iskuros (2021)

Country: Brazil
Style: Gothic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 18 Oct 2021
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Beyond enjoying so much of what's coming out of South America, I'm always surprised at what genres they're tackling. Sure, they're shining in prog and thrash, but they're not location-specific. It's when a band records Celtic rock or Viking metal that I really start to wonder, but the results have been stellar and I eagerly seek the next surprise. And here it is, because the beach city of Fortaleza, on the north-eastern shores of Brazil, isn't where I'd generally expect a darkwave band to do their thing.

However, Plastique Noir have been strutting their stuff in the Brazilian underground for fifteen years now and this is their fourth album, six years after 24 Hours Awake. As such, I shouldn't be too shocked to discover that they could play the Whitby Goth Festival without anyone noticing that they're from a little further afield. The singing voice of Airton S. suggests that they may not even be able to tell from inter-song banter. He's very much in the Peter Murphy vein.

While I'm far from the world's greatest expert on this genre, the sound is very old school English goth, grounded in new wave pop but draped in darkness and with an electronic edge that's not only there in the beats from the inevitable drum machine but in the atmospheric overlay. Songs like Times feel like they're draped in fog as much as darkness. This is upbeat darkwave dance music rather than a descent into doom and it's hard not to move to it, especially when the driving grooves get under your skin, like on Asleep in the Night Train. Sometimes it's downright perky, if mostly because of the jangly guitar of Danyel Fernandes. Again, Bauhaus spring quickly to mind rather than, say, U2.

The point at which the album lightens up a bit is Scrying Your Soul at the beginning of the second half. It's the poppiest song up to this point, the closest thing to pure new wave (and stays as such until All Cats Shall Celebrate), but it's slower than everything else too, with a clear sense of melancholy in its introspective piano. It has a drive to it, but it aims for atmosphere more than the emphatic Sisters of Mercy groove that drove some of the earlier songs. It also has plenty of time to breathe, because it's easily the longest song here. Everything else sits in the traditional three to five minute range, but this one's a comfortable seven and a half.

It still resembles Bauhaus, but there are points where the vocal approach seems almost like Billy Idol was stepping in and trying to be Peter Murphy, and the very prominent bass is right out of the Peter Hook songbook. And, as the album ran on from there, I started to hear those influences even more. It could be said that Upper Waves is Scrying Your Soul condensed into under four minutes. It's perkier in that Billy Idol sort of way and that Joy Division lead bass of Deivyson Teixeira is suddenly unmissable, the guitar shifted to atmosphere generation.

Another oddity to note that's surely more of a reflection on me rather than the band is that there are a couple of songs late on, Kafé and Catedrais em Chamas, which are sung in Portuguese instead of English, but that shifted the songs in my mind firmly onto the continent, so bizarrely making them sound as if they had harder edges like the Germans tend to go with. I think that's unfair and it's just in my brain because Portuguese isn't remotely similar to German, but I couldn't unhear it.

It still seems strange and unusual for a darkwave band clearly primarily influenced by old school Brits like Bauhaus and Joy Division to be from an equatorial beach town in Brazil, but they sound very good to me. Whether they're upbeat and driving, like on Asleep in the Night Train or Manifesto, or slow and atmospheric like on Scrying Your Soul, they'd fit perfectly in and among all the usual suspects at any goth night anywhere and surely prompt some audience members to ask the DJ who they are. I certainly would.

Liv Kristine - Have Courage Dear Heart (2021)

Country: Norway
Style: Gothic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 7 May 2021
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This EP may not be what you expect from Liv Kristine, but it's good stuff and she's done enough over a quarter of a century to deserve not being pigeonholed. You might know her work from the pioneering gothic metal band Theatre of Tragedy, the symphonic metal band Leaves' Eyes or even her sister's folk metal band Midnattsol, which she joined as their second vocalist in 2017. This has elements from all of those genres but much of it not really a metal release at all.

