Tag: dark wave
The Horrific Beauty of A Place To Bury Strangers: APTBS at the Regent
Grace Dunn
June 26, 2018
A Place To Bury Strangers grant you access into their dome of ear deafening delights. Oliver Ackermann, Dion Lunadon and Lia Simone are the gatekeepers seething with energetic enthusiasm like a rabid dog foaming at the mouth. Upon arriving to The Regent, the first thing one ought to check for at this gig is the merch table. Why you say? It’s not often you find custom made pedals from one of the band members. First comment I hear from some guy, “They’re cheaper to buy here than online.” He turns to the lady merch keeper and asks, “You guys take card?”. related content: The First Real Day Of Summer: Hinds At The Teragram On top of the usual merch from touring bands, you can buy ‘Death By Audio’ (DBA) effects pedals crafted by lead singer/guitarist wizard Oliver Ackermann. There is great inspiration that has been spurred from his DIY pedal company. The documentary ‘Goodnight Brooklyn’ directed by Matthew Conboy gives great insight into the glorious history that raised out of the beginnings of DBA. It builds up the expectation for each wild APTBS performance. I settle into the crowd 10 minutes before their set time. Random enough, I look around the arches of the
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The Sound of Sex: Boy Harsher Seduces The Echoplex
Rob Shepyer
January 29, 2018
If you were to cross Jae Matthews, vocalist of Boy Harsher, on the sidewalk you may not have any idea you were just in the presence of an industrial dance goddess. Hailing from Savannah Georgia, her and producer August Muller, don’t necessarily fit into your idea of what a goth should look like but then when you hear their combined force, you sense that this is the music that the world’s darkwave/industrial dance/EBM should crowd around. Part Time Punks did it again, lassoing a lineup that could sell out the Echoplex two times over with Boy Harsher getting support from Din and High-Functioning Flesh. Both bands feature producer Greg Vand, yet both bands sound completely different. Din was first, with female vocals and guitars to pair with Vand’s must-dance soundscapes. The filtered vocals gave the industrial sounds a bit of a shoe-gaze or post punk flare. Although sounding totally unique, Din offers a more straight forward and obvious dance triggering sound than High-Functioning Flesh. Using samples of voices to make musical medleys and punchy beats that marry Susan Subtract’s punchy crust vocals, High-Functioning Flesh sounds like revolution music for the cyber punk era. I’ve seen them numerous times now and
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New Album Review: HEALTH- Death Magic
Danny Baraz
August 14, 2015
Los Angeles’s own, HEALTH and their new album, Death Magic released by Loma Vista on August 7th might very well be my top record of 2015, thus far. Even with a more polished, less noise influenced battery of songs, HEALTH manage to keep that dark edge that mixes beauty with taboo concepts of the human condition and is delivered to fans in their familiar package of abstract messaging. There seems to be a formula developing in the nebulous vacuum that was once the music industry. It’s really not all that different than what existed previously. The previewing of new singles in the months leading up to an album release isn’t an original concept. There is just a greater volume of them, which has allowed fans to hear more of an album before it’s official release. That is, if there isn’t a strategy to “leak” the album. There was a very calculated build up to the release of Death Magic and a real attempt to control the message of music critics, which is a departure from the typical, laissez faire vibe of HEALTH. Death Magic successfully manages to cut the chord in the eternal association between HEALTH and Crystal Castles, not just
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