Carla Lippis – You Will Be Happy
Genre: Post-Punk, Alternative Rock
Extreme music is genuinely pretty nice entertainment. You could take your loved one on a date to watch one of these shows. You could take your parents or your dog. And, you likely can even have dinner just as the lead singer is getting ready to light the sacrificial pyre.
Extreme music doesn’t feel very scary anymore. This is certainly good for business. You wouldn’t sell a lot of tickets if audience members routinely got dismembered. But it’s all a bit of a comfortable cop-out.
The world is often a scary, violent place, and, unlike your therapist might have you believe, it is out to get you. Carla Lippis’ “You Will Be Happy” reflects that level of aggression in a song that can be best described as an extreme form of psychoanalysis. Don’t let any of that distract you from Lippis’ excellent vocals or from the clear artistic merits of the music.
Sweeping Promises – You Shatter
Similar artists: Lithics, Spread Joy, Diode
Genre: Post-Punk, Gothic, Dark Wave, Alternative Rock
Like trying to join a fancy dinner party while being completely underdressed, a lack of style will not make you very popular with the kinds of people that visit goth parties. Whether this is fair is really beside the point. It’s so ingrained in the DNA of the subculture that if you’d rather be fat and dress in jeans and a t-shirt, you might as well check out what the skate-punk kids are doing.
While goths do have the best sense of style, what they’ve been lacking over the past few decades are tunes. Maybe Robert Smith or Siouxsie Sioux just got to them first. Or, more likely, maybe folks in the scene were too busy working on their wardrobe to bother writing them.
The first few lines of Sweeping Promises’ “You Shatter” are a monumental promise. Here’s a band that not only has the goth act down but also the memorable music to go along with it. Cold and detached, the vocalist’s monotone cuts sharply while the instrumentation weaves around it a ghostly atmosphere.
Sweeping Promises do the one thing missing from most modern goth music. They are theatrical, and their music is hard to forget.
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