Goth Band Misery
Miserable music has always been fashionable. Just ask fans of The Cure, Placebo, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Smiths and blues musicians like Albert King, Muddy Waters and Elmore James if you don't believe me. There's just nothing like it when you're feeling depressed and down at heart. It can reinvigorate or reaffirm depending on how bruised the skies are; it can be emphatically cathartic or dramatically compounding. And on rare occasions it can be good for dancing, though if you gave me a choice between 'I Want You' by Elvis Costello or 'Summer Of 69' by Bryan Adams, you'd probably find me strutting my stuff to the Canadian midget's offering. But only after large quantities of alcohol have been quaffed, obviously.
The Moirai are depressed - or at least that's how they seem to me. With lyrics like "Why do we let ourselves decide while you hold onto bottles and I hold on to thoughts of suicide", how can you possibly argue? But the problem is that I don't believe them. Actually, let me qualify that statement: I don't understand them. Actually, let me back up a second: I can understand them fine; I just don't understand why anyone would bother to write lyrics like this down. Bear in mind that you're dealing with a man who thinks the greatest lyric in the known universe is "Oh Mr Carpenter, knock us up a chair out of wood/Make it comfortable yet attractive so that old people in the world can have a good sit down" and you might begin to appreciate that I ain't in possession of a full deck.
The first thing I do whenever I get a new album is throw it into the player, dig out the sleeve notes and have a quick flash through to see what's up. On skimming this particular booklet, the first things that popped into my consciousness were angst/pain/moaning/whining/sadomasochism/depression. Then a friend took a look through the lyrics and within seconds put them into crystal-clear perspective: teenage poetry. Please realise that I've seen a photo of this band and they do look older than McFly, but my God, she was right. These songs read like a GCSE English assignment written by pasty-faced Goths who revel in the delusion that gluing studs to their knuckles and painting spider webs on their faces constitutes an expression of self rather than the attention seeking twaddle it really is, and I used to be a Goth, so don't accuse me of talking out of my arse. There's only so much whinging and moaning the human soul can endure before you round smartly on the offender and scream "CHEER UP YOU MISERABLE GIT" in their face. And I had reached this stage by the third track. Although vocalist Brian Carley can carry a tune (even if he does sound like he's singing through his nose), he can't add gravitas to, and exorcise far-reaching banality from lyrics such as "We eat in our kitchens and sleep in our beds/We're so nice on the phone and so cruel in our heads", and to be honest, I doubt even Bob Dylan could either.
Musically, The Moirai are an extremely competent bunch and the production is uniformly excellent. A blend of Placebo, Strangelove and with a little dash of The Cure, the album is a slick and professional affair, though I couldn't get the thought that they sound a little like The Rasmus out of my head for ages. And that ain't a good thing.
With song titles like 'Last Year For Halloween I Was A Ghost' and 'Water Is The New Fire' and glancing through the ramble above, you've got an appreciation of what the album is about - if you trust in my opinion that is. Now it's up to you to decide if you want to pursue The Moirai further. And leave the epoxy-resin and permanent marker in the drawer next time you go out on the town, will you?