“The Story of Goth in 33 Songs”

• Pitchfork
• 25-Oct 2017

From Bauhaus to Jenny Hval, these tracks are to die for

After it blazed through England and New York in the 1970s, the first wave of punk rock left a whole lot of darkness in its wake. As the decade rolled to a close, young musicians struck by punk’s ferocity and lawlessness picked up its ashes, lit a few candles, and invited the world to a séance. Their songs were marked by echoes, distortion, minimal guitar lines, and an arch taste for the macabre; their electroshocked hair, smears of black eyeliner, and dark clothes only reinforced the vibe. Goth offered music what horror had given movies: a chance to lean into the void without quite falling in, to sneak close to death while still very much alive.

Recorded in 1979 in Northamptonshire, England, Bauhaus’ nine-minute vampire ode “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” is widely accepted as goth’s wellspring. Soon after their frontman Peter Murphy sang about the undead over an uneasy, descending bassline, fellow Brits Joy Division found transcendent melancholy in simple chord progressions and staccato baritone vocals, and Killing Joke reveled in menacing drum fills and overdriven guitars. Their sounds proved infectious: In the early 1980s, the Cure and Siouxsie & the Banshees melted down their early post-punk into lush and eerie fantasias, folding in synthesizers and slowing their tempos to a gloomy gait. Up in Scotland, Cocteau Twins started etching out songs that sounded like initiation rituals to arcane death cults. Something was in the water in the UK, but the sonic desolation wasn’t confined there: In New York, Suicide were immersing their synthesizers in waves of static while screeching about domestic murder.

At the end of the ’80s, the goth aesthetic seeped into industrial acts like Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode, who placed less emphasis on guitars and more on drum machines and caustic synths. Goth lay mostly below ground during the 1990s grunge movement, in which anger and sarcasm were the fashion instead of despondency; it burst back up into the mainstream with a fury by the mid-2000s, when My Chemical Romance and Panic! At the Disco threw a pop spin on the melodrama of their forebears. Singing about death in full Victorian regalia might not have sounded like a chart-winning strategy, but MCR’s Gerard Way knew his history: The kids love a good spook. Today, artists like Jenny Hval, Makthaverskan, and Zola Jesus keep the goth torch lit; black clothes and loose drapes dot designer runways; even Justin Bieber rocks a Marilyn Manson tee on occasion. Once a riotous underbelly of society, goth’s tendrils have risen from the grave into the mainstream.

Just in time for Halloween, we’ve traced the dark history of goth, from the earliest songs that hinted at its spirit to the ominous artists keeping the genre alive today…

Cocteau Twins: “Blood Bitch” (1982)

On the first track of Cocteau Twins’ debut album, Garlands, Elizabeth Fraser wields her vibrato like a buzzsaw. Against Robin Guthrie’s squalls of guitar and Will Heggie’s minimal, throaty bassline, Fraser sets the mood for what would become her long career of vocalizations made more sinister by their indecipherability. It’s strange to listen to “Blood Bitch” and imagine that she’d one day feature on a song that would become the theme to “House,” of all shows, but it makes sense in a way: Fraser always sang just out of frame, like the narrator of a horror story. What lyrics do come through on “Blood Bitch” only deepen the song’s sense of the occult: There’s an altar, a blood woman, a well of female range. In 2016, Norwegian artist Jenny Hval would name her own exploration of menstruation and vampires after this song; in their introduction to the world, Cocteau Twins opened a wound that’s still not ready to close. — Sasha Geffen

This Mortal Coil: “Song to the Siren” (1983)

By any metric, This Mortal Coil were an unusual proposition: a supergroup composed of members of the 4AD roster, spearheaded by label founder and producer Ivo Watts-Russell, tackling covers of songs by the power-pop legends Big Star and the folk singer Roy Harper (among others). Despite the decidedly non-gothic provenance of the songs they performed, there was no mistaking the atmospheres they conjured using gloomy strings, dolorous baritone voices, and never-ending reverb. One song above all stood out in their dirgelike catalog: a cover of Tim Buckley and Larry Beckett’s “Song to the Siren,” which Buckley recorded for his 1970 album Starsailor.

Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser sings This Mortal Coil’s version, and it is devastating. Clean-toned electric guitar, gentle processing, and subtle vocal multi-tracking provide the woozy backdrop for Fraser’s voice, agile as a barn swallow; she circles the root note as though drawn to it by gravity. Metaphors of surf and sailors pass by almost unnoticed, tossed aside by the magnetism of her voice, until she zeroes in on the crux of it all: “Here I am, here I am, waiting to hold you.” Just as the climax is reached, it all goes silent, as though pulled under by the waves. — Philip Sherburne

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