Consistently haunting along the dark wave scene since 1999, Canadian band The Birthday Massacre has recently released their 9th album Fascination. Having dropped on February 18, 2022, the entire album is a beautiful marriage of the ethereal vocals of it’s lead singer, Sara “Chibi” Taylor and the dark synthetic sound that the band is so well known for.
Fascination delivers a similar feel to the bands prior albums that came before, and this is not something grounded in the negative. A continuing, slow evolutionary sound that they have spent time mastering through past albums such as Hide and Seek, Imagica, and 2020’s Diamonds. The tracks of Fascination alternate between slower paced, more romantically themed songs, and a harder, darker sound that would be easily at home echoing out over a goth clubs dance floor. I don’t think I’ve ever found a musical talent whose sound so perfectly corresponds to the art of their album covers. Fascination “sounds” like being led into mysterious new surroundings by some fae child under a violet hued night sky.
It’s title track, Fascination, starts out with the twinkling of keyboard keys, popping into existence like stars at night, before the rest of the song envelopes you with Chibis vocals extolling her new obsession. It sets the thematic feeling of the album overall and is a powerful starter. Dreams of You, One More Time, and Once Again are more romantic in their subject matter, hitting on both love found and lost while Cold Lights,Like Fear, Like Love, and Precious Hearts each come on stronger, and are far more likely to be deployed from a DJ’s arsenal.
A few stand out songs – Stars and Satellites is definitely one of the stronger tracks, and while starting out with a slower beat, boasts some powerful guitar riffs and Chibis vocals help paint a celestial soundscape. My favorite ballad is it’s closing one, the aptly named The End of All Stories. It’s the slowest piece on the album, something I am oddly predisposed to in most cases, and brings together all the good elements that the band has to offer to allow a slow fade out for the albums end. The beautiful vocals, powerful guitars, and those wonderful synths which for me play off a nostalgia for bygone eras of music. I miss the 80’s and am grateful that it’s sound lives on in albums like this.
Altogether, Fascination will offer fans of The Birthday Massacre another lovely helping of everything that made them fall in love with the band in the first place. Yes, it does tend to sound a great deal like what came before in their discography, but if something isn’t broke why try and reinvent it? Putting this album on will net exactly what the world could use more of – beautifully gloomy music being performed by beautifully gloomy Canadian musicians.
It is from gloom-laden antiquity that the Jean-Marc Lederman Experience brings forth the latest compilation album, The Raven, featuring some of the most well known names in the Gothic Industrial soundscape. 13 tracks inspired and adapted from the works of Byron, Shelley, Poe, and even cinema from the Classic Hollywood era, this album has something that will appeal to all tastes and appetites, no matter how dark.
Jean-Marc Lederman
The man behind the project is Jean-Marc Lederman, a Belgian better known as Jimmy-Joe Snark III of The Weatherman. A man who’s placed his name on a variety of projects throughout the last few decades Lederman has been refining his craft since he was 18, and was first inspired by electronic luminary Brian Eno. Some notable projects of his include Gene Loves Jezebel, The The, and Fad Gadget. On this album, he has brought together some great minds and song-scribes such as Christopher Hall, Mari Kattman, and Emileigh Rohn.
Mari Kattman of Helix opens the album with “The Cold Heart Slept Below”. The track, the title of which alludes to The Telltale Heart, opens with a backdrop of a clock ticking steadily before the main beat and Kattman’s entrance. The track has a wonderful, almost dark-jazz type element that marries well with Kattmans vocals.
Conrad Aikens poem “The Vampire” is the inspiration of the second track of the same name by Stabbing Westward. Christopher Hall conjures bloodthirsty fiends and the struggle to escape them which is destined to be a fan favorite on the album. There’s no hint of cringe-inducing melodrama here, only the story of a creature that is going to rip you apart and eat what it finds inside. “The Vampire” would be equally at home on any Halloween playlist or any other time of the year on the dance floor of whatever Goth-Industrial night is smart and lucky enough to play it. Stabbing Westward never disappoints.
Unique among the tracks are numbers 3 and 13 respectively as these are not merely inspired by past works but adapt them completely to musical form. Track 3 “She Walks in Beauty” performed by Mark Hocking‘s band Mesh is a full adaptation of the Lord Byron poem of the same name. The albums final track is a musical adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” by Magnesium Burn‘s Christina Z. Both of these are fun to listen to and amount more to a reading of the aforementioned works set to music done in each artists style. Similar to the two aforementioned tracks is “Frankenstein” by Dr. Strangefryer. The lyrics of the song are made up of prose from Mary Shelley’s book. The accompanying industrial music fits well with the scene of Dr. Frankenstein witnessing his creature awaken for the first time.
Track 9 features Sound’s and Shadows own Duchess. Ken Magerman, and his band Amaranth. “Crushing Weight” is the bands take on Poe’s “The Raven” rebooted as a modern day panic attack brought about by the phantom bird visiting an introverted and reclusive Poe. Magerman‘s echoing vocals eerily convey the mood and essence of the man’s frantic uncertainty as he is buried beneath the inescapable truth the bird portends.
