Turn Pale/Radio Berlin

[manny at telerama.com]

On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, DarkThreads wrote:
> Please don't hurt me...I wouldn't call them goth,
> at least not the way I like it, and when I saw
> them at club laga I was not real impressed. I
> vaguely remember thinking "garage" sound. They
> are ok I guess. I might go see that show anyway
> because of the other stuff going on. 

I'm not gonna hurt you, but you fail to understand.

So I'm going to draw an analogy to help you.
I think I know that you like ethereal bands. Well, ethereal bands like
Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance were not automatically considered
'goth' when they started. They were part of postpunk. Later on, they
and the bands they inspired were included in a subset of goth/dark rock
called ethereal. This is now a totally accepted part of goth as
advertised in the Projekt catalog and whatnot, but in the days of the
Batcave it would have been unthinkable, not edgy and transgressive
enough (whereas Test Department, an industrial band, was!). The same
thing holds true for industrial-dance. In 1982, Front 242 and Portion
Control were by no means considered 'goth' bands - yet 20 years later
their direct descendants are part of a scene called 'gothic/industrial'
which for short is still really called 'goth', as in 'are you going to
the goth night at the club?'

It's the same with these indie crossover bands. There
is definitely a deathrock revival on both coasts,
and at the same time parts of the indie
scene are reflecting a return to postpunk (whether it's the Rapture
sounding like Gang of Four, !!! sounding like Liquid Liquid and so on).
The gradual trend of indie bands incorporating both deathrock imagery and
sound is not new, it has been going on for more than five years with
such groups as Antioch Arrow, Ink & Dagger, The VSS, Subtonix and so on,
but it is more recently burgeoning and taking off, coupled with the
growing popularity of other postpunk revivalists from the Faint to
Interpol to StellaStarr and so on. Because postpunk was really the
last creative period of original rock music - everything after that
was an imitative revival. And the kids today, if they can't think of
anything original to do, at least respect the originality of the
postpunk era.

You do not presently consider these bands 'goth' because in fact, 'goth'
has morphed into something else in the past decade, something else other
than what it was originally. For you, and for many others of this decade,
'goth' may seem more to be about either ethereal romanticism or about
dark-electronic danceclub stuff. Which is fine, but it also explains why
you'd look at a band like Turn Pale and consider them to be a 'garage'
band. Because there is simply too much 'rock' in it to fit into the
changed goth paradigm. They are not a garage band. The Hives and the
White Stripes are garage bands. But what bands like Turn Pale are doing 
shows the pendulum is swinging back to the more original definition of
goth, which is driving, angular, noisy, dark postpunk rock from the days
of Siouxsie and Bauhaus on upward to the late 80s (when I was digging
bands like Of A Mesh, The Grinning Plowman, Strange Boutique and Deception
Bay among others etc.)
Sinuous phase-pedal basslines, angst-ridden vocals, minor-key or sharded 
guitars, tribalistic drumming. You would not call them garage bands
anymore than I would call Radio Berlin and Turn Pale garage bands I
should think. But yes, it will be interesting to see this live and to see
what the reaction is among a generation of goths who have forgotten
entirely what 'rock' even means.
For that reason I think, regardless of whether they play Rozz covers or
not, the inclusion of TP & RB is entirely contextually appropriate in
the course of an event paying tribute to the American king of LA
deathrock.