It's a creature in the surface, Lagoon! [screaming] Look, watch it! [screaming] What's up, decomposers? Welcome to Punkalado Pod. I am a cardboard cutout of Frankenstein promoting Pepsi in 1989, a.k.a. Justin Hinsley. Oh, that makes mine a lot less exciting. I'm Count Dylan. [laughing] Whoa! [laughing] I mean, it works. I think it was going that hard. [laughing] We are in the Universal horror theme, though. Universal Hollywood horror nights. That's right, we are continuing our Halloween spooktacular with our final entry for 2024. Focused entirely on Gothrock, the least punk horror-themed punk subgenre. We'll get into that later. But if you head to patreon.com/punkladopod for $1 you get access to all of our weekly bonus audio, and last week we did a horror movie bracatology where we just took some of the most well-known horror movies at the last, hmm, all time and put them in head-to-head competition. And it was pretty fun. We did a little bit of a mashup of a bracatology master-punk theater halloween spooktacular. Yeah, it was a full-sized candy bar of patreon content. Yeah, yeah, it was good. We went long on some of those. A little bit of classics as well as some more nouveau classics, modern classics, some elevated horror discussed in there. Yeah, you could also join our $5 tier, which is our producer/listening club tier. And you would have been too late to join in on this week's listening club because we did it on Monday night and we discussed the cramps stay sick. We're recording this before the event happens, so we don't know how the turnout was, but let's just say we had a good time. And if you would like to join in on future listening clubs, sign up at that $5 tier, which will also get your name set on the show alongside whatever it is you would like us to promote on every single episode. And you could sign up at our $10 tier where you choose the album we devote an entire episode to. And we have some of those we're going to need to do soon now that our halloween spooktacular is over. So before we have to get into our next gimmicks like Christmas and end of the year, is that a gimmick album of the year content? Yeah, I mean, it's like two episodes. Yeah, even though it's two months away, it feels too early to be talking about it, even though like November and December are kind of dead zones for new music. Yeah, I need to catch up on stuff, I guess. Yeah, I'm behind on some stuff. This last month I've just gotten really far behind. I also have things on my list that I've had on my list for months at this point where I'm just going to start culling them and cutting them off just because I'm like, Am I really going to listen to this album? It's been on my list for four months and I haven't had the urge to listen to it. And it's one of those records that I know I'll listen to it exactly one time and then never come back to it. So I don't even know why they're on the list sometimes, but I do that a lot. I'll sacrifice listing time for an album model here once instead of re-listening to something I would like to hear again. But thus is the life, which that's two months away. We got plenty of time to worry about that. Yeah, that's that's a. Oh, shit, I got a goose my listening. Cram, Cram. December me problem. There's always like one record that comes out like the first week of December, too, that like, you're like, should I put it on my list? It just came out though. Yeah. Future problems to worry about, but with that on the later base. Yep. And this year, I'm going to do what I did last year for the best of 20, 24, where I do just lists of best demos, best splits, best comps, like that kind of stuff. I found, I really enjoyed doing it that way last year. So, and that leaves like pure albums for the best of lists on the main show. So patreon.com/punklotopon. All right. So for our final week of Halloween Spectacular, this is coming out two days before. Oh, the day before Halloween? Yeah. So it's one of those ones where it's like, we're going to do a Halloween episode. Drop it the day before Halloween. And then the rest of the week after Halloween, will anyone care to listen? Because now it's Halloween themed and it's November and does anybody care? It's a fun little line that you have to juggle. But if you put something out, if the week of Halloween, it kind of has to be Halloween themed. So that's why we saved Goth for last. I don't know why we wound up with Goth last, but okay. Goth Rock is a genre that I said is the least punk out of our spooky themes. So Goth Rock has a TINCHOUS history. Goth Rock proper. There's, I guess there's like, you could get into like a copy pasta, you know, true. Emo only consists of kind of assessment of Goth Rock because it comes from punk. Because the first bands that you would call Goth Rock were basically post-punk bands. Uh, yet the genre has kind of like, it has developed very far away from punk. And as it's progressed and as it, as a scene has progressed and grown, has gone into like chill wave and, or not, not chill wave. But it's progressed into like darker electronic music. It's picked up elements of industrial. It's become, you know, a sub-genre of metal. And I feel like it's gone in directions that Goth culture almost is just like whatever kids wearing fishnet sleeves and dying their head hair dance to in warehouses. It's one of those things where like, I think Goth Rock kind of created a look that then pulled people in who aren't necessarily punks. I feel like people go become Goths and then they get into everything that's under the big gigantic goth umbrella. And I think the goth umbrella is something that covers a lot of other music. Because gothic, as a descriptor, way pretty, it's predates punk music, obviously. Oh, yeah. So like, you can do any kind of music that's influenced by gothic architecture and Dracula at, all right, radio music is, this is one of the rare times where radio music is deciding to not go in depth enough when you look at a genre chart. Because if you go to like the gothic rock genre chart and the only sub-genre to list is death rock. That's like, okay. So I guess we're saying that all the other genres with Goth in their name are not spin-offs of gothic rock, but just other genres that added goth to their sound. You can get gothic rock, gothic country, AKA gothic Americana or southern gothic. You have gothic metal and you also have ethereal wave, AKA ethereal goth. Dark wave