There are five tracks on offer, running just over twenty minutes between them, and they're agreeably varied. Serenity starts things out in a gothic post-punk vein, reminiscent of Siouxsie and the Banshees at their most interesting. The title track feels indie too, pairing a tremulous vocal with a vibrant drum sound and little touches of decoration here and there. Apparently it began as a mandolin piece but it grew into something that Liv has described as a sort of imaginary spaghetti western theme.

The closest this gets to the work she did for the bands listed above is the final minute of Gravity, but it has to be said that Skylight kind of qualifies too. It's not heavy enough to really be called metal, but it definitely has an upbeat nature and it builds nicely. This could easily have been as a gothic metal song but one shorn of its crunchy guitars and turned into simply a goth rock song. What's really interesting about it, though, is that she doesn't stop there.

The song that closes out the album is called Skylight Cathedral and we might expect it to be a reprise or a companion, but it's actually the same song, because "cathedral" in Liv Kristine's world means an acutely bare rendering of a song. It's like she wrote a metal song, then stripped it down to be a rock song, but wasn't done, so she stripped it down again to its essence, with nothing but voice and piano. It's delicate and it's touching and it's very personal, as if she's sitting on the edge of my desk singing to just me. As much as I love the heavy stuff, I think this is my favourite piece here.

That leaves Gravity, which sits between the two takes on Skylight and so is presumably a focal point. I would have to describe this one as synthpop, at least until it heavies up late on, though again there's a tinge of darkness from the outset and the gothic melancholy only grows. The final minute is as close as this gets to metal, though I'm guessing that the five live songs might go there. They were recorded in Nagold, Germany at her eighth annual special show and my copy doesn't have them, so I can't talk about them beyond mentioning that they ought to be there on your copy.

Even without them, I like this EP a lot. It might feel consistent, but Liv Kristine actually does rather a lot with her voice here. It's an immersive twenty minutes.

Inkubus Sukkubus - The Way of the Witch (2021)

Country: UK
Style: Gothic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Apr 2021
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I remember Inkubus Sukkubus well, in part because they sounded great when I saw them live in 2003 in a pub in York and in part because they introduced me to the drum machine. I don't mean that I hadn't heard of drum machines before, but I recall sitting there after a few pints in, wondering about when they would start their set, given that time was moving on and there was no drumkit on the stage. Of course, it didn't hold them back at all, because they eventually showed up, simply plugged in and got straight down to business without hesitation. Talk about portability!

I'm listing them as gothic rock, because that's kind of where they fit musically, but there are a couple of key notes to make here. One is that the themes have always been pagan in nature, the songs going back to their first album in 1990 being about witches and faeries and whatnot, with only an occasional nod to more traditional gothic fare like vampires. The other is that they've stayed completely true to their roots over a thirty year career, remaining independent and in charge of their own destiny, with no pandering to fashion or outside influences. I respect that.

What I like about them most is how easily they find their grooves. Because of that drum machine, the band is a trio, with Tony McKormack on guitar and a variety of other stringed instruments, as well as keyboards, and Roland Link on bass behind the striking frontwoman Candia McKormack. Yet they can launch into a song and be firmly in its groove just as quickly as they plugged in and played at that York gig. There's usually an intro of some sort from Tony, whether it's on guitar or keyboards, and after an initial repetition or two, it builds and suddenly the band kick in and we find ourselves caught up in the groove before a single word is sung.

And the Sea Shall Consume You is a perfect example of this. He sets up a four note riff, echoes it with a single note varied and repeats those eight notes four times, at which point he starts adding layers as if he's an entire string section. The beat kicks in before thirty seconds and we're already hypnotised. I remember this sort of thing from the Sisters of Mercy but Inkubus Sukkubus don't need eight minutes of build. This entire song is built on four notes and it still had me dancing in my chair on a first listen.

