It was a weekend of industrial musical love at Reverence in Madison, Wisconsin. Well, it was for me, anyway. Angry music makes me so happy that I could explode in a shower of rainbow butterflies.
A quick recap: day one was at the Orpheum Stagedoor, which is most certainly a theater. Definitely not a place you would expect to see an industrial show. Despite its complete lack of ventilation and space for displaying anger, the crowd made do. Endif opened and demonstrated that one can make great music but put on a bland live show. Next was Neuroverse, which I remember being pretty good but not much more stuck in my brain. However, they were followed by The Gothsicles who were f*cking brilliant. I’m still singing “Konami Code” and giggling myself into tears. Sadly, Cruciform Injection followed them and it was pretty clear the crowd was far more into the band that preceded them. They were alright if mediocre, but they had zombies. Zombies, people!
Day two was at The Inferno, a club I visited once before for all of a half hour. We arrived a bit late and missed Sensuous Enemy as well as Blind Faith and Envy. Monstrum Sepsis made being a dork with a huge synth setup look as cool as Fonzie. Glis ft. Manufactura put on one hell of a show; the end of their set where they blew some sort of power was so metal that it hurts. ThouShaltNot didn’t fit the bill whatsoever; I have since discovered that I really like their recorded material but they sounded awful live (and out of place, as they’re not an industrial act). Imperative Reaction, the only band I was familiar with before attending the festival, absolutely smoked the place; headliner Combichrist not only did that but mopped the floor with whoever was left. Excellent, excellent ending to a piecemeal festival, enough to make me almost completely forget about the stuff I didn’t like.
But yes. If the Gothsicles come near you (WI/MN/IA/IL/IN), you need to go. Highest recommendation for one hell of a great audio/visual spectacle. Regardless of what kind of music you like, you’ll get a kick out of it.
And there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that we caught Cruciform Injection making purchases at Hot Topic. Nope, nuh-uh.
Alice In Musicland
Amusing to this white girl, here’s the latest from the AP:
LOS ANGELES – Will Smith has one big introduction to make at Tuesday night’s BET Awards: Gangster rappers, meet the rest of the world. Smith told The Associated Press he hopes to impress the global significance of U.S. black culture on the show’s audience and artists.
“The kids that are making these trends, making these songs, don’t understand the level of effect that black Americans have around the world,” he said in an interview. ” … Black Americans are so elevated, it’s almost worship.”
Smith, co-host of the show (8 p.m. EDT) at Hollywood’s Kodak Theater with wife Jada Pinkett-Smith, said he witnessed the phenomenon recently while in Africa. Touring a village in Mozambique, he came across a shack on which someone had scrawled the name of slain rapper Tupac Shakur.
“I was asking the kids: What is it about Tupac? Why is that there? I kept asking why. They were saying we want to dress like you dress, wear all the things you wear, talk how you talk.”
“The impression is that black Americans are the dragon slayers. Here we are 13 percent minority in a foreign land, and yet we can make laws, change laws. If Jesse Jackson shows up at Coca-Cola, something changes.”
Okay, yes, nice, lovely, hooray! Empowerment! Africans love African-Americans! Whatever! Yay smiles! It’s the next paragraph that got me though:
Smith, who won the first rap Grammy in 1988 for his squeaky-clean “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” said he wants hip-hop artists to recognize their importance and shift away from thuggish themes.
This is the part where someone is supposed to chime in and say that Will Smith’s ghetto pass has long since been revoked.
Do you hear gangsta rappers carrying on about how kids shouldn’t be gangstas? Hell no! You know why? Because it f*cking rules! You get guns and money and wiminz. Who doesn’t want guns and money and wiminz? That’s why gangsta rappers are huge, not because of any stupid stereotype. It’s pure materialism, hand-served on a platinum tray encrusted in diamonds. Hell, I’m white as f*ck and I want some bling, okay?
Will Smith wants us to whine about our parents not “getting” us.
Will Smith shoots aliens and robots in big-budget movies.
Shut up, Will Smith. Don’t even try stepping into my ghetto either.
For the record, I’m listening to De La Soul right now. I’m not sure how that’s relevant but it sure does make me feel cultured.
Now to take another step backward in the world of decrying racial stereotypes, here’s more from the AP:
NEW YORK – TV viewers have peeked into the lives of Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey, and Britney Spears and Kevin Federline. Now another celebrity couple is about to take the reality show plunge.
“Being Bobby Brown,” which features Brown and his wife, pop songstress Whitney Houston, premieres on Bravo Thursday (10 p.m. ET).