is not really listed here, but that's another one. Does that mean, see, I guess dark wave is more of an electronic genre, but still. But there's even like that classical style, I forget what they call that one, like neoclassical dark wave or something like that. Like there's so many other genres. Goth is more of a, I guess a descriptor, unless so much just like a step off of the goth rock genre tree. So I don't know, it's kind of weird. We can have like a million sub-genres of crust, but for some reason we have separate categories of gothic stuff on here. Yeah, it's kind of like, I don't know, there's just like a goth presentation like deviates off of branches off of each other's genre of music. But that's not to say that like, I think a lot of gothic metal and a lot of dark wave and a lot of other stuff, even gothic country are informed by classifiably goth rock artists. Like, I mean, I think part of it's just like, you know, with this, with the right music, it's just kind of a quirk of how the genre trees are, are structured and I, I don't think there's really a, I think any genre that is kind of a fusion of multiple genres is only going to show up under as a sub-genre of one of them. It's going to be whichever one it's closest to musically. So we don't have to, you know, I don't think rate your music is like the standard on everything. It's just kind of the tool that we use. It's the most effective tool for diving into genres that we have. But I think that the family tree, genre family tree thing is one of the more underdeveloped aspects of the site. Yeah. What is your relationship with goth music? I guess because of our age, my earliest, like I associate goths primarily with the like 90s industrial and metal influenced goth music. Yeah. Just because that's what I would have been aware of first. Yeah. I was trying to think of the bands that would be considered like gothic that I would have listened to first and they are like metal mainly, like I would have gotten into stuff like Christian goth metal like Virgin Black, which is also like kind of a black metal band or savior machine who was like, it's goth rock, but it's also like Prague too. So like my entry into this genre is, or at least just goth in general is very light. And then I would have become aware of more stuff like type of negative, which also feels more industrial coated, but they may be our most like famous goth metal band. Or if you go into like the more theory on, you know, that kind of metal, that kind of gothic metal stuff, night wish after forever, like that's the other kind of stuff I would have probably become more familiar with personally. And then I would have taken me a lot longer to get into stuff like Susie the Banshees or the Cure or a lot of like the 80s goth inspired like post-punk a new wave stuff. Yeah. I mean, we had, you know, one of the kids in our neighborhood, we didn't hang out with him a ton, but he was into stuff like Susie and he also liked a lot of visual key. Mm-hmm. Type stuff. And like I knew about that stuff, Bauhaus, you know, kind of, you know, as a teenager. But yeah, I never really had any, I haven't, I haven't spent very much time with gothrock in really any iteration gothic music in any real sense. So I, I don't have a ton of familiarity with it. I certainly heard some Cure records have definitely heard, you know, how much do you consider Joy to Vision, gothic rock, you know, it's a question, I guess. And we've done the Susie best works over and over and under, which the Susie and the Banshees like I've listened to that entire discography. Mm-hmm. So that's like the one artist that I'm like firmly familiar with in gothrock. But otherwise, very little of it has appealed to me. Yeah, and it, a lot of the stuff that I do like in that style. It's so borderline post-punk, because post-punk in and of itself has a lot of the similarities that gothrock utilizes, because like you can get into post-punk bands at all. They're all kind of like that spooky goth-y sort of stuff, but they don't really claim that. They don't really look the part either, you know, yeah, it, there's a fine line between post, some of them like chillier, reverb-y, you know, post-punk stuff and gothic rock. I guess, I guess like true gothic rock, it's a little more melodramatic, it's a little more, I don't know, dynamic maybe, or more moving parts to it. Like, there's like a classical element that can show up as well, it could even be a little bit more lyrical. I don't know. It's funny to me to think like the cure are also considered a gothrock band, because like all their songs are just like love songs, you know, like, and they certainly have some pretty morose material more early on. But if you think about this, who embodies goth themes more, the cure or joy division? Right, yeah. Joy division, yeah. Yet most people don't really consider joy division goth, goths like joy division, but like as a genre, or as you know, people just think of them as a post-punk band, for the most part. A post-woman who was probably influential on goth music, but in and of themselves, not really considered goth. Yeah. I think that gothrock, again, it's similar, I feel like gothrock is really similar, really all of the genres that we do in October on this show are very much defined by imagery and lyrics. Because yeah, if you look at early gothrock bands, they're basically post-punk bands, you know? Yeah. There's not a significant difference other than you get into things like, I don't know, doing chorus pedals, and I'm like, that's not enough of a genre. I mean, honestly, I think any like defining genres by what effects they use is kind of silly at the end of the day. And it leads to a lot of things like modern shoegaze. It's like, this is Deftones, just because you have 15 guitar pedals, doesn't mean it's shoegaze. Like, I think the best, like, I would say tonality in atmosphere is where you can kind of differentiate gothrock from post-punk, where there's primarily a dark minor or, you know, even somewhat dissonant tonality and much more emphasis musically on atmosphere to represent the lyrical themes. Not that you can't have atmospheric post-punk, but that isn't gothrock, but, I don't know. I do think ultimately fashion also plays a really big piece into this, all three of all the genres we've covered, really. Fashion is a big, big part of it. Because I feel like a lot of bands, like a lot of