Author: luciazelenia

Educator by day, moon child by night. Formerly the queen of the Crypt. Currently draining the inkwells for SuperChatParty, Sounds & Shadows, and more.

In This Moment’s ‘Blood’ Serves as a Linchpin Record, Stands Up Ten Years Later

on By

In This Moment is one of the few bands I have something of a hipster attitude towards; as in, I’ve been a fan of theirs since before they were cool. Around the time of 2010’s A Star-Crossed Wasteland, the band’s creative direction took a turn for the more theatrical. Their stage shows became sweeping productions, with backup dancers, set pieces, and enough costume changes to make Lady Gaga turn her head. In some respects, frontwoman Maria Brink became a pop diva with a metal backing band.

By the time their 2012 album Blood was released, the New York-based band hit their stride. Though a couple years off from what the title track of their 2014 album Black Widow would call “a hellpop groove,” Blood was a potent mix of alternative, gothic, and industrial metal with a healthy dose of pop sensibility and delivery. This watershed release launched Maria Brink and her conspirators into the metal stratosphere, even if a couple of tracks have been overperformed by any drag performer trying to show her darker side.

Don’t worry, we’ll get to that.

Sixteen-year-old me couldn’t cope with Maria using a hands-free mic onstage…

Setting the opener “Rise with Me” aside, I can remember hearing “Blood” for the first time, after having been such a fan of their previous effort A Star-Crossed Wasteland. This song… didn’t feel like In This Moment. It didn’t even really feel metal, even in the chorus, but rather a pop song, lyrically dealing in the hard knocks and the abuse one takes on their way to getting what they want. Guitar solos aren’t frequently employed in their music, but the bluesy, soulful lead that comes in the bridge is a highlight. 

“Adrenalize” is a full-throttle groove metal masterpiece, barreling forth with a machine gun kick drum pattern fit for any windmill headbanging needs. The verses gallop with an one-note riff that gets little licks and flourishes added as we inch towards the chorus. Riff after riff, this song is just a kickass time from moment one to moment done. 

“Whore” might be the band’s most recognizable song, especially since the inception of Tiktok. Even over the title track, it’s the most streamed song from this album, at least on Spotify. It’s a pop song wearing metal clothes, but it is a powerful anthem that reclaims a word used to degrade and deface. Are they breaking new ground, musically speaking? Not by a long shot, but when a woman is front and center of a metal band and letting the children have it, bringing a different energy along with it.

Perhaps the most straightforward metal song on the album is “You’re Gonna Listen,” featuring a ripper of a guitar solo from ex-Ozzy Osbourne axeman Jake E. Lee. It’s a punch in the face that closes the energetic first act of the record. The interlude “It Is Written” centers around music as a lover, estranged or otherwise, as a game-changer. In “Adrenalize,” it helped Maria feel like a god. Here, it does so even more, and we’re not even halfway through. 

Where there is pain, there is healing, and “Burn” is a painful song, having been written after Maria found out her partner cheated on her. The pacing slows to a crackling flame’s, taking everything with it at a deliberate pace. Heavy and visceral as it is, the composition is so simple, with the piano riff rising above the conflagration. Following is “Scarlet,” which I’m frankly surprised didn’t come out as a single, as it bridges the gap between past and present In This Moment while still being infinitely accessible. Maria is able to explore her full vocal range, from her guarded lows to her lightly-fried highs. 

“Aries” gives us a moment to let us up while preaching redemption and salvation, before “From the Ashes” gives us another nod to classic ITM. What comes next is a one-two punch of the power-pop anthem “Beast Within” and the war cry “Comanche.” The pace slows for “The Blood Legion,” which is misspelled on the back of some of the physical releases of the record, and the final interlude “11:11” reminds us it’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.

That statement indeed applies to the album as a whole. There’s plenty to love here, and while Blood isn’t quite my favorite In This Moment record, the roots of what would follow on subsequent releases had to start somewhere. The band sought to find that aforementioned hellpop groove, and this was the test drive for it. Clearly something worked, as the band’s style has developed more in that pop-metal vein, right up through their most recent studio LP Mother. This transitional record has a lot going for it, and serves as the movement from maiden to mother for Maria Brink and her band.

Also, as far as the band’s cover of “Closer” which appears on the special edition release… it’s not bad. As sex-positive as this record and this phase of the band is, it makes sense to cover one of the horniest songs of all time, and while it doesn’t come close to the original article, you can’t blame them for trying.

