Chp 203. Sweet Gothic Love

I came across these two “Gothic” music videos recently, and I love it. Being a Goth fan, I must say these people did an amazing job, and I really hope this small promotion here will give them a little bit more exposure to the rest of India and hopefully some of our fellow countrymen will realize how advanced the music scene is in the Northeast, contrary to popular belief that the only thing that exists in the Northeast is terrorism.

Click on “PLAY” of both the videos and then pause them and continue reading the rest of this post while you wait for the videos to load.

The Scavenger Project – Signs





Myth of Fate - Paradise




I am not getting into the whole debate on what exactly is Goth. It is too wide a genre to define in one sentence. The kind I am crazy about would be Gothic Metal, which as wiki aptly describes it, is “a combination of the aggression of heavy metal with the dark melancholy aesthetics of gothic rock.”

You have the Goth subculture, such as this picture below:



Nah, that’s not the kind of Goth I am into. The pictures below are the Goth I love, which showcase some of my favorite bands.












And that is why I stress once again that being Goth is too wide a term to use. In fact, if you look at the first picture above of the Marilyn Manson look-alike dude, many of you old timers like me would remember that popular rock band called KISS (Beth, I was made for loving you, Detroit rock city, Rock and roll all nite etc). Well, one thing is for sure, their music was nowhere near Goth and yet you can see the similarity in their looks.


[KISS]

Just like how Heavy Metal is too general as there are thrash metal, power metal, speed metal, death metal, glam metal, even nu-metal etc with different fan followings in each sub-genre, the kind of Gothic Metal I follow can come under “Symphonic Scandinavian Gothic”, since a majority of such bands come from Finland and other Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden and Iceland).

Of course I don’t like all Goth bands that have a female front (wo)man, like for example Cadaveria (former vocals of Opera IX) whose style is more extreme to the likes of death metal bands like Carpathian Forest, Satyricon, Deicide etc which are all way too dark for my taste.

[Cadaveria]


Likewise, I am not into Astarte, althought they are hot! After listening to a couple of their tracks, I had to sadly “shift+delete” the files.


[Astarte]

And there are many other Gothic bands I listen to, that do not have a female vocalist. It’s mainly about the similarity in style.

Some gothic black/death metal may be about Satanism, occultism, nihilism, necrophilism and all the other disturbing “isms” one can find in the dictionary, whereas the symphonic gothic metal that I love are usually about mysticism, nature (animism), medieval love songs, Norse mythology and even phantasmagoria.

However, there is no clear cult definition because of the continuous fusion of various styles and forms of music.

So rather than argue about what is the exact definition of Gothic, or the subtle differences between melodic black metal and symphonic black metal, or Gothic ambient and Gothic doom etc etc. let us all appreciate these two new Mizo bands and hope they continue to shine. In fact, "Scavenger Project" defines their music genre as ELECTROROCKGRESSIVE.

All the best to you guys! Show the world what you've got.

I’m just a little bit disappointed with some of the criticisms they get, mainly: “Why don’t you guys come up with your own style or originality? Why do you copy other styles?”

I find such people who talk like that to be quite ignorant about the music scene. I wonder what they mean by “original”. There has been so many many many different styles produced all over this tiny place that we call earth, that it would be extremely difficult to come up with a totally new style that has never been composed before.

If such people hear a “new” style and say “THAT is a new style”, then it is simply because they haven’t heard of it before, hence the reason they think it’s a new style. That is why I call them ignorant. Just because they’ve never heard of a particular style doesn’t mean it does not exist.

So keep rocking, Scavenger Project and Myth of Fate. Don’t listen to such unconstructive criticisms and may you take India by storm. Special wishes to the bassist of Scavenger Project - Jonah who’s the ex-bassist of IIIrd Sovereign and a good friend of mine.

Now, scroll up, watch the two videos that must have loaded by now, relax and admire their awesome talent. Cheers.