Mayflower Madame – Paint It All in Blue
Music is a great way to focus on things and pinpoint problems. It doesn’t even matter when the things being put into focus are terrible, saddening, or grotesque. In fact, it helps. Life happens to be much less predictable and tends to throw all matters of horror at you or other innocent bystanders without so much as a warning. Isolating these scarecrows of the mind through art can be a wonderful thing.
In many ways, this is the starting point for goth-rock and post-punk. The costumes come later and only add a layer of theatricality. Yes, goth rock began as a kind of collective therapy. It’s an apolitical movement that seems to deal with all the horrors that politics, of a personal or communal nature, create. It’s a cold look at dreadful, degrading things.
Mayflower Madame’s “Paint It All in Blue” has the right idea about classic goth rock. The music is cold, cool, and detached. The troubles that the music deals with are hot, pressing, and unavoidable. This is music designed like surgery. It’s emotionless because it has to be. There’s too much to get emotional over if you make the mistake of really stopping to think about the matters. Besides all of this, Mayflower Madame have already perfected a sound that will earn them the favor of devoted fans of the genre.
closebye – Hammer of My Own
There are a million therapies designed to make life’s troubles feel lighter. Few of them will have you approach those issues head-on, except, maybe, for the infamous Primal Scream therapy. But, most would agree that once John Lennon and Yoko gave up on it, the method also lost its trendiness factor and most of its adepts.
No, the majority of these strategies work by making you feel comfortable. They work by encouraging you to avoid those troubles first. And nearly all of them involve you closing your eyes first. It’s a good thing that this is the instinctual reaction to a lot of people trying to shut off the world for a while. Just close your eyes and hope it all goes away. Just try and summon up a dream.
closebye’s “Hammer of My Own” is dreamtime music, the kind of dream that your mind creates to push bad thoughts away. It’s also an immensely dark and hopeful song in equal measure, as well as mighty catchy. It’s the song that The Cure’s Robert Smith failed to write during the band’s 90s run of goth-pop albums. It’s a really good single and deserves repeated plays.
