The Naked and the Dead chime in next with female vocals slightly reminiscent of Gitane Demone. Hints of Killing Joke (check out the awesome drumming!) and the Sisters of Mercy permeate the band’s sound. As the internet has enabled a retroactive inspection of a lot of this style of music - music that in the 80s could only be found by being supremely in the know or by scouring record shops or zines for hours - I hope that Of a Mesh’s profile is raised as an important US postpunk band. Of a Mesh have always been one of the most fascinating US dark postpunk bands to me - they really seem to have never gotten their day in the sun. ![]() Sludgy, dark, and depressive vocals echo out over a musical landscape that is at turns melodic, dissonant, and dirge-y. The amazing Of a Mesh (see the video at the beginning of this write-up) are probably the most direct sonic link between New York’s deathrock scene and The Swans, or 4AD bands like Mass. Lots of flanger effects on the guitar and tribal, heavy-on-the-toms drumming, as was common in the UK’s dark postpunk scene at the time. The second track is a heavier, stompier number also by Scarecrow, a kind of strange cross between Siouxsie’s “Spellbound” and the UK gothy postpunk (or so-called “positive punk”) of bands like Brigandage or Blood and Roses. The opening track is Scarecrow’s “Blood in My Dreams,” an atmospheric gothic rock song that recalls Join Hands-era Siouxsie and the Banshees. NYC’s mid-80s dark postpunk band Of a Mesh, in fact, resemble a lot of earlier Swans (mixed with maybe some Bauhaus) material at their best. The no-wave scene that produced Lydia Lunch and The Swans should be seen on the same continuum as the bands featured on this anthology. The city’s shadowy concrete-and-steel canyons seem to breed bands with darker inclinations. In reality, starting with the Velvet Underground, dark music has been no stranger to New York. This compilation remedies that longstanding problem. ![]() And while California’s and England’s gothy postpunk scenes have been exhaustively documented, an adequate cataloging of NYC’s similar scene in the 1980s has been much overdue. ![]() In other words, it comes from scene participants themselves not outsiders. Masterfully compiled by Joe Truck Kasher and Greg Fasolino (of NYC’s deathrock band The Naked and the Dead), this compilation has the added benefit of being produced by folks that were active in NYC’s postpunk heyday. Released late last year (2012) on Black Scorpio Records, the record fleshes out an oft-overlooked part of the 80’s American postpunk phenomenon - New York City’s lively gothic and deathrock scene. 1 compilation is only available on vinyl. So far, the excellent Dark New York: Gotham City’s Post Punk, Goth, & Deathrock Bands 1983-1988, Vol.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |