SOUNDTRACK: PINKISH BLACK-“Razed to the Ground” (2013).
After playing No Age, Lars Gottrich came in to show what real heaviness is with a new song from Pinkish Black. Unlike most of Lars’ songs, this was neither death- nor speed- metal. Rather it has a very 80s goth sound. But it’s more Birthday Party than Sisters of Mercy.
There’s no guitars, just loud drums (with a lot of cymbals), a pulsing bass keyboard riff and some spacey high keyboard notes thrown along the top of the song. There are elements that I liked about the story. However, the synths in the solo give it a very cheesy horror movie feel and I have to admit that although I like a lot of bands from the era, this feels like a pale imitation.
[READ: June 20, 2013] “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Whisperer in Darkness”
Both of these stories appeared in Michel Houellebecq’s H.P. Lovecraft book, but I wanted to treat them separately for ease of searching and discovery.
After my long history with Lovecraft and after reading Houellebecq’s book, I anticipated being blown away by these stories. And so, with my expectations so high, I was naturally disappointed. I was especially disappointed with how normal these stories seemed. Houellebecq made me think the stories were practically non-narrative in form—that they eschewed all manner of conventional storytelling. That his writing was so weird that no one would publish it. But in these two stories everything seems completely normal. Psychologically these stories are different, but aside from content, they are fairly conventional stories.
Maybe they aren’t mind blowing because they were written nearly 100 years ago and the entire world has changed drastically since then. It may also be because I have read all of the derivatives of Lovecraft enough that there’s nothing new in his work. And it may also be that in the past 80 years, we have thought of things that are much scarier than these, in part because of Lovecraft himself. Or maybe I would have been into them a lot more had I read them when I was a teenager.
“The Call of Cthulhu.” (more…)