times it's just like, yeah, you just called yourself gothic, and that was a, like you're a post-punk band and you said you're gothic and you kind of like, dress the part, that's enough to get you there. The cure is what that is. The cure itself does not feel like particularly dark or more dark than a lot of their contemporaries, but because, I guess, because they kind of embraced that term or didn't fight it too much, that it worked. And the way they dress, you know, especially Robert Smith, yeah, the clothes on the cure are both considered gothrock fans, but they're sonically not anything alike, visually, they do kind of look alike, dress alike. Yeah. It is a good thought experiment to just be like, if this didn't have the hair and makeup, if you made the same kind of music as early cure and Susie, would people call it gothrock? If you sang about anything else, if you had lyrics like wire, people would probably just call it post-punk. So there is that lyrical and visual element to it. Yeah. I think you could. Yeah. I think you could get some, I think you could try to define it in more musical terms than that. But it's not, it's not uniform. None of these genres are. None of the ones we've covered this month. Right. Uniform. Yeah. It's, um, they're silly. They're all silly. It's really what they are. Yeah. I guess gothrock is considered the most credible genre. It has like the highest amount of like well-regarded albums and widest range of styles and the, probably the higher amount of bands playing the style. So it gets a little bit more, you know, respect on its name, but at the end of the day, they're all pretty silly terms, but it just works out that, you know, we could do three weeks on it. So for this, trying to decide what album to cover was tricky. I picked out for one of them we wound up using initially the plan was for us to both pick options. I sent you four picks and then you sent me none. Yeah, yeah, you picked four and there was like one of the four that I'm like, not that one. It's not going to be that one. Oh, I said you five then. That's right. That's right. Did you send, did you send five? I thought you sent four. I sent five. So we'll just go down to the ones I sent you. I sent you in the flat field by Bauhaus. Lots of Bauhaus to choose from. Yes, probably we should probably do them one year. We will do Bauhaus probably next year. I mean, there's a high chance of just calling our shot. Yeah, I would say, I mean, making, you know, this is appropriate. Let's make our resolutions for next year in October. But I would say next year, let's always go for the obvious choice. For this, this season, or you're talking about next year in whole, oh, you want to go like almost in general, let's just pick the obvious choice almost almost the entire year. Oh, we're going to do a year of, wow, we're going to do the most obvious year. That's, that's an idea. The most obvious year. I mean, like, you know, I guess we'll do the pogues, you know, for, for St. Patrick's Day. We'll do, yeah, we'll do Bauhaus, Bauhaus for Gothic Rock. We'll do a new Misfits record. We'll do a Graves Misfits record, because we did a dancing Misfits record this year. Psychability might be tricky. Yeah. We've done all the obvious thing about the sea, we've not touched yet. But yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. All year. The gimmicks, not the, not the regular week to week, she want to do that too. Yeah. We'll get tired of that, though. We'll be like, ah, I'm tired. Talk about the big ones. Let's talk about something niche. But we'll see. We'll see. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Air on the side of Bobby. Yeah. I've yet to hear about house album all the way through where I was like, I love that though. And that's kind of been my hesitation with ever choosing Bauhaus. Yeah. They seem like the hardest band to get into. I've heard Bauhaus. So I never really want to pick up Bauhaus record. Yeah. Which it wasn't that I like, when I saw that I wasn't like, no, I mean, you know, I was like, yeah, that's probably one we should consider. It's one we should do. You also sent draft majesties, the demonstration. Yeah. One of the more modern goth rock bands that actually does kind of fit in with the more traditional 80s style and aesthetic, I feel like you kind of shot that one down pretty quickly. Like you didn't really consider it for very long. I don't know that I really even gave much of an opinion on it, but it wasn't one. I guess my thinking for draft majestie was, I don't know how much we really have to say about it because they have what two records. They got more than that. Do they have more than that? Yeah. So, and like some EPs too that were pretty high profile, I've heard two records then. No, that's right. They have three albums. I forgot about the first record. I thought the demonstration was the first record, but there's one in 2015. Yeah. They have a couple of EPs they put one out last year, but that EP from last year took modern mirror was 2019. Yeah. And then they didn't put anything else out until that EP last year. So they felt like one was like, yeah, they kind of take a long time to put stuff out. Because, I don't know, I guess it just takes a really long time for them to find the right settings on their course pedals. You keep saying they. I think it's just one guy. Oh, no, I guess there's two of them in this picture of them looking at them. No, there's two of them. It's Deb Demir and Monadie. Demir? Wow. I also, I don't know that Deb uses any specific pronouns. And I don't know. I think so who records under the alter ego, Deb Demir. Yeah, Monadie. Yeah. I know nothing actually about them. So there might have been something there. We just have to research it to find out, I guess. But I've read like maybe one interview and it was like a reverb interview. So they were just focused on the guitar gear and basically their whole thing was like, I don't know what any of this shit does. It's like, Oh, okay. So yeah, that's probably why it takes so long. Other than that, like I've, Dave Quigill really likes drag majesty. Yeah. So I've heard those records while it getting tattooed before. But bloodletting by concrete blonde was on the table as well. And I think might have been the second highest consideration. I think the thing that we decided, I think we decided more for the album than against this concrete blonde record. Yeah, I