Yes, I’ve Lost My Mind: t.A.T.u’s “All The Things She Said” as a Contentious LGBTQ+ Anthem

on By

Before I knew my own identity as a pansexual transgender woman, before I really even knew what it was to even question my own identity, I heard that voice while watching WrestleMania XIX. 

Yes, I’ve lost my mind…

Out walked then-Women’s Champion Victoria, accompanied by ECW legend Stevie Richards, to defend her title in a Triple Threat match against Jazz, another ECW alum and bonafide badass, and Trish Stratus, one of the greatest performers in the Divas era of women’s wrestling. I recognized the melody right away, as she had a generic, legally distinct version of the song for her entrance in WWE SmackDown! Here Comes the Pain, but the real McCoy hit different for reasons aside from the obvious. While the version she used jumped from the chorus right to the synth solo, there was something different about this song. Teenage me, hormones and all but with the kind of sensitivity that comes from being raised by three mothers, couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

Then, upon learning the name of the song, I looked up the music video for “All The Things She Said,” Russian title “Ya Shosla S Uma,” by t.A.T.u.

The original music video, directed by Ivan Shapovalov.

My reaction was twofold. A muted part of me was like “woo, girls kissing, this is great!” Because what teenage boy wouldn’t think that? But there was more to the story. The song was about forbidden love, about the kind of affection that some believe should only happen behind closed doors, if at all. It’s about processing feelings and mixing them with what you’ve been raised to believe, and given that I was confirmed Lutheran in a tiny Podunk town with 1,000 residents and six churches in it, things hit a bit close to home. And again, this is before I figured out a damn thing about myself.

I’ve gone on record saying that wrestling has introduced me to so many bands, and in particular the soundtracks for the SmackDown! vs RAW games helped to shape my musical tastes into what they are today. I was at the point in my musical journey where I was past the point of hating the popular bands just because, and was branching out beyond just heavy metal. But still, this 2000s pop anthem was hitting differently.

Musically speaking, it’s a four-chord pop song. D flat, C, F, A flat. Guitars, synths, a drum machine, a simple bass line. The lyrics, as mentioned earlier, are concerned with what the others think, what am I thinking, and am I losing my mind? This is rather pedestrian in pop music today, but cast your mind back to 2002, when this song first was released. This is over a decade before Obergefell v Hodges, this is a few years before the blatant rainbow capitalism we see today. Hell, we were only just starting to see LGBTQ-themed media like The L Word and Queer as Folk, and those were on premium cable.

As far as its use in WWE goes, it was used while Victoria was a heel (villain). In an interview with Fightful, she revealed that WWE only licensed the song for a year, beginning with the Armageddon pay-per-view in December 2002. After that, and on streaming services (curse you, licensing fees), a generic soundalike is used in the song’s place. On the May 24th, 2004 edition of RAW, well into Victoria’s babyface (hero) run, she began using Hood$tars’ song “Don’t Mess With,” featuring a then-unknown Nicki Minaj laying down bars. 

Victoria entering to “All The Things She Said” on the April 19, 2004 episode of WWE Monday Night RAW. This would be one of the last times she would enter to the theme.

So is this WWE using the old trope of a villain being different, ostracized, or something that we dare not speak out loud? Granted, in the Divas era of wrestling, there was always a nudge and wink of girl on girl action for titillation’s sake, but there’s not much in Victoria’s WWE run that would suggest her playing for the other team. To her credit, Lisa Marie Varon, the woman behind Victoria, was afraid that the song would cast her persona as a lesbian, especially given how some fans tend to see the characters on TV as dialed-up representations of the people portraying them. When WWE made her visuals in her entrance Titantron video creepy and unsettling, it gave a bit more credence to the evil lesbian trope. Varon was a bodybuilder and a fitness model before turning to wrestling, a point that was used in her first storyline in WWE. 

By pointing this out, I don’t mean to demonize the WWE or its creative team, but I have to wonder if they were really paying attention to what they were setting Varon up for. Yes, it’s a great song they gave her, but there’s far more than meets the eye, especially the one coming out of her hand in said video.

The unsettling, Exorcist-like TitanTron video for Victoria, ca. 2003.

The irony here is that, the same year that WWE licensed “All The Things She Said,” they landed in hot water following a “commitment ceremony” between Billy Gunn and Chuck Palumbo that was admitted to be a publicity stunt. The company even got GLAAD involved to do things right by the community. But I digress.