In an interview on “Dateline NBC,” Brown said he decided to allow cameras to follow him for six months because “it’s easy for people to just have the freedom to be able to say things about me, and me not say anything. That’s the easy part.
“But the hard part is to show them me, because I’m scared of being myself, sometimes.”
Brown, a former member of New Edition, married Houston in 1992. He took off with singles such as “Don’t Be Cruel,” but progressively became known more for his drug and alcohol arrests.
On Dec. 7, 2003, Houston called police, alleging that Brown had struck her in the face at their home near Alpharetta, a suburb north of Atlanta.
“Me and my wife play a lot. It was just a misunderstanding,” he told Matt Lauer in the NBC interview that aired Sunday. “I mean, we slap box, and she hits hard, hard.”
I won’t carry on how much I loved Don’t Be Cruel growing up. Instead, I will do the opposite of what everyone expects from me and I will back up Bobby Brown:
It was two years ago at a super-corporate Christmas party where I was bored out of my damned skull. Everyone was drunk but expected to keep that air of superiority that comes with the land of super corporateness. My boyfriend and I were rather tired of this but we paid $6 for unlimited beer, and we weren’t leaving until we got our fill.
But we were sooooooo booooooooored. So we started playing Bloody Knuckles.
He got me hard, dammit. I punched him in the arm. He smacked me in the face.
I turned to see my manager’s jaw laying on the floor as I laughed my ass off, trying to get back into corporate mode.
So, see? Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston are a lot like me. They just do better drugs.
More violence! From Blabbermouth:
A 26-year-old German heavy metal fan died over the weekend from injuries sustained at the Pressure Festival in in Herne (near Dortmund/Bochum), Germany.
The accident occured Saturday when 26-year-old  whose named hasn’t been released by the German media  took part in the “wall of death,” a form of concert dancing where the crowd is split down the middle and on the signal, both sides ram into each other.
The impact on the fan’s liver was reportedly so significant that he died the same night at a nearby hospital.
The German media, especially regional TV, are already talking about “casualties at a heavy metal concert”, and calling the wall of death an “aggressive” form of dance.
The “wall of death” was famously popularized by LAMB OF GOD during their Ozzfest 2004 stint where it became a regular part of the group’s live performance.
FUN FUN FUN!
Okay, so I’m a fragile little girl and I stay the hell out of mosh pits, but I can’t say this doesn’t sound as awesome as my elementary school playground. Red rover, red rover, send half the audience on over! WHAM! How neat!
But someone died, so now we have to be somber.
People, stop dying. You’re ruining all the fun of concerts. Seriously.
Me, jaded and cynical? Oh, PISH-POSH.
Band vs. Band
The idea came to me as I was completing the last SBNV column and it has been twirling in my mind ever since. Thus, I have quite a decent chunk to say about The Cure vs. The Smiths.
Let’s start with Robert Smith and pals. Hearkening back to the late ’70s when the underground flavor was punk, The Cure formed to take the spirit of punk and filter it into jangly, dark pop. Nearly always critical darlings yet quite under the radar for years, the godfathers of goth rock became decidedly more mainstream by the mid ’80s and started churning out actual hits, rounding out the decade being well-known on both sides of the pond.
The Cure are known for being fairly schizophrenic in style, bouncing between super happiness and complete sullen misery, all peppered randomly with a whole lot of pondering about love and security. In their catalog, you’ll find everything from political statements to mindless dance chatter. Also instantly recognizable is Robert Smith himself, providing The Cure with a definitive “look” and inspired a lot of gloomy copycats.
The Cure can chalk up quite a number of hits, although definitely more in Britain than the US. “The Lovecats” was their first top ten success abroad, but it wasn’t until the double album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me in 1987 that they began to see actual top 40 action in the US with “Just Like Heaven.” After that came Disintegration, long since heralded their greatest masterpiece to date, and their fandom exploded. While things started to fizzle out and fade in the early ’90s, by that point their cult status guaranteed that they could do no wrong, no matter how long they took to do it.
There’s just little negative to say about The Cure in general, aside from their complete inability to keep a stable lineup. They’re underground heroes, stalwart parents of the goth rock movement, and generally so quirky and interesting that even Wild Mood Swings couldn’t bring them down. Oh, sure, they’re not for everyone, but they rightly could be if people looked past the image. Simply put, The Cure was always high quality pop. Britney Spears could cover a number of their tunes without sounding like she’s out of her realm, and “Boys Don’t Cry” makes for one hell of a fun ringtone.
