Archive for June, 2005
The Best New Goth-Rock Album of 1992
June 23rd, 2005
Billy Corgan’s new solo album, The Future Embrace is, truly, the best new goth-rock album of 1992.
But….”Wait a sec,” you say. “It’s 2005, not 1992. What the hell are you talking about? Last time I checked, Billy Corgan doesn’t have a working time machine, so….”
The Future Embrace is a wonderful collection of simple, but beautiful, songs revolving around drum-machine beats, heavily-reverbed guitars, moaning bass, and melancholy lyrics delivered in Corgan’s distinctive whine. This isn’t just another underproduced Zwan album or “Smashing Pumpkins” record aiming to recapture the grunge-chord-meets-orchestration power of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness”. This album has a heart…and a production ideal straight out of 1992.
The guitars are very reminiscent of those on The Cure’s Wish: melodic, slathered in reverb and delay, and understated–there’s very little distortion at all on this album. The drums sound like they were sampled from an old Big Electric Cat album, or perhaps Rosetta Stone (minus the fuzzbox and the overdrive). The bass is heavy and smooth. And the lyrics are…well, wistful. All in all, very suggestive of The Cure in the days before Robert Smith grew fat and snarly. The Future Embrace could very well have been released by EMI or Cleopatra Records in 1992…long before they grew fat and snarly, as well.
And speaking of Robert Smith: he does background vocals on “To Love Somebody,” a superbly gothed-out ethereal cover of the Bee-Gees…but I’ll be damned if I can identify his voice beneath Corgan’s. Doesn’t matter, though, because the song is just a beautiful cover infinitely superior to the original, which I always found too saccharine for my tastes.
This is definitely Corgan’s best post-Pumpkins work to date. Check it out!
Hammerjack(off): or, Cyberpunk is as Dead as Industrial
June 23rd, 2005
Waaaaaaaaaaaay back when in the Year 1990, while I was still in highschool learning how to kludge together a simple databasing program in BASIC on one of my school’s ancient Apple ][e’s, I discovered - through the auspices of a friend of mine much more in touch with the audiovisual underground than I was thanks to his involvement in our school district’s “gifted” program–two artistic milieuxs which would come to define my own personal aesthetic for the next decade: cyberpunk fiction and industrial music. More specifically, William Gibson’s seminal Neuromancer, and Ministry’s The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste.
At the time, that book and that album were like microscopic bombs smuggled into my brain and detonated, shaking loose a lot of ideals and concepts that had been drifting formlessly in my head for a while, and literally opening up another world for my imagination to explore…one saturated with the chromeplated, circuit-ridden fascination of The Future that I’d come to adore by my exposure to lots of sci-fi and Gary Numan’s music, but at the same time filthied over with the everpresent shadow of human greed, apocalyptic disaster, and eternal nastiness that even then I recognized to be a constant Sword of Damocles dangling over this planet. Cyberpunk fiction melded the gritty grime of 1940s Film Noir and 1980s post-apocalyptic survivalism with ultrahightech visions of a transhuman world in which the line between Man and Machine had all but vanished, and life was lived hard, fast, and brutal along that razorblade-edged interface. Ministry’s music the same thing in a different medium: it brought together the rusty, crunching growl of metal guitars together with futuristic samples, voices, and a metric ton of Very Bad Attitude to create an album that…well, it wasn’t metal, exactly, but it wasn’t synthpop: it was street music for the world of Neuromancer - screeching sounds and voices sliding hard, fast, and brutal along the razorblade-edge of what was, in 1990, just beginning to be called “alternative music.”
Cyberpunk and industrial were perfectly complementary visions of one another, one ingested by the eyes, the other by the ears. In the heady glory of discovery, when both forms of art were completely new to me and unbelievably exciting for being so amazingly different than everything else I was reading/listening to, I went nuts and sought out Gibson’s other novels, the collection Mirrorshades, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling, Walter John Williams - and everything else I could find from Ministry, Front Line Assembly, Skinny Puppy, Tool…anything and everything that could be considered either “cyberpunk” or “industrial.” Even then, I was discovering that amid the beautiful shards of heat-ruined mirrorplastic and the scrapyard of sampled beats and distortion, there was Good Stuff and Lame Stuff: Good Stuff was original, crafty, and shared certain genre elements with its fellow stories or albums, sure, but always did something new and interesting with those basic core concepts; Lame Stuff, obviously, just ripped off the basic core concepts of cyberpunk/industrial and just churned out generic xeroxes of much better works. For example, if I could say, “Wow, this is like Count Zero only cooler!“…well, Good Stuff. On the other hand, if I came away from a book or an album thinking, “OK, this was just like Count Zero,” Lame Stuff.
I never imagined that, a mere fifteen years later, both genres–once so fecund and promising–would be so exhausted, so saturated with The Lame, as to have become parodies of themselves. But one need look no further than the latest Big Promotion Savior-of-Cyberpunk novel, Hammerjack, by Marc D. Giller, and just about every contemporary “industrial” band’s work to realize that both genres are dead…and that anything being put out these days under the monikers “cyberpunk” or “industrial” is little more than a wretched, zombified revenant of past glories recycled one time too many.