“All The Things She Said” can’t be talked about without mentioning the controversy which befell the band. A year after the duo split with their producer and Cowell-esque figure Ivan Shapovalov, the jig was up, as it was revealed that Yulia Volkova not only had a boyfriend, but was pregnant. And twenty years later, the feelings of the Russian government towards LGBTQ+ folks are… the less said, the better. But were the girls just using the lesbian storyline for attention? After all, going back to her Fightful interview, Victoria herself didn’t want to represent a community she wasn’t a part of, and didn’t want to be accused of being a “fake lesbian,” much in the way that Yulia and cohort Lena Katina were.

In an interview with The Independent in 2008, Lena shed some light on the intent behind the song, stating:

“If boys like boys or girls like girls, so what? We’re all people – we tried to show people that there’s no need to pressurise or ostracise people because of it. The situation is still bad but it has got better.”

Yulia then throws her two cents in, adding:

“It was our teenage years. You have to try everything. It felt at the time like it was real love – it felt like there was nothing more serious… Now when you look back at it of course it’s ridiculous. We still sleep in the same bed sometimes. But it doesn’t mean we stay up all night having sex,” she says. I look the other way, trying my best not to conjure up a mental image. “We just have very close, friendly relations. Though we do still sometimes get drunk and kiss each other. But it’s just fun between friends.”

Before we go dismissing the girls as faking it till they made it – and given the lasting success and influence of the song, oh boy did they make it – sexuality is a fluid thing, and can change over time for a number of reasons. At the time the song came out, the girls were barely adults, and who knows what the influence of their native Russia had on things. I’m not trying to insist that the girls from t.A.T.u have been queer all along, as that’s their story to tell, but what I am suggesting is that their story is one that rings true for so many people, whether they end up coming out or not. In so many words, the fact that this singular pop song from a Russian duo resonates with so many people, even in the face of all the gaga and the public outcry, will forever define t.A.T.u. 

The song has seen covers from Halflives, Poppy, and Seraphine, and the more aggressive Fernando Garibay remix still makes its way to dance floors from time to time. While the singers of said song, as well as its usage throughout the last two decades, have not gone without a few bumps in the road, we can still celebrate “All The Things She Said,” as so much has changed since its premiere, save for a certain dictator in the singers’ native country. It is as central to the scene as any other song, as it highlights being on the outside looking in, and all of the struggle that comes with it. 

To quote the song, it’s about that moment when one asks, “Have I crossed the line?”

Let’s end on a high note with the aforementioned Fernando Garibay remix of the song, available on the 10th Anniversary Edition of 200 KM/H in the Wrong Lane.

Riveting Music Tells Those In Power To ‘Regulate This’ With Upcoming Cover Compilation Devoted to Girl Power

Featured By

Riveting Music has offered up some excellent compilations in recent years, namely Tear Down the Walls: A Tribute to Pink Floyd. The goal of Riveting Music, much like ours here at Sounds and Shadows, is to put industrial and alternative music out to a wider audience. Their next undertaking is set to help fight back against the unfortunate overturning of Roe v. Wade, which has since endangered the reproductive rights of millions of Americans.

https://rivetingmusic4u.bandcamp.com/

Regulate This: A Riveting Tribute to Girl Power is a compilation of twenty-one artists each covering a song dedicated to feminism, girl power, and standing up to the patriarchy. All proceeds from the release are going to the Global Fund for Women,  While who is covering what hasn’t been released just yet, we know that the following artists are involved: Containher, Sapphria Vee, Caligulust, Demons Need Angels, Schedule IV, Society Burning, Fractured Machines, The Blue Hour, File Transfer Protocol, Mach FoX and Illuminate Steele, Latex, Machines With Human Skin, Out Out, Flood Damage, Fatigue,  Sandi Leeper, Bellhead, Deconbrio, Alcestea, The Joy Thieves, and Eva X.

https://rivetingmusic4u.bandcamp.com/track/love-is-a-battlefield

The following artists will be covered on Regulate This: Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Portishead, Animotion, PJ Harvey, Bjork, Toni Basil, Garbage, Janet Jackson, Ani DiFranco, Bonnie Tyler, Pat Benatar, La Tigre, The Plasmatics, Kim Carnes, Fleetwood Mac, Laurie Anderson, Belinda Carlisle, Danielle Dax, Berlin, Dolly Parton, and The Eurythmics.