As that might suggest, everything here is rhythmic, ironically for a band without a drummer. Much of what Tony does is to build rhythms with his guitar, his keyboards, even his backing vocals, I won't fault him as a musician but you won't find him showing off with solos much here. He's always most obvious as the creator of the textures that the songs are set against, whether that's as a writer or performer. And those textures are inherently rooted in rhythm.

What surprised me here was how varied those textures were. It's been a while since I've listened to an Inkubus Sukkubus album, but I remember consistent, mostly upbeat tempos and, while those are here in abundance, there's also a lot of variety.

The Girl in the Grey Rags is a patient intro to play as a neat bookend to the title track, which turns out to be a patient way to close out the album. It's a longer song for Inkubus Sukkubus at over six minutes, but it builds very well. It's certainly a highlight but my favourites show up in between these bookends. Beneath the Moon and the Trees is a delicate and hypnotic piece with darker overtones. The Morning Star follows suit but with a more commanding vocal from Candia, a guitar motif borrowed from early Leonard Cohen and an even more atmospheric use of bells in the background than on other songs. It's fair to say that Tony really likes his bells. Most stark of all, Where Have You Gone, My Daughter? is an enticingly beautiful folk song set over a simple beat and a drone.

It feels good to tap back into what Inkubus Sukkubus are getting up to nowadays. It looks like they've been busy while I've been away, quietly knocking out album after album, waiting for me to tune back in. This is their twenty-third album since Beltaine in 1990, which is an enviable production rate for any band. That this is just as good as I remember them being on Belladonna & Aconite or Vampyre Erotica back in the prior millennium renders it an even greater achievement. Now, I think I have catching up to do.

Evanescence - The Bitter Truth (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Alternative Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 26 Mar 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I like Evanescence, even though it's not the fashionable thing to do among metal cognoscenti. What's important to note here is that I've never seen them as a metal band, even if they added some metallic crunch to their gothic tinged alternative rock sound, and that what pissed me off in their massive hit, Bring Me to Life, was the rap line they added to the chorus. Sure, it helped them crack the big time and I'm happy for that, but the demo version doesn't have that and it's better for that. Both these points have meaning here and I'll explain why.

While I've always been a little bitter that the trendy rap bit meant that Evanescence got the success that Lacuna Coil deserved, I'm not letting that thought define me for eighteen years. The reason that I mention it is because, once they broke the mainstream, they ditched that angle and it's nowhere to be found on this album. So anyone who doesn't want to hear that doesn't have to worry about it. This can safely stand or fall on its own merits, outside of any flirtations with trendiness.

Well, mostly. It became obvious pretty quickly that the best songs here are the more overt pop songs. Every time I hear Evanescence, they reinforce to me that they really don't need to the metal aspects, because it really isn't what they do. They're a damn good pop band who are still somehow pretending to be a metal band because, I don't know, it lends them street cred or something. Amy Lee has a voice that could sing metal, but that doesn't mean that they're a metal band. Don't look at them that way and they'll likely improve in your eyes.

It was Yeah Right that underlined that for me here. There are some interestingly powerful drums on Broken Pieces Shine, the first song proper after the decent intro, Artifact/The Turn, and some neatly resonant bass on The Game is Over, but these songs are heavy without ever being heavy metal. After those two, Yeah Right shone out for me with its teasing pop sensibilities. And other songs underlined it further. Wasted on You sounds to me like Emilie Autumn singing Creep by Radiohead and whatever crunch is there really doesn't matter. My brain was stripping it away and listening to the pop cover as it played.

And, as the album runs on, I found myself doing that often. Whenever a song brought in a quirky pop element, my brain automatically applied the de-crunch filter to hear what it would sound like deep in its essence. The clockwork that kicks off Better without You echoes Emilie Autumn's quirky steampop and the song should have carried on in that vein. Except the crunch shows up to hide it because that's what it's apparently supposed to do. There's a neat Kate Bush style backing vocal on Use My Voice, in different sections to the more routine woah woah one, and that should have helped shape the song, but it's mostly drowned out.

