EVERY GENRE PROJECT - July 22 - Gothic Rock

Genre of the Day - Gothic Rock

Album of the Day - Disintegration by The Cure (1989)

A few years ago on TikTok, the 2012 song “New Flesh” by Current Joys hit the app’s unpredictable algorithmic airwaves, the snippet repeating a simple refrain: Listen to the Cure, listen to the Cure, listen to the Cure. As someone striving to learn more about music, it’s high time to let Robert Smith sorrowfully serenade my ears. As the idol of goths everywhere in the 1980s with clearly some of the most enduring music, given that a mere 2012-name drop lyric sounded romantic enough to stay jammed in my head, it only makes sense that The Cure earns the slot of gothic honor in today’s genre exploration.  

The label gothic being applied to music wasn’t brand-new by the time gothic rock emerged. The word gothic had followed a winding, strange path starting from the Visigoths who trampled over the Romans, whereby the word became shorthand for a notion of medieval darkness and gloom. With the Industrial Revolution’s technological leaps, 19th century authors reached for the haunting settings of medieval Gothic architecture. That architectural style had been pejoratively dubbed as gothic for its emergence in Germany and France, though it appeared centuries after the Visigoth domination. Whether music, painting, or architecture, someone artistic somewhere is always pining for a far-off gothic past. The detached, icy sonic ambiences and visual posings of the Velvet Underground and the Doors struck a few music critics as gothic, laying the groundwork for the term to categorize particular bands and their music. 

Never underestimate the power of music critics to tack any old descriptive word onto a piece of music; sometimes I don’t even know what I mean when I throw in a particular word. Painting music with words is a formidable task, though quite fun. 

The rise of gothic rock within punk music almost resembles the Visigoth takeover: musical rebels with divergent sensibilities displaced the original stylings of punk with eye-grabbing Victorian-mourner-chic visual style and a less aggressive approach to punk music that favored fatalistic themes of nostalgia, heartache, and longingness. Those late ‘70s gothic breakaways created the most popularly striking and enduring phenomenon to emerge out of punk or post-punk alike. It might be a case of cherry-picking, sure, but just look at The Cure’s streams versus those of the Sex Pistols as evidence. As Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees, The Cure, Bauhaus, and other acts—many out of London’s club The Batcave—the gothic takeover of post-punk was apparent by the mid-‘80s. Musically, Isabella Van Elferen’s article “Dark Timbre” excellently addresses the particularities of what sonic choices lended gothic rock such a characteristically dark ambience. She argues that timbre, or the tonal color, of the music sets gothic rock apart in a proprietary, shadowy sonic world. Acts accomplish this through wobbly, tormented vocal expression lended deeper agony through reverb, and similar sonic vastness in the twangy guitar and drama-infused synthesizers.

Two Batcave attendees; the club welcomed guests from 1982-1985.

So, back to The Cure. Rather than any cure for the condition of being goth, the immensely popular band may have proved the gateway drug for many people wading into the subculture. Their 1989 album Disintegration is dangerously tantalizing. “Plainsong” opens with sweeping, disarming chimes before an explosion of organ-esque synths catapults up from the depths to score the cloudily unfolding lyrics of an intense, fatalistic romance on the edge of the world. The slow rumble and misty ambience of “Closedown” give way to the sheer all-hands-on-deck hookiness of the hit “Lovesong,” featuring the album’s most  plainspoken lyrics of renewing love, penned for Smith’s wife on the verge of their marriage. “Lullaby” is something of an oddball in light of its title: Smith’s quiet whisper might set you to sleep, but its whimsical blend of pizzicato and humming synth strings against particularly hard drums and twangy guitar cleverly make for one of the album’s most charged moments, like stumbling out of the Batcave at dawn. The suite of “Prayers for Rain” and “The Same Deep Water as You” features one of the most menacing underlying melodies depicting the anxiety of romantic stagnation and yearning painted through the grandeur of climactic plateaus of droughts and floods. 

It’s an excellent listen whether in the context of gothic rock or not; each song is a bewitching entry into the Cure’s poetic world as well as the masterpieces of timbral manipulation and shading that make gothic rock so unique. Gothic rock has for four decades now been the musical representative of goth subculture’s room for emotional refuge and fancifully dark personal expression: as long as people dress gothic and continue to evolve the style, Current Joys will always get their wish that people listen to The Cure.