Tom Piccirilli: Newskool Southern Gothic
June 16th, 2005
Tom Piccirilli is one of my favorite members of the latest crop of contemporary horror-fiction masters (along with Caitlin R. Kiernan and Thomas Ligotti). I’ve followed his work since I stumbled upon A Lower Deep several years ago, and was instantly enthralled by Piccirilli’s uniquely surreal, oftimes almost Burroughs-esque style and the surprisingly creepy way in which he uses such disjointed narratives to revive age-old horror/Gothic fiction tropes such as the evil necromancer and undercover Satanists that have otherwise become parodies of themselves in myriad lesser authors’ hands. Horror is one of those genres which, by this point in its evolution, has pretty much exploited every possible plot, every possible source of human fear, and every possible constellation of characters: one need only take a quick glance at the legion of Leisure Horror paperbacks clotting the horror section of your nearest Borders to realize that almost every damn one of them is the nth rehash of the Haunted House Story, the Demonic Baby Story, the Psycho Killer Story, the Walking Dead Story, or what have you. Most horror writers today are content with endlessly regurgitating the same ol’ plots in the same ol’ ways because, really, the horror genre has become established: its readership expects certain content and will gladly pay for it, no matter how many times its rehashed and rehashed and rehashed.
Piccirilli’s work, then, just like everyone else’s, deals with one or another of these established themes - in the case of A Lower Deep, with various -mancers and their Faustian bargains for power - but Piccirilli’s will stand the test of time, and will eventually find its way into representative anthologies of early-21st-Century and late-20th-Century horror fiction, because his work takes these old, wornout tales and infuses them with a whole new unlife by scrapping so many of the genre’s default stylistic conventions (the barely-serviceable, straightforward prose and the mechanically-logical unfolding of plot) and throwing tales at you clad in amorphous clouds of surreal characters, dreamscapes that intertwine seamlessly with the waking world, plots within plots, subtle details that prove to have vast importance, landscapes that exist in no specific place or time but seem to inhabit the archetypal realm….His work doesn’t leap at your from the pages of his novels and scream “BOO!” then leave you giggling because It’s Just A Stupid Story, but seeps of the page like a hot, sour mist that leaves your skin clammy and haunts you with a shivery melancholy and an indefinable sense of dread.
In other words, Piccirilli succeeds brilliantly at the Lovecraftian dictum that horror is first and foremost about atmosphere - because even in the 1910s ol’ Grandpa Theobald had identified the fact that there were only so many possible plots and storylines to follow, and that the only way to generate a good weird tale was by amping up the weirdness of it, tweaking its atmospherics, until despite the silliness of the story it leaves you shaken. Gigantic ancient gods rising up from the seafloor to devour humankind? Pshaw! Hardcore materialist that he was, Lovecraft didn’t believe a word of it. It was just a story. And yet…who hasn’t been genuinely creeped out by “The Call of Cthulhu”? Lovecraft’s sense of style and his expert layering of scene upon scene, each growing stranger and more outre at every turn, nevertheless summoned that blubbery god from the depths and left every reader shuffling away from the story feeling like a moon is about to fall from the sky and crush him.
Piccirilli’s work is not as cosmic as HPL’s - in fact, Piccirilli’s fiction is surprisingly earthy, involving casts of Everyday Joes and Everyday Miseries….But much like Thomas Beckett could take Everyday Joes and their Everyday Language and build genuinely unsettling, out-there works like Murphy and Molloy, Piccirilli creates Lovecraftian morasses of threat from very mundane matters. And whereas HPL built all of his fiction within the New England Gothic mode, Piccirilli employs the Southern Gothic.
Numanity!
June 1st, 2005
Where the hell are we all going? What’s to become of this goofball species known to themselves as “humans” in the near and far future? It’s certainly possible we’ll render ourselves extinct, or at least destroy civilization, through the usual combination of environmental damage, war, resource depletion, and so forth…but despite my oftimes dismal view of humanity as a whole, I don’t see the possibility of us extincting ourselves to be that great. Sure, the future will no doubt see a drastic change in human numbers and human biological forms, but I believe that intelligent life on earth has reached the point where total extinction is possible but highly unlikely: even if an oldskool nuclear war were to break out and eliminate most human civilizations overnight, there’d still be survivors scrabbling amid the ruins, and tons of left-behind technology to analyse, re-engineer, and use to start over at some time in the future. Intelligent life on earth will around for a while, yet, but “humanity” will not. Why? Because we’re already in the process of becoming something else. Evolution teaches us that there are no such things as ultimately stable species–every species can, at the drop of a gene, begin to morph into a wholly new species better suited to its situation. To think that our species will remain the same forever is moronic. To wonder what we’ll become in the future is fun.
MSNBC.com recently ran an intriguing feature entitled “Human Evolution at the Crossroads” detailing five possible avenues of development open to our species in the future. All of these speculative avenues were dreamed up by credible evolutionary biologists or, in some cases, health professionals…but all are not created equal. Briefly, these five possible avenues are:
- “Unihumans”: a monlithic species in which all racial differences have been eliminated thanks to bioengineering and interbreeding of people from all continents.
- “Suvivalistians”: rugged, hardcore, tough-as-nails humans (practically a rebirth of Neanderthals) produced via the species’ transition through a major catastrophe (asteroid strike, war, etc.).
- “NUMANS!”: genetically-designed, physically “perfect” superhumans immune to virtually all disease and biological difficulties.
- “Cyborgs”: the familiar cyberpunk melding of human and technology.
- “Astrans”: humans engineered for interplanetary and interstellar travel/colonization/exploitation.
So, Pegritz, you ask. You’re virtually obsessed with human evolution (particularly technological), and you’re a total sci-fi geek as well…plus, you’ve read just about every decent sci-fi novel ever written concerning human evolution–so which of those MSNBC scenarios do you think the most likely to come about?”
