Becky’s Goth Club Classics #5

In honor of the North American solar eclipse today, a song written about a solar eclipse. I will not get to see the full eclipse from where I am today, but I know a few people who’ve traveled to be in the path of full totality. I know that pictures won’t be remotely adequate to convey the awe-inspiring imagery, but I’m looking forward to seeing them anyway.

Apoptygma Berzerk is a Danish futurepop band helmed by Stephan Groth. The story (urban legend?) about the source of the band name is that Groth picked two random words from a dictionary and combined them together to form his band’s moniker. This band is well-entrenched in the goth scene, despite Groth’s departure from established club music and into a more rock-oriented direction. There are some bands that latch onto a unique sound and style, and then they ride that until even the hardcore club kids are exhausted and bored by the tedium of it. Not so with this band. You can follow Groth’s steady evolution of sound from first album to most recent. Many in the scene are unhappy that he’s moved away from his futurepop style, though for others, a good song is a good song, even without the oontz-oontz beats layered on top.

I read somewhere that Mario Batali (restaurateur, Food Network alumn) stated that a successful restaurant should not have a name longer than two syllables, because it has to be easy to remember and roll off the tongue (some asinine BS like that). I hold up APB as a contradiction to that “dumb-down-the-name” idea. Apoptygma Berzerk could scarcely be a more tangled and baffling name. I claim that if you bring quality and talent that people WANT more of and WANT to remember, they’ll come up with their own device for identifying it. Apoptygma Berzerk is generally referred to by the masses as Apop or APB.

Anyway, this song was written after the solar eclipse that traversed Europe in 1999.

But some day we’ll catch a glimpse of eternity
As the world stands still, for a moment
And I guess we will be making history
When we all join hands just to watch the sky (For a moment…)