Black Eyes & Neckties
Apparition!
Clickpop
By Jose Fritz
Vocalist Bradley Horror wakes most mornings and hacks up spongy, bloody phlegm. It’s the screaming. As he said in a recent interview “I'll probably not be able to speak when I am sixty years old, but it'll be worth it.” That roaring, throaty scream only comes from the epiglottis pressing into the arytenoids at the base of the pharynx. His technique is technically poor, but the sound is powerful and probably growing a set of throat polyps.
Shock-rock was preceded by decades of theatrics in rock n’ roll: Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson and Screaming Jay Hawkins before them. It’s a long, slowly evolving tradition of young men with guitars in desperate need of attention. Horror-punk is just another branch off that tree, The Misfits, Coffin Caddies, Murderdolls, AFI, Wednesday 13 and others. The list goes on. My point is that this is a totally legitimate movement. The problem is that most of the movement is total crap.
Black Eyes and Neck Ties is not crap. Their musical alliance within the genre is more to the Misfits and to Jay Hawkins. It’s more about rock n’ roll and less about mumbled odes to classic zombie cinema. Very little of the album gets mired in spooky accoutrements.
Cuts like “Night after Night” trade shouted hardcore chants with noisy guitar effects. Hardcore chants appear in the middle of Bela Lugosi organ chords. In the studio that ethic came out. They recorded on reel-to-reel instead of Pro-tools. They kept it simple, a minimum pf overdubs, like a vintage 70’s garage band. The low end is a tad muddy but ferrous oxide is like that. It helps deliver them as a convincing live act. There’s nothing here they couldn’t do live. All you have to do is imagine the grease paint, smoke machines and fake blood.
Collectively it makes them about as subtle as the Newlydeads. You have to respect that. But the band’s press dances around a key adjective. There is an elephant in the orthography. Syllogisms are made in ill-fated attempts to evade the pachyderm in the periodical. Euphemisms include: horror, dark, theatrical, creepy, gloomy, spooky, and eerie. All of this effort is to avoid the word “goth.”
It’s a bogus, heavily weighted word. To most minds there were only two waves of goth in the modern sense. There were those clove smoking kids in the 80’s that wore white face paint and liked the Cure and Bauhaus. Then in the late 90’s there were the ones that listened to Korn, wore bondage gear and didn’t bathe. It’s a dangerous, dangerous word. I sling it around freely because, like the priesthood and politicians, there are no consequences for music critics.
|