Now, there are points where the crunch works and points where the album doesn't even when it's not obvious. Far from Heaven is a musical theatre style ballad that only serves to highlight how much Amy Lee is far more comparable to someone like Lady Gaga than someone like Floor Jansen. And, after it, is Part of Me, with some decent doomy riffs that are perfect for Lee to soar over. So I wouldn't want to throw out any absolutes here, especially given that I enjoyed this album. I'm going with a 7/10 but it's worth mentioning that, as slick as this is and as obviously commercial, I still much prefer the Marianas Rest album I reviewed before this that also got a 7/10 from me. And I guess that's the bitter truth.

Moonspell - Hermitage (2021)

Country: Portugal
Style: Progressive/Gothic Rock/Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 26 Feb 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Portugal's premier gothic metal band return with a new album, their twelfth, which returns them to a predominantly English language approach after their concept album, 1755, about the earthquake that year in Lisbon, which was entirely in Portuguese. As has increasingly become the case, this is a gothic metal album that isn't what we would usually think of when someone mentions gothic metal. There is no beauty and the beast vocal interaction and no female vocalist at all. In fact, there's not a heck of a lot of metal either.

While Moonspell reached this stage of their careers in a gradual shift away from the black metal they started out playing, this feels like it started instead as goth rock, moved into progressive rock and, at points, heavied up a little. The Greater Good, which opens the album, plays with that contrast, mostly staying in a rock vein but happy to get more crunchy and emphatic at points. However, a song like All or Nothing feels like it's still in that prog phase, the gothic tone mostly in the pleading of the vocals but overshadowed by some neat guitar solos. It doesn't even think about becoming metal, even when it could.

I quite like this sound, even if I was hoping for something heavier, but these songs aren't particularly immediate. I liked what I was hearing, even on a first time through, but it took a few listens to really start to appreciate what Moonspell are doing here and, even then, little of it wowed me. I just became increasingly comfortable with it until the point where some of the songs turned into old friends. The longer I listened to this album, the more I appreciated it, but it took time.

Entitlement was the first song to seep under my skin. It's a slower, proggier piece, but an atmospheric one too, that atmosphere being dark and obviously rooted in goth, if notably underplayed goth if we compare to what the early eighties would have done to it. It chooses to beckon us in rather than bash us over the head and drags us there, which helps to underline that it may be one part Bauhaus but it's one part Bauhaus to four or five of Pink Floyd, the name that I kept coming back to. That influence is a stronger one as the album runs on, especially in the solos of Ricardo Amorim, who has been paying a lot of attention to Dave Gilmour, though the band are never derivative.

What surprised me, given the album's title and song titles such as Common Prayers, Solitarian or The Hermit Saints, is the lack of a religious feel. Clearly this is themed, if not a concept album, and we're constantly hearing references in the lyrics. I was following the music a lot more than the words, but it ends up being impossible not to hear words like "saints", "pray" and "hermit" repeating everywhere. However, excepting some choral backing vocals, the first hints I found were in Apophthegmata, eight songs in, and even there, it's only at points, through a well placed church organ, and not integral.

By the way, that song title doesn't refer to the name of a demon, it presumably refers to the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, or the Apophthegmata Patrum, a set of stories that describe spiritual practices of 5th century Christian hermits in the deserts of Egypt. It doen't explore them specifically, but there is a common thread running through this album about leaving the world of things behind and going elsewhere to think and pray and regain some sense of who we are.

And talking of identity, it's interesting to see that Moonspell apparently still think of themselves as a gothic metal band. Their Bandcamp page still uses tags like black metal, dark metal, gothic metal and progressive metal. There's no black metal here at all and, while the other three still hold truth, this is much more of a rock album. Sure songs like Common Prayers, The Hermit Saints and the title track are willing to add some metal crunch and vocals that are more overt but, over time, that gradually seems like a holdover from the older Moonspell, who are inexorably moving away from it. I'm interested in seeing where Moonspell go from here.