was kind of excited by the concrete blonde one being on there. That was definitely one I was leaning towards of the ones that you sent me. I have heard concrete, another concrete blonde record that I thought was good, but it was a little all over the place. And I think they're just generally all over the place. I think they're a weird band. They're a band who I think their whole thing is it's gothic and lyric and presentation, but their music itself is more, I'll just alternative rock inspired, maybe just like a little moodier. But there's also like a dream populist, they kind of seem like it all over the place band in general. So the gothic really just comes into presentation more than anything. Yeah, I'd be really interested to do that record and cover it and it would be very different from a lot of the other records of the genre. Yeah, they're an interesting one because they're different, even as an alternative rock band, which I think is basically how you could describe their music. They don't really fit there either perfectly. So they really are just like a weirdly hard to categorize band. I kind of put them with the cult too, in the sense that like the cult is essentially just a big hard rock band that just uses gothic imagery and fashion in their sounds. So it's very similar to not falling under like the sonic tropes of goth music. But yeah, you know, one year we could just do the Crow soundtrack. Yeah, that's true for this category. Get a lot of stuff in there. And my last choice, you shot this and down super quick. The low and behold album uppers, did you shoot that down just because like nobody's gonna know what it is? Yeah, it was just like nobody wants going to hold nobody wants that guy from Starfire 59 and the guy from Demon Hunter, but it's good. Yeah. I mean, it's the best thing that the guy from Demon Hunter is done in a long time. Yeah. Yeah. It was such a like side, it's a side project of two bands. Yeah. That had like nothing else around it. Like, I think there was an EP before that LP, but yeah, it was just kind of on like a label and we're gonna rest, I think is what that label is called. Like, not even like a big label. It was just a weird one off project thing and I don't even know how it came to be. Yeah. Did Ryan just like, I want to make a post-punk record? So at the same time, he made this low and behold record and he made that Knives record with Randy Torres from Project 86 and I forgot about the Randy Torres connection. So I was like, where's Ryan Clark and Jason Martin meeting each other? Yeah. They're not bumping into each other at the tooth and nail offices, the family picnic. Yeah. I mean, if Ryan wanted to get in touch with Jason, he would probably just have to reach out to like Brandon Evel or, you know, Aaron Sprigle, Randy Torres makes sense. Yeah, Randy makes the most of those because I think Randy briefly played and even Hunter for like a tour or something to, but yeah. But the difference between those two records is like one was good and one was bad. The Knives record was like more electronic, but they were still similar in that like we're going for something spooky and gothy, but that was just more, and he did his rock voice more and whereas on the low of a whole record, he did a little bit more of like a spooky reverb-y, you know, clean thing because Jason wouldn't. You just know Jason Martin wouldn't let Don sing like he does in the Stephen Hunter and Randy would. So that's the difference between the projects. I love that record. It's really fun, but you're right. Like nobody would know what the fuck that even was that we were talking about. So you sent me those the five choices, right? And we picked the one that we're talking about from that one. And I was like, all right, let me go look at the goth charts. And I'm like, not that, not that, not that, it's like maybe it was like, eh, maybe a cure record. It's like we've done Susie and I guess there's nothing stopping us from doing an individual Susie record. And at some point we probably should, but we've done the entire discography. Yeah. We talked and we talked about a lot of those records, like we kind of covered the whole career of the band on that episode. I don't know that any other episode that we do on a Susie record is going to be significantly different unless there's someone who wants to talk about it as a guest. Yeah. And that conversation is more interesting because their perspective is going to be different. You and I aren't going to have anything significantly different to say about it that we didn't already say when we talked about it with Anne and we had Anne's opinion on it too. Yeah. There's like certain killing joke records that show up and there's like, I don't want it. Cockdoat wins doesn't feel like a goth rock band to me. Yeah. One of the things that I pointed out to you are asked you. I asked was Swans always all over the Doth charts? And I couldn't remember. Like I could not recall if they were always on those charts. I could see why they would have that's so maybe I haven't listened to the right Swans records. Yeah. Why would I? But I've heard Swans records. I wouldn't call that a goth band. No, I mean, they're just like an experimental no wave band. It's really what they are. And then they occasionally would do some like 20 year, you could call it gothic country elements. But as we discussed, gothic country is not actually a subgenre of gothrock. It's just country that's spooky, but they have quite a few records that are just like primarily tagged gothic rock and I'm just like, huh, I wouldn't have thought that. No. Yeah. I don't know. But it doesn't matter because I'll never pick a swans record. No, I'll never pick a swans record. And one of the other things I think we talked about was like, it's too bad that well, you said it's too bad. Nick. Well, I said it's too bad. Nick Cave won't shut up. Yeah. And you're like, yeah, it'd be good if he wasn't a Zionist. It's like, yeah. And also like a cancel culture guy or whatever it's like, you can't make real art anymore or whatever. It's like, wait, just trash your legacy, dude. Just like, we let you slide on edgy shit forever, but then you start to get defensive about it when no one's coming for you for it. That's the thing. No one is coming for Nick Cave for making edgy art. Everybody knows what his deal is. They want to avoid that. They avoid Nick Cave. Super easy. Also, I've listened to tons of Nick Cave albums. They're not that edgy. Yeah. Right. I think he thinks he's edgier than he is. Like he just sings about death a lot and doing heroin. Like it's not that edgy in sex. He sings about sex all the time. I guess that's the edginess, but whatever. It's not that edgy. I've heard so many of his albums, like, but you're right. Just shut up. Shut up, Nick Cave. Stop being such a fucking Zionist. God. Yeah. Tarnishing his own legacy. The thing is he's the type. He's going to get a pass. He's the type that in a couple of years people will go back to. Yeah. They'll ignore all the Zionist shit and just let him in. