Bave Blog

I actually don’t think I’ve ever heard this song in a club, but its genealogy is such that I’m sure it was played somewhere.  The band is The Tear Garden.  Members of the band come from Skinny Puppy and Legendary Pink Dots, and the album was produced by another member of Skinny Puppy.  Thus any goth club kid who cared to trace the familial relationships across bands should’ve known about this artist.  It’s certainly how I found out about them.

I had completely forgotten about this beautiful little song until I stumbled upon it in a playlist on 8tracks.  One of those moments in which you are reminded of something you lost but never realized was missing; because in the cascading passage of time you can’t keep track of everything.

Perhaps fittingly for this blog site, one of my all-time favorite clubs songs is written by Keith Arem, who has gone on to write soundtracks for video games, including Call of Duty and Titanfall.  While 1990’s pop music sucked (have you ever seen a 90’s music club night?), 1990’s industrial represented the glory days of the goth club scene.  It was gritty, aggressive, spare, and provocative.  We weren’t looking for oontz, oontz rhythms, or generic melodies and well-worn lyrical themes.  We just wanted something raw.

This song delivers that for me.  To this day, it evokes the emotions that I felt as a twenty-something when I hear it in the club, albeit somewhat muted.

Contagion “Scratch”

At a club not too long ago, on the song request list, someone requested “Old-school music, because we’re old.”  The club music world has evolved considerably since I first set foot in a dance club at the tender age of 15, in 1991.  Back then, there were clearly delineated genres, with distinct names that meant something specific.  Now the genres have seemingly blended together, often incorporating broadly-accessible pop elements that were defiantly not present in the music of my disaffected youth.

Continue reading “Becky’s Goth Club Classics #1”

There was never any question that I would post a song from Anything Box.  The only thing I wondered was which song I could possibly choose as representative of them.  A song that could possibly have the emotional weight I would want to share, along with a video that encompassed the artistry and conveyed the personality.  Anything Box has an extensive catalogue (both under the Anything Box moniker and under other names, with a couple side projects worth noting).  Their sound has evolved over time as well.  Many people mistakenly consider them an 80’s band.  Technically, they were around in the 1980’s.  But their initial entry onto the national music stage occurred in 1990, with the release of their album “Peace” on Sony Records.

Continue reading “Heaven60”