Love is a Battlefield | The Joy Thieves | Riveting Music (bandcamp.com)

The full compilation will be released on September 9th, but to tide us over, we’ve gotten a taste of what is to come. The Joy Thieves have teamed up with I Ya Toyah for a rendition of Pat Benatar’s 1983 hit “Love is a Battlefield.” It’s faithful to the original, though an increased guitar presence helps kick things into another, more powerful gear. It brings the sound forward in time from the early Eighties new wave to a mid-Nineties industrial rocker, while remaining a loving tribute to Benatar’s original work.


Check out the track below, stay tuned for the music video on Friday, August 26th, and the full Regulate This compilation on Friday, September 9th. For more information on the Global Fund for Women, check out their website here.

KMFDM’s Reunion Record ‘Attak’ Serves As A Memory Of A Post-Mass Tragedy World, And How Public Opinion Reigns Supreme

on By

Being a mid-Nineties baby, I don’t have many memories of a world pre-Columbine or pre-9/11. I’ve been through my fair share of security checkpoints, I’ve been through my fair share of active shooter drills, and have been in lockdown situations more times than I care to count. It is a scary world we live in these days, but what doesn’t seem to change are the arguments we hear for the supposed causes of these mass casualty events. It’s the media, it’s the suggestible youth, it’s those damn foreigners, so on and so forth. To say that the music world was rocked by the events of both Columbine and 9/11 is to put it gently. Acts such as Marilyn Manson and Slayer were crucified in the media, but perhaps none was caught in the crossfire more than a band who had just disbanded months prior: the mighty purveyors of the “Ultra Heavy Beat,” KMFDM.

The band took a beating in the media due to the coincidence of their Adios record releasing on April 20th, 1999, the same day as the Columbine tragedy. Further, several of the band’s songs, namely tracks like “Son of a Gun” and “Stray Bullet” were quoted on one of the shooter’s websites ahead of the shooting, and of course the media added that and the band’s German roots and arrived at Nazism overtaking these poor lost souls.

Deep exhale of exasperation…

By the beginning of 2001, KMFDM reformed, and while Günter Schulz and En Esch opted not to partake, Sascha Konietzko and Tim Sköld, the remaining members, added singer Lucia Cifarelli, formerly of the band Drill, as well as previous co-conspirators Bill Rieflin and Raymond Watts. While En Esch lauded his creative freedom, Konietzko was happy to see a more positive creative direction, not to mention fewer egos driving the machine forward. Add to this a change of record label, from the commercially demanding Universal to the industrial-friendly Metropolis, and on March 19, 2002, Attak was released.

Fun fact: the idea was thrown around to use Middle Eastern writing to spell out the album’s title, which would have been written as Attaq, but after the shit hit the fan with Columbine, not to mention the all-too-recent attacks on 9/11, and even Kap’n K thought that was “pretty fucking harsh.” Good call, Kap’n. Of course, the next album the following year would be called WWIII, so you can’t say Sascha doesn’t know exactly where the line in the sand lies or how to cross it.

The title track “Attak/Reload” starts off with a vengeance, as Sascha softly assures “we’re gonna make you sorry for every word that you say…” What follows is an electro-heavy track with a mid-tempo groove. From the first chorus on, Lucia’s vocals dominate, doubled in the chorus by a robotic monotone. Lyrically, they’re challenging three years’ worth of frustration, singing about the “gravitational pull of delirium,” a phrase that’s aged a bit too well for comfort twenty years later.

“Skurk” is a much more guitar-centric track, with a couple of sections of fancy fretboard footwork. If nothing else, it’s a good moment for Tim Sköld’s guitar work to shine, something it almost always does. It pivots into the sleazy “Dirty” and all of its Rob Zombie-esque glory (and I promise that isn’t an insult). We also get our first self-shoutout of the record, something of a signature of the band even today. If there’s a track that I could point at and be like “this, this is the quintessential Ultra Heavy Beat sound for this record,” the finger is pointed firmly at “Urban Monkey Warfare,” with its monster riffing and Sascha’s talk-singing verses against Lucia’s vocals in the chorus. 

“Save Me” is another song with a guitar for a backbone, as well as a fair amount of nu metal influence. According to Spotify’s metrics, it is the most streamed track on Attak, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s as radio-friendly as I’ve ever heard the band, the song as accessible as one can get. Things turn to dub on “Yohoho,” which is mostly chilled-out grooves with occasional guitar flourishes over Sascha’s whispered vocals. This is one of two songs with Raymond Watts getting a writing credit, and the influence is easily recognizable. “Superhero” is painfully Nineties in its construction, and even giving a wide berth between initial listen and revisit, it’s just not doing it for me. 