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah. How many people in Hollywood does that count for as well? Yeah. Or we're just like, oh, you guys signed that letter? I guess we're going to forget about that in a couple of years. Yeah. So those were the things we were considering before. Wait. No, yeah. And that was it. I just didn't see anything else. I was just like, I went through pages and pages of it. I was just like, yeah, you know what? There's good enough choices. Most of the ones you picked I was interested in. Yeah. So the one we did pick was released in the year 1987 and we decided to take a look at the other albums of 1987 that fall under our four category, our horror punk, gothic rock, death rock, psychobilly. I guess I don't need to actually put the death rock tag in there because death rock is considered a sub-genre gothic rock. So whatever. And here they are. Swans on the top. Okay. Whatever. I don't know. Could be 87. We have Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me by the Cure, which is just like the least goth Cure record. Like it's just like, ooh, nevie-dovey. Like it's just not like what you would think of as goth music, just big red nips on the cover. Yeah. It's also a 74-minute album. Yeah. The Cure basically they got to a certain point where they're just like only double albums. Yeah. Yeah. A double album is a double album disintegration is a double album. Is there another one? No, disintegration isn't. It's a single LP. But it's long. Yeah. It's like a long record. And the extended version online is even longer. Mixed up is a double album, which is like alternate mixes anyway. Yeah. Wish is like 66 minutes long. That's a CD era album. Mood swings is like 61 minutes long. Just like they got to it once they got to the point where they could, they're just like an hour of music every time. We have the Fields of the Nephilim Down-Razer, Gothic Rock, Subgenre Psycho-Billy. Is that right? Are they considered a Psycho-Billy band? I have never seen them considered a Psycho-Billy band. No. Maybe that one record has some rockabilly songs on it. Right. And the first one, which is their big record, is Neosecondelia. Elysium is dark waves psychedelic rock. So there's a psychedelic element there, Sound. I wonder if they're kind of, sounds like they might be a little bit of a precursor to shoegaze. Well, well, I think generally Gothic Rock is an influence, you know, Susie, you know, all of the guitar work in Susie is generally considered an influence on most of the shoegaze bands. Yeah. That's where shoegaze comes from, like the UK Gothic rock scene and post-punk scene and just the way all of those genres progressed of like, oh, we're all doing this now. Yeah. But it turns into like a club culture and that's where shoegaze ends up coming from. So yeah, there's baggy beats. Oh, we have a gun club record I'm not familiar with. Mother Juno. I don't know this one at all. This is their. That's late. Fourth album for them. Yeah. Yeah, between 84 and 87 with that one white zombie soul crusher. This is early white zombie before the industrial, I guess. This is the first white zombie record. There's one before that, isn't there? No. Oh, it is. Okay. Oh, make them die slowly is the second one. You're right. Yep. So yeah, this is the Los Sexoristo is like the beginning of the. Oh, that bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, the groove metal industrial metal thing. This is probably very similar to that EP we covered a long time ago with an as well. Yeah, which is really more of a noise rock. Yeah, good. New York, New York, noise rock. I mean, that's where they're from. They're part of that same scene that gave you like helmet and prong and yeah, unsane tons of other bands. They just have like fog machines. Yeah. Go go dancers or whatever. We got love and rockets, which is that's what that's the Bauhaus project, right? Daniel Ash. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have heard some love and rockets. I don't love love and rockets. I don't either. I think their records are wildly hit or miss. Yeah. There's a Lydia lunch record honeymoon red don't know what that sounds like. Don't care to find out either. There's an ex-small Deutschland record that apparently like the entire Deutschland discography is being like reissued currently like this year. I keep getting emails from record the same record labeled saying like, and now we're re pressing this album this month and now we're it's just like nonstop barrage of their all of their stuff being reissued. They only have four LPs, but it seems like they've got a hundred, but there's a lot of stuff that gets the gothic rock tag that I don't know if it's good or what it is. Yeah. There's a gene loves Jezebel record house of dolls, but that record's actually like primary genres are considered alternative rock and jingle pop. Yeah. Not even really that gothy of a band on other, you know, the other genres, we've got a mojo nixon record, which even even calling that psychobilly is kind of a stretch. Yeah. Yeah, I would not. But it's mojo nixon and skid rober. Yeah. Nothing really for horror punk, I mean, this is post Misfits breakup. There's a Batmobile album, Bamboo land. There's that Japanese death rock band Asylum, their album Crystal Days that I was talking about. I think kind of Patreon, maybe. Yeah, there's not even like a Sam Hain record. There's a meteor's record. Yeah. LSU record. Hey, there we go. That's a gothy band. LSU shaded pain. That's actually probably one of the bigger LSU records life savers underground. This is Mike, not this is their first LSU record to he had done a couple life savers albums before, and that is not a goth ban, but the LSU stuff is very gothy, even though I guess some of the genre