Stefan Netschio provides a personal nostalgia trip for me on track 11, “Smouldering Corpse In The Mourning Sun”. An avid listener of Stefan Netschio‘s band Beborn Beton since my teenage years he has long been able to bring a darkly elegant sound to every project he is a part of.
Emileigh Rohn
Emileigh Rohn, or Chiasm as she is better known in the Goth-Industrial world, sings a rendition of “Pretty Fly” in track 12. Originating during the classic age of Cinema in the 1955 horror film “The Night of the Hunter”, this spooky lullaby is sung by a little girl named Pearl to her brother as they drift down a river at night, pursued by a serial killer preacher. Rohn‘s rendition of it is just as dreamlike and spooky and remains my favorite track on the entire album. At only 2 minutes and 16 seconds the track is the shortest on the album but is not to be overlooked.
Beyond this, there is a lot more to the album, the stories it has tell tell definitely make it worth a listen. Ancient poems and macabre tales from the past conveyed through the filter of modern day dark wave artists is a natural enough pairing in itself, but Jean-Marc taps into something special here. Edgar Allen Poe and his works have long been inspiration for the thematically darker artists that have come after, but my personal intrigue was stoked by the other sources that were drawn upon for the creation of this album, and it is in their adaptation that it’s charm truly lies.
Interview With Jean-Marc Lederman:
James: What was it that inspired the other sources of the album beyond Poe?
JM: I wanted to do something darker than my usual work and had the idea to take several writings from the goth authors to oblige me to turn more somber. I was of course well on point about goth and goth culture (for Christ’s sake, Peter Murphy slept in my mother’s bed, she wasn’t in it, back late 80’s) but started to read and document myself more on the subject of goth in art and literature, which is the way I always do when I start a new album: I want to dig more into the album concept, and doing so I learn and discover more about it, its surroundings and the areas I could expand to. The concept always evolves from a genuine interest I develop about something or a certain frame of work I want me to discipline into. Or an idea I find funny and a possible vehicle for a cool album. And at the end of the adventure, I want my listeners, the artists involved and myself to have a solid, bold and interesting album to dive in. So, I compiled texts from the usual suspects (Mary Shelley, Oscar Wilde, …) but also less known authors like the US author Percy Byshee Shelley. But some are total outsiders of the known authors, like the one Jean-Luc Demeyer (F242, of course) picked up: a very unknown early dark ages french poet. But I didn’t want the influence to be only about texts, but also insights from the other arts, like cinema (Night of The Hunter, horror movies, etc…) or even architecture and paintings. Eventually, the scope moved to be about dark sides, being them in us, in nature, in mythology…So, while it started being about goth culture, it ended up being much larger
James: Were they pieces that resonated with you personally?
JM: Yes, I cannot work for something I’m not passionate about. All the pieces are equally resonating with me even though I do have some tracks I favor because there the magic really worked: “Pretty Fly” with the very talented Emileigh Rohn (from US band Chiasm) is a good example. I have wanted to cover that song from that incredible movie for years and Emileigh just nailed it in a single take. But all tracks are special to me: I wouldn’t put them in the album if it wasn’t resonating strongly in me.
James: How much input were the artists given in their contributions to this album?
JM: Pretty much all control. I would contact singers and ask them if they wanted to participate. They had really quite a lot of freedom, the main idea being for them to sing or recite something which would represent some gothic /dark aspects for them. If they were game, I would then send them a poem or a writing and the music customized for them. Some would jump in straight away, some would ask for a different text (or different music) so I would let them choose a text or even write one on their own. I wouldn’t dare have an artist being unhappy about his work: they have the last call on the mixes of course. With some it’s very easy, they love it and it’s wrapped in a few days, for some it takes a few “trial and errors” before we get to a mix we are both happy with.
James: Was there much discussion with them regarding the songs they were to craft and the individual inspirational sources?
JM: The texts were only proposals and so was the music I would created for them. I think artists like to work with me because they know I’ll tailor things around them. One of the main reviews feedback I have from my collaborative works is how the song and the singer are so embedded into each other: one can really feel it’s been fine tuned around the voice and the end result is strong because of that. It’s not a voice being dropped in a song, it’s a coherent musical universe.
James: Or were they involved in the selection of the topic?
JM: The freedom given to the artists make them very proactive: some created their own lyrics (Lis Van Den Akker, Azam Ali,Chrystopher Hall, Ken Magerman,Jim Semonik, Stefan Netschio), some glued very much to the text (Christina Z and her dazzling performance of The Rave (Poe) which was in fact the 1st track done on the album, Mari Kattman, Elena Alice Fossi, Mark Hockings, Dr Strangefryer, Jean-Luc De Meyer)
James: Given the sheer amount of darker literature throughout history, were there song ideas that were cut and would you ever consider doing a sequel album to this one, inspired by other literary or cinematic works?
JM: Oh yes, there are ideas that weren’t used. It always happens when you embark on projects like this: you search, you find, you complete…but sometimes it just doesn’t work, whether it is the text or the music but it’s the rule of the game: not everything can work out, you need to allow yourself space for failures in order to achieve your vision/the vision of the other artists. A sequel would be so not like me 🙂
You can purchase the album on bandcamp from COP International.