The opposite of fun, however, may be The Smiths. Oh, how serious a pop song can be.
Formed in the early ’80s, the core of The Smiths, Morrissey and Johnny Marr, also pulled from the ethics of punk and successfully married them to pop rock. The band had a knack for incorporating the sound of new wave yet keeping the lyrics extremely dark and dry-witted. Matching this sound with Morrissey’s elitist croon, they were more than just unique. They became their own little unimitatable corner of the universe.
And just as much as The Cure was known for the look of Robert Smith, The Smiths were almost haunted by the oddness of Morrissey. He wore a hearing aid, he wore flowers stuffed in his back pockets, and he hated everyone. Everyone. He took sarcasm and absolutely ran with it, he gave notoriously obnoxious interviews, and became an enigma above and beyond the band.
The Smiths were quite popular in Britain, having no issue with flying into the top 40, from “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” “William It Was Really Nothing,” “How Soon is Now,” “Shoplifters of the World,” and so on. As for the US, they were virtually ignored by the mainstream, although picking up a considerable underground and independent fanbase. Everything pretty much died at the end of the ’80s as Marr decided to leave the band, although Morrissey picked up solo career that mirrored his activities from his Smiths tenure.
The biggest point the Smiths had working for them was controversy. From songs so dry and ironic that nobody in the mainstream could tell what was serious and what was a joke, to Morrissey being generally bizarre and silly while taking himself 100% seriously, if nothing else they were fantastic fun to watch in action. It also helps that Marr and Morrissey together crafted tight, memorable pop tunes that belied the depth of their lyrics. Truly, it was as if everything they did was a mockery of the music industry and the people who inhabited it.
Really, these two bands similar in scope and impact, and actually had quite a bit in common. Both wrote cohesive pop and had a definitive image; both were known to get political and both continue to hold masses of longtime underground fans. Both had enigmatic vocalists and had rocky times holding the band together.
But the differences are staggering; The Cure, while acting quite serious, clearly took themselves less seriously than The Smiths. They also wrote much more candidly, and in a manner that one might call “fluffy.” The Cure focused more on introspection in all degrees, while The Smiths spent most of their energy pointing at others (and usually laughing).
The Smiths also went pretty much nowhere stateside, while The Cure had a nice MTV run that lasted several years; however, The Smiths enjoyed much more mainstream success in their native country. And while The Smiths called it quits and died during the peak of The Cure’s rise to fame, The Cure continues to regroup, record, and tour. The Cure clearly has the larger of the two fanbases, but it’s also fair to say that this fanbase isn’t nearly as rabid and truly “into” the band as those who continue to worship The Smiths. The Cure has at times become quite the caricatures of themselves as well; meanwhile, The Smiths quit when they were just starting to slide from the top and Morrissey appears every now and again with a new effort. This isn’t to say that Morrissey himself hasn’t become someone easily mocked, but he’s low enough on the radar that his fans enjoy him without much hassle.
In other words, it’s actually pretty even until you consider one factor: influence. While The Smiths were unique and interesting, and they surely had an effect on what became the alternative music revolution in the decade following their rise and fall, it’s clear that nobody out there wanted to be The Smiths. Contrast this with The Cure, who inspired a lot of spooky looking kids to make spooky sounding romantic-spirited bands and also impacted the ’90s with just as much vigor, and suddenly, there’s no question. Morrissey has his clique, but The Cure has a legion. And rightfully so: how much can one empathize with satirical lyrics verses lamentation about emotion?
You would probably beat me if I said otherwise anyway. The Cure takes this one.
And let me add that nobody can ever accuse me of not being fair and unbiased in articles such as this; truth is, I hate Morrissey and would like to see him set on fire. I like one, maybe two songs by The Smiths. Still, I respect their legacy and can honestly say that this match was more of a fair fight than I would like it to be.
Your Band Here
The premise, in case you missed it: Are you in a band, unsigned or on a teeny label? Do you have a web presence, either your own site, MySpace, or another outlet? Would you like some free press and a review by the mighty Gloomchen? EMAIL ME and we’ll get you hooked up!
This week, here are a couple of acts from the Minneapolis area. It’s just coincidence that they fit quite well with the subject matter of the column thus far. Okay, maybe it’s not coincidence.
Uber Cool Kung Fu (also on MySpace):
This may be some of the happiest dark music you ever hear. I guess it’s more fair to say that they transcend genre labels like crazy, combining harsh industrial and guitar sounds with smiley, bouncy electropop. Even still, as I sit here piecing together this description, I feel like I have left out the magical ingredient that makes it all work. I have no clue what it is.