tags aren't really frequently goth, but definitely going for that darker, heavier sound. Not a huge fan of those. But by the way, not a big LSU fan. Yeah, I mean, there's stuff, but like, not a lot of big stuff and 87 seems to be weirdly when you think of like the late 80s, early 90s as being a really strong period for like goth stuff, but this year in particular does not seem to be like the strongest year for that sound with the exception of the album we're talking about today. I do think that may be one of the most important. So let's get into it. So before that, we must shout out our Patreon producers. So thank you to Brooks Phillips. Thank you to Dave Brown, host of the podcast, one band five songs. Thank you to Steve Long, host of the podcast Rebel Rock Radio. And thank you to Jason W, host of the podcast, a thousand plays are less, as well as the writer of the sub stack songs about chocolate and girls. He's doing a really fun series right now on the emo, shoe gaze bands of the 2010s. Really fun series. So thank you all producers and if you would like to become a producer of the show and have your stuff shared and plugged, patreon.com/punkcloudupud. So we went with Floodland by the Sisters of Mercy. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] There's like 10 band members listed on here, but then you only listed two people that actually played on the record. Oh, there's so much story to this band. But let's get into our experiences with the group first. What is your past experience with the Sisters of Mercy? I have known of them for a while and I have heard most of this record, if not the whole record previously. That's it. That's all I got. [MUSIC] I could probably have sang you this corrosion. Oh, okay. You can do that one before listening to the album again. I probably would have been able to figure out which one it was. I might not have known what it was called. But if you'd said like, how does the Sisters of Mercy song go? I probably would have done the hey now, hey now now part. [LAUGHTER] Okay, so I have a little bit more experience with this band. My first introduction to the Sisters of Mercy would have been Lucretia My Reflection, covered by the band Project 86. Yeah, I do remember that after listening to this album. But is that on, I should have looked up which record that was on. Is that, what is that one on? That is on, I can't remember the name of it, but it would have been the last one we bought. Did you buy Picketfence Cartel? I did, I did. That was a step backwards. It was not a very good record. But yeah. Lucretia wasn't on. Is it on? Is the Cane Mutiny EP? Is that what it is on? It might be. Because I can't find it on Spotify, the Project 86 version, which means to me it's probably on that EP because that EP is not on Spotify. Yeah. So yeah, okay. That would have been my first exposure to that song, a cover. And then I would have heard the song on this compilation. I think it was called like After Dark. It was like a gothic compilation that was sold. Barnes and Noble carried it when I worked there. And it was an in-store play. And it was one of the most popular in-store plays we had because like everybody loved it and everybody wanted to hear it because it was like cool music. Like it was, let's see if I can pull up. It's a, it's a really good. Well, I won't say it's actually really good because it's just kind of all over the place as a comp. Say, I don't know if that would be on. I feel like in a store though, you want a lot of variety. Yeah. Say if I can find this thing. It may be one of the most generically titled things as well. After Dark, the alternative gothic rock collection features the Jesus of Mary chain. Him, the cult, the bullshoy, the mighty lemon drops. Telepathique, loving rockets, night wish, sisters of mercy. Peter Murphy, the cure, joy division, echo in the buddy minute about house. People, oh, it was actually presented by Barnes and Noble. It was a Barnes and Noble CD. So that's what they made it. Explains why it's so weird what they chose, but everyone wanted it on all the time because it was like one of the cooler things we had to listen to. And it stayed on for a while. My wife wound up getting the one to take it home. And we'd probably never listen to it ever again. But right because you listen to it. It worked all the time. Yeah. So that would have been when I heard like, okay, that's the real one. I mean, I probably heard the real version too prior to that, but I just heard it a lot when that CD was being played. And then the other big moment that I would have really been introduced to. Sisters of Mercy was the Edgar Wright film. The world's end, which was the third in the blood and ice cream trilogy because this corrosion plays a big part in that movie. Sisters of Mercy is like a running joke throughout the movie. Simon Pegg's character is a big fan of the Sisters of Mercy and has a Sister of Mercy tattoo on his chest. And even though most of that movie is just like baggy, mad, Chester style music, they also threw in the Sisters of Mercy. I have so little memory of that movie. I've watched it a lot of times. So I have watched it once. That's wild. I've seen this so many times. It's good. I really enjoy that movie. It's got a good cast too. So yeah, that was the big part of that movie. So after that movie, I would have been like, I really like this, this corrosion song. I really like Lucretia my reflection. Yeah, let's check them out. And then I would have listened to Floodland and I would have checked it out. I've probably heard the other albums too, the one before and the one after. I don't have too many memories of those records. I've heard them, but this is the one. This is the one I've gone to a couple times. I've listened to Floodland a bunch. So I was like this record. I probably suggested it last year when we were looking at Gothic stuff. I've always, I'm always trying to get sisters of mercy on here somehow. But yeah, I think they're entertaining. And yeah. ♪ ♪ I have a war of a big machine ♪ ♪ So the world's acting between ♪ ♪ I've met all that misery ♪ ♪ I hear a vampire down ♪ ♪ I hear a vampire down ♪ ♪ ♪ I hear the roar of a big machine ♪ ♪ ♪ So the world's acting between ♪ ♪ All I've lost, fire a pearl ♪ ♪ And on, on bullets and shoots are killed ♪ ♪ I hear a die, bombers and ♪ ♪ I've been fired down ♪ ♪ I've been fired down ♪ ♪ ♪ I hear the songs of the city of