
Xombii – Last Whisper (Devoured Soul)
Ok, ok. Pop culture has evolved a bit since its earliest days. Back when it started, all it had to do was please teenagers and make sure it didn’t piss off their parents too much. That meant that certain limits existed to the topics it could approach.
Sure, sure, movies, advertisements and music seem to approach a wider range of topics. Sex and violence are much more often used to sell t-shirts and expensive coffee. But is there greater freedom for artists?
Not if they’re trying to write a pop hit. If hired by a big corporation or if working under the patronage of a famous pop star, the topics that can be approached are limited. And it’s just as true that the way to approach them is limited, too.
Xombii is still everything that couldn’t be used in pop music unless the Halloween season was all year round. This is because “Last Whisper (Devoured Soul)” deals with heavy, existentialist topics and wraps all of those ideas in gore. It’s also because the vocals suggest a kind of distance and darkness that may put pop-radio listeners off. It is especially important because the production manages to incorporate creepy retro sounds to give the tune its colour and shape. Yes, it does all of these things, and that’s why it is destined to be truly loved by a lucky few.
Sektion Tyrants – Love & Suffer
The thing is that you don’t just tell a story to someone and expect them to listen. You don’t do this unless they’re madly in love with you or they’re some kind of secret agent paid to gather intelligence on you. Nobody else really wants to listen. What you do, instead, is to trick them, to lure them in, to spring a trap. If you’ve done it well enough, they’ll end up asking you to tell them the story.
Songs are a lot like that. And even though I encourage you to show love to all music genres, as I would encourage you to do the same to all people of the world, some start at a disadvantage. A pop song needs to tell you the story in 20 seconds or less. A progressive rock song needs to do it in 10 minutes of more. And a death metal song doesn’t contain lyrics any human being can understand.
Gothic rock is built on an excellent format for storytelling. Sektion Tyrants understand how this works and use the cool, slow sounds of the music genre to write their dark romance of “Love & Suffer.” The fact that Sektion Tyrants’ music resembles an early Christian Death sound, particularly the great Rozz Williams’ vocals, ought to make this all the more appealing to its target audience.