Highlight: DIFFERENT IS BETTER. Hell, I have yet to hear anything from them that I can define.
Lowlight: I’m not trying to kiss ass here or get free drinks at their show at Station 4 where I am going to be on July 2nd, but I have quite honestly heard a lot from these guys due to mutual friends and I’m still looking for the lowlight. If they put on a shitty show, I will set them on fire for making me eat my words.
Thosquanta (also on MySpace):
Ahhh, now we’re back into the more traditional gothy realm. Not to say that Thosquanta falls into any compact genre — particularly since you will find elements of COUNTRY peppered throughout their fare — but you know what you’re getting for the most part. Dark, evil, bits of industrial and bits of pop.
Highlight: Thosquanta = atmosphere. Everything flows like crazy, nothing is awkward or uncomfortably dissonant. Great mood music.
Lowlight: More hooks, please. I love the sound but nothing sticks in my head. Make yourselves memorable!
And wow, have I ever stuck this column into a genre.
My Opinion Matters
Normally I would bag on some shitty band here or link the hell out of someone that I think is awesome, but this column has plenty of that. Instead, I’m just going to throw in two things that are very, very important.
The first one seems frivolous but you have to understand that I am a freak for statistics, surveys, polls, and other chunks of calculable knowledge.
But, PLEASE: TAKE OUR FRIGGIN’ SURVEY!
I know, I know. You might have to register for the damned forums and all that, and you hate forums. Or whatever other excuse you have. You know what? I’m telling you right now why you might as well sign up for the forums now: because people are working hard behind the scenes at IP trying to set up giveaways and contests, and the only way we have for you to enter these sorts of things is via the forum! So honestly, this saves you the trouble of signing up at a later date. Plus, you get to take a survey. Your opinion gets counted! Inside Pulse becomes better tailored to suit your needs! And you don’t have to write any fan emails, it’s all semi-impersonal!
So, yes. Do it.
Now, for the second thing.
I have made a lot of friends online over the last 12+ years I have been wandering around aimlessly, writing and talking and reading and living. One of the first people I casually befriended on LiveJournal somewhat disappeared over the last two years; he was relatively silent about the issue. He later spilled that he was gone because his girlfriend was fighting cancer and he was spending every moment he had by her side. Sadly, she didn’t conquer the disease and passed away early this year.
I can’t really talk about this any more than I already have because the story is much too sad. However, the only thing left this man has to give the love of his life is a headstone, and he needs help. Read the page, throw in a buck or two if you can. Call it your good deed for the day and maybe the karma will prevent cancer from striking yourself or someone you love.
The Rad Ones
Fernandez is defeated by the Google search game! HahHAH! This is why it is good to have a gimmick pseudonym; you control everything in the world of search engines that relates to you.
Cameron gets some backlash because of his 411/IP draft. AARON, SPILL THE GOSSIP!! WHO WAS THE WHINER? I MUST KNOW!
Smith was a hell of a lot nicer to me in this column than his last. It’s okay, we cool. Well, after I eat his betta fish.
The summer mixes begin with Gordi Whitelaw laying down a very mellow groove. Think you’ll see me participating in this feature sometime this week? It would be a pretty damned good bet. Stay tuned.
Lucard better buy me some silver bullets because I am afraid of real life lycanthropes. I wonder if he knows any real life werewolf hunters.
Check out Lucard, getting two pimps. Eh, he deserves it, he’s been one hell of an awesome catalyst for happiness lately. Anyway, Pokemon is the greatest.
Basilo watches more TV than I do. Well, everyone in the TV zone watches more TV than I do, but that’s not the point. Basilo actually has shit to say about the stuff on TV. I don’t watch but am intrigued. Hooray, Basilo won at the Internet!
Delloiacono recaps the only comic I might ever consider reading. Insert cliche Mr. T tagline here!
And finally (wow, this is one pimptastic section), Leamons reviews one of my most favorite movies of my youth. It was the first movie we taped off of TV when we got our first VCR. I can still recite entire scenes by heart, and not even memorable ones:
“LOOK AT THESE PALM TREES, DAMN! DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS?”
“WATCH OUT FOR FALLING COCONUTS?”
Outro
Wow, I wrote a lot. Energy, baby! The power of organic chocolate!
I think I’m actually out of stuff to talk about. A new first!
Umm, yeah. Eat babies?
Get busy.
They say I’m crazy, I really don’t care. That’s my prerogative,
–gloomchen