dispossessed ♪ ♪ We'll get it down ♪ ♪ We'll get it ready ♪ ♪ You and me ♪ ♪ We got the king ♪ ♪ We got the king ♪ ♪ We got the empire ♪ ♪ But now I say ♪ ♪ We don't doubt ♪ ♪ We don't stay ♪ ♪ Time to mention ♪ ♪ The creation ♪ ♪ My reflection ♪ ♪ It's almost everything ♪ - All right, let's get into the story. I'm gonna try to tell this story as fast as possible, 'cause there is a lot to it. And I think it's all necessary. It's not like some of the misfit stories where I'm like, we don't have to tell all the stories, but there's a lot to this band, and I think it's all pretty important to discuss. So the group is initially formed in leads by Andrew Eldridge on drums and Gary Marks on guitar during this period, numerous band members, none of them wind up sticking. It's just Eldridge and Marks. They named themselves after a Leonard Cohen song, "Sister of the Mercy," after they saw the film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. So they didn't even know the song before they saw the movie, but then they went with the song name. They bring in bassist Craig Adams and Andrew Eldridge moves off of the drum kit and they brought in a drum machine, which is where Dr. Avalanche comes from. Dr. Avalanche has his own bio on Discogs, and it's great, and I'm just gonna read this really quick. The good doctor is renowned as the only member of the Sisters of Mercy to have remained with Andrew Eldridge throughout the many incidents of in-fighting splits and new lineups. The doctor has gone through a number of reincarnations during his career, beginning life as a boss DR-55, Dr. Riddler machine. The doctor became a Roland drum machine, TR-606, and then a TR-808, and then briefly a TR-909. The doctor transformed into an Oberheim DMX for the band's first album. By the time of Floodland, the doctor became a Yamaha RX-5 to accompany Andy's new computer and sequencer combo. By the time the album was recorded, the doctor transformed into a CHI-S900 sampler. These days, the doctor maintains two forms, and a CHI-S1000 sampler on stage, and an CHI-S3200 in the studio. When not providing the band with their characteristic drum sounds, the doctor also writes the Dear Doctor column on the band's home page. (laughs) The guy from Sisters of Mercy is writing posts on the website pretending to be a drum machine. (laughs) So the doctor name makes sense. The doctor rhythm drum machine was what they had originally, the DR-95. Pretty classic drum machine. Yeah. So they have a bassist, they have a guitarist, and now Andrew is focused on vocals, songwriting, the drum programming, and the production. They start playing their first shows. They cycle in a couple more musicians to kind of fill out their live show. They recruit a second guitarist named Ben Gunn. They began releasing singles, as well as their debut EP, Reptile House. They signed to WEA in 1983. Then Gunn leaves the band due to internal discontent. He was then replaced by Wayne Hussey, who played 12-string electric and acoustic guitar, like that was his main focus on those records at the time. They go to record their first full-length album, first and last and always, but the entire band is basically estranged from Andrew. They write all of the music to form all of the instruments, and then Eldridge comes in and does lyrics and vocals only. He is apparently suffering from some declining health, and then some psychological issues during this time, as well. So Mark squits the band, and they do one tour in 1985. And then Andrew moves to Hamburg, Germany. Hussey goes to Germany to work on a new record with him, but eventually both Hussey and Adams, they both quit the band. Andrew then brings in Patricia Morrison to play bass in the band, and she has a really cool history, too. So Patricia Morrison, she's an American bass player. She founded the bags with Alice Bag. They used to play with bags over their heads until Darby Crash came and yanked the paper bag off of one of their heads during one of their performances. And that ruined their gimmick. She joined the Gun Club in 1982, and she wound up leaving in 1984. She started another band called Fur Bible with Kid Congo of Gun Club and the Kramps, and he would later go play with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Fur Bible then toured with Susie and the Banshees, which is where Andrew Eldridge saw her and asked her to join the sisters. Well, okay. Asked her to join the band. Later, she quits music altogether. She has a lawsuit ongoing. She becomes a motorcycle courier, and she claims she made more money doing that than actually playing in the Sisters of Mercy. She released a solo record in '94, and then later she joined the Dam in 1996 after being friends with them for a really long time. Captain Sensible asks her to join the group. She winds up playing on the album Grave Disorder, which she claims is her favorite performance on an album. She later married Dave Vanean, and she retired from the band in 2005, and they have a child together. So she's still with Dave Vanean. I didn't know that. Yeah. So, Hussie and Adams, they go and started a new project called The Sisterhood, and they are using songs that they were intended to use for the Sisters of Mercy. Andrew Eldridge is pretty mad about this. He's protesting it. He's saying, you know, the name Sisterhood, it's way too similar to the Sisters of Mercy. You were in the Sisters of Mercy, so it's too messy for you to call this the Sisterhood. It's just going to be confusing. So he's mad, and to combat this, he releases a single called Giving Ground under the name The Sisterhood. He blocked Hussie and Adams from using the name Sisterhood by using it first. He also released an album under that name called The Gift, but he does not sing on that record due to contractual obligations with WEA and The Sisterhood not being on Warner. So they eventually changed the name of their band to The Mission, who become a pretty famous man in their own right. Yeah, that's a pretty big man. Yeah. Yeah. These days, Hussie says he thinks Eldridge was right. He's like, he's compared it to if we had some members of The Mission, quit the band and start a band called The Missionaries, you know, that would be confusion, and it wouldn't be very fair to the original band. So he agrees with it now. It is just very funny to me that he just rushed to put something out faster than they did, so he could block the name usage. So after