“Sturm & Drang,” however, which would go on to be the name of their 2003 tour, comes in like a bat out of Hell and doesn’t let up. An ultra-heavy beatdown of sorts, this one focuses on self-determination and the strength within ourselves, but does so not in a coddling way, but in a “hey dipshit, get up, get out there, and make shit happen” manner. Again, the guitar work of Tim Sköld drives this one onward, both in sheer riffing and his pre-bridge solo. Following is Raymond Watts’ lone lead vocal performance on the record, “Preach/Pervert,” with another shining example of the band’s signature sound, particularly in the sung-through-Watts’-gritted-teeth chorus. The one-two punch of “Sturm & Drang” and “Preach/Pervert” might be enough to sell some on the full record, had one never heard either song before.

“Risen” features a ping-ponging of vocals between Sascha and Sköld, with the latter chugging away on the low B. Forget about a one-two punch, the previous two songs and this make for a potent combination attack, which is a shame considering the final track “Sleep.” It feels like it’s trying to be too much at once, and while I’m glad to see Lucia assuming full vocal duties, that it’s happening on a meddling track like this is a bit upsetting, and serves as a snap back to unfortunate reality.

Those who long for the glory days of KMFDM, the En Esch / Günter Schulz era of the band are long gone. Is Attak on the level of say, Symbols or Nihil in the extensive catalog of Kap’n K and his merry band of industrialists? Maybe not, but all told this is an album that suffered due to controversy, rather than some of its contemporaries which thrived on it. Sadly, the idea of the mass media wanting to tear down something it knows precisely nothing about is something we’re still dealing with today, arguably more so than we were around the time of Attak’s release.

SKYND Serve a Sizzling Mix of Djent, Industrial, and Nu Metal on Newest Offering “Armin Meiwes”

on By

If there’s one band that proves that genre labels are a little bit antiquated, it’s SKYND. Are they industrial? Sort of. Are they metal? Sort of. Are they – and here’s a term I haven’t seen thrown around in a hot minute – horrorcore? Sure, why not? What can be nailed down about this two-piece Australian act is that their music is centered around true crime, their founding in 2017 coinciding with an uptick in true crime podcasting and a renewed popularity for true crime television series. Their song titles are taken from real-life monsters, such as Katherine Knight, Jim Jones, and Elisa Lam. Their music videos are disturbing yet oddly compelling. And with their latest single, the duo look to cannibalize everything they stand for.

SKYND first played their newest song “Armin Meiwes” earlier this year while on tour in Europe to rave reviews. Sonically speaking, there’s plenty of meat on the bone, with the chorus using elements of djent, while the verses uses the syncopation and hip-hop-like dictation of nu metal, all with an electro-industrial base. The lyrics detail the cutting and the culinary aspects of the crimes, right down to the lines “roast the flesh, medium heat / add garlic, pepper, and salt / meat is too tough to eat / so I’ll feed it to the dog.”

For those uninitiated, Armin Meiwes was a repair technician who, in 2001, found a man who wanted to be eaten, offering himself to be voluntarily cannibalized (title of your next death metal song, anyone?). Long story short, Meiwes was arrested a year later and sentenced to eight and a half years for manslaughter charges, after authorities found body parts which he hadn’t consumed, as well as a videotape of the gruesome crimes which Meiwes, dubbed the Rotenburg Cannibal, kept for his own sexual gratification.

I mean, when a victim shares in dining on his own genitalia with his soon-to-be killer… 

He was re-tried in 2006, after prosecutors argued that the initial defense, that being that he only killed his victim because the victim requested such, was null due to the aforementioned videotape. He was then convicted of murder and therefore sentenced to life imprisonment.

If any of that sounds familiar, yes, this is the same story that Rammstein modeled their 2004 song “Mein teil” after, though they are by no means the first artists to draw inspiration from these horrific crimes.

SKYND is the kind of music I would describe as a connoisseur’s choice: it’s not for everyone, but that isn’t inherently a bad thing. Those who are looking for something different, those brave souls who wish for a bit of danger that may have been missing in their music for some time, may find solace in the songcraft of SKYND, as jarring and shocking as the content within may be.

Check out the music video for “Armin Meiwes” below, though viewer discretion be advised: