Since we have an extra Tuesday in July, and July is our first month, I thought I’d throw in an extra new music review. In future when this happens, I may take a break and give myself a week off for good behavior, but this month, I said “Fuck it!” I found this album while doing research and really liked it, but the band has not been cooperative with the interview aspect to make them a feature and their album is a bit older at this point, so I figured this would be a good time to review it anyway. Veil Veil Vanish is a San Francisco post punk band whose melodic sounds and wailing vocals often border on gothic, although they eschew that term as “the g-word“. Their debut album Into A New Mausoleum is filled with very full sounding songs that are a little heavier on the electric guitars than the bass with powerful vocal deliveries from singer Keven Tecon. At times the electrics, which seem to be aiming for atmosphere, threaten to overpower and almost always push the bass into the background. This is a shame, because if you listen hard, you can make out Amy Rosenoff’s bass in songs like the title track and it sounds quite good.

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Link: http://www.morbidoutlook.com

Morbid Outlook is a gothic oriented lifestyle zine and the brainchild of Mistress McCutchan. The zine started as a print and staple entity that took life online in 1995, making it one of the oldest still standing online publications dedicated to gothic interests. Since August marks the 16th anniversary of Morbid Outlook, I felt that would make it an excellent subject for this month’s Lifestyle piece.

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For those that are not familiar, many people feel the Virgin Prunes deserve true credit for the formation of what we now think of as Deathrock and Gothic Rock. Forming in 1977, the Dublin band quickly garnered a reputation as subversive, melancholy, and just plain weird. Their dark garb and teased up hair were only part of what caught people’s attention and imagination. It was their stage show that set them miles apart from virtually everything else going on in music at the time.

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I caught up with Barge of New Thrill Parade for this month’s interview and this is what I found out about an elusive band with so little about themselves on either their myspace page, or their website. Notes: Can you tell us a little about when and how NTP formed? Where did you meet each other and has the band lineup changed at all? NTP: New Thrill Parade used to be known as the Gross Gang. There were far less of us at that time, and we were much more of a riffy, aggressive houseshow band, with all the violent dancing and flopping around and all that. At some point it became clear to us that some people’s reactions to this type of music made other types of people want to leave the room so as not to get throttled. When we reconvened as New Thrill Parade in summer of 2004, we decided not to allow audience members to make that decision for other audience members. We thought it would be better for everyone, ourselves included, if the music itself made people want to leave or stay. So we began playing slower and more deliberately, and with a touch more irritability. Basically at the time, Santa Cruz was chock full of music that was cute and fun, so we decided to be ugly and jarring. We didn’t have to try very hard. Notes: Where did the name New Thrill Parade come from then? NTP: The name New Thrill Parade comes from a Phil Ochs song called ‘Crucifixion.’

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San Francisco/Santa Cruz based band New Thrill Parade’s latest album Slumber In Colorland offers fans of more Avant Garde dark music something to ponder. This is not a pop band, nor would they be considered a typical deathrock band either. With 5 or more instruments regularly adorning their tracks, the band continues to create full, rich sonic textures, while leaving just enough breathing room for the listener to suffocate. The band’s mysterious persona, lacking any real information on their myspace or official homepage about the band members themselves, adds to their mystique and forces fans to focus on the music itself. Slumber In Colorland is an album that tackles dreamy, often creepy images of a world that seems to be falling apart, but running together at the same time. Bridging from periods of mania in songs like “Paradise Leased” to relaxed carnivalesque tracks like “Snake Skin Brutes” that you can almost hear slithering along, this album creates a very unique sense of continuity that could not be pulled off by just anyone.

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