that, he returns to the Sisters of Mercy name, and we get to this corrosion, which was written as a Sisterhood song, but then brought over to the Sisters of Mercy, which is one of the two songs that was composed by Jim Steinman. They had apparently gone into a meeting with Warner A&R with a budget of 50,000 pounds in mind. The label really wasn't sure they made the right call, because there's a story that came down to whoever records and puts up something first is getting the Warner contract. So Eldridge put, I think he puts those Sisterhood tracks out first, so he gets to keep the Warner contract, and then the other guys, they're released and they can go do whatever they want with The Mission. And so the label is kind of like, did we make the right call? Because The Mission has already put out multiple albums and touring a lot by this point. And they go into the meeting, they're like, okay, 50,000 pounds isn't so bad for an album. And then they say, no, no, that's just for one song. They wanted 50,000 pounds to record this corrosion. So Eldridge says Jim Steinman is really, really, is instrumental for them getting the funding for the record. He said the label would say no to the amount of choirs they wanted to use for this, but if Steinman asked, they would get it. Because, you know, he helped make bad out of hell. That record sold shit loads. So yeah, they're going to let him do what he wants. He had originally been pitched to help produce a cover of Abba's Gimme Gimme Gimme because the sister of Mercy did tons of covers and they were doing that cover at the time. But Steinman was way too busy at the time. And then the band broke up like right after that. So this corrosion was him like getting back with Steinman and be like, all right, let's work together. Originally going to be a 12 inch EP under the sisterhood name with a secret American vocalist. Eldridge, like I said, wasn't allowed to sing due to the contract obligations. They supposedly recorded an EP with Alan Vega of suicide, but then never released it. So the idea is maybe Alan Vega was going to be the secret singer on that. But they decided to shelve it because the sisterhood stuff was not very well liked. So for this corrosion, they used six background singers and 40 members of the New York Coral Society for this corrosion and the song Dominion, which is the other song Jim Steinman produced. So we mentioned how Eldridge does all the performances and Patricia plays no bass on the record. She only does backing vocals. Eldridge states this because she had writer's block and he couldn't even convince her to pick up the bass at the time. She doesn't really fight this too much. She says that everyone knows at the time that sisters of Mercy is Andrew Eldridge's band and everyone else who plays on the records is just kind of like buried in liner notes. She is credited under her real name, which is not Patricia. I didn't write down a real name. She's in like the thank you, special thanks section. My guess is he just didn't want her to play. I think he hired her for her look because she has a classic goth look. If you see pictures of her, she's on the album cover for floodlands. She's on the right. She's present in all of the music videos from this time period. She's very much a visual component of the sisters of Mercy and kind of essential for their goth look. I think he didn't really care so much about her performance as he just wanted her around for the aesthetics. Yeah, yeah. The classic move there. Yeah, let's get the cool girl bass player. We don't care what she does. Yeah, yeah. They don't do a tour for this record because Andrew says this isn't meant to be played live, though they do play on top of the pops, doing the Pantomime thing. They released this corrosion dominion in Lucretia as singles. Lucretia is apparently about Patricia. Don't know why. I mean, I guess it's like kind of she's like his muse is kind of the idea, which makes sense again. All about the looks. Yeah. She leaves the band in 1989 claiming she went unpaid by Andrew Eldridge and that's where the lawsuit came from. And yeah, they continued going with a new lineup, released the record called Vision Thing. They book a tour with public enemy, but a lot of shows are canceled by the venues citing fears that the black and white fans won't get along. Yeah. I don't imagine public enemy fans and sister to mercy fans are the same people at this time. Maybe now more so, but not back then. And then the tour is like canceled halfway through just outright canceled the rest of the tour. More band members leave. The label moves them to their imprint East West. They're dropped by their US distribution. They play some shows in 93 and then go on strike against the label. It's not exactly clear what Andrew is on strike for. It's kind of assumed it's just more financial issues like that tour fell through. They lost their distribution. They're not getting the money from the label to do more stuff. And making their music is very expensive. They're using a lot of money to make these albums. So despite him doing most of it, yeah, right. It's production is really what all the money is going towards on their records. So he still owes two more studio albums for the label. They eventually terminate the contract in 1997 after they agreed to accept material that he recorded under the name SSV. They took it without listening to it first, which supposedly is techno like drone with mumbling vocals. Yeah, these these were never officially released. There are leaks of them, but the label heard it labels like fine will do that. You're out of your contract and then probably listen to it and said, this is garbage. We can't put it out. So they're released. And then as soon as that happens, they go, hey, sisters of mercy are back and we're going to write some singles, and work on a new record because it takes us a long time. But don't worry. We'll get there. They have never released a new album or new music. So they do still tour. They are a touring band. They were just here in Charlotte like two months ago and I kind of wish I'd gone. But that is that is the main story of the sisters of mercy. It's just a big, messy band around one guy in particular. 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We wrap up our yearly Halloween Spooktacular this week with a little gothic rock. We are talking about Floodland, the second album by The Sisters of Mercy
