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Queen Adreena:
Curmudgeon #22 April 2000
In the mid-1980s, Goth did get such a bad name (and deservedly so): foolish, flouncy nonsense perpetrated by fat kids who sucked their cheek bones in and thought that gave them a personality. Jee-hosephat, you thought that Grunge was whiny: you should have been stuck in Yorkshire in the late 1980s, during the "none more black" years. Yet, at the same time, Goth did provide the world with a handful of advantages. Firstly, you got to laugh at men in fishnets, which was never a bad thing. Secondly, in the form of the Sisters Of Mercy and The Cult it provided the UK's least embarrassing 80s stadium rock bands (OK, next step down is Def Leppard and it's not as dangerous a drop as it should be) yet most importantly it provided a cover-all term for a wide array of bands by which a lot of bands could define themselves by or rail against. There were more bands denying their Goth roots than those accepting them, but they were defined by their fans and eventually even The Fields Of The Nephilim had to drop the spaghetti metal tag and start reading Lovecraft and Crowley. Goth became more about the image than the content, so anyone in a frilly black skirt or a black frou-frou shirt was a Goth of some ilk. Hippy-goth, glam-goth, industri-goth: as long as you looked dour once in a while and shuffled your pixie boots, you were in the club. It got even worse in the late 90s, with the post-black metal piffle of Cradle of Filth and Hecate Enthroned forcing even the most die-hard of teeth-sharpeners to hide their crinoline and crushed velvet in fear (well, fear of embarrassment, maybe). That was always what was weird about Daisy Chainsaw: although never fully gothified, they were sort of adapted by the scene as pop-Goth. Their one memorable single, the infuriatingly jittery Love Your Money was Iggy covering The Stray Cat Strut and danceable as hell, as long as you didn't mind suffering heat-stroke by the second chorus. Maybe that was why the Goth crowd loved them so: it was an excuse to actually look like you were having fun and not have to explain to the fashion police afterwards. Or maybe it was prescience. Y'see, what I objected to most about Goth culture and particularly its feeble coterie of hangers on was the overwhelming desire by many of them to find something wrong with their lives and elevate it to psychosis level. Failing that, they'd hang around someone with problems and define themselves by someone else's trauma. Read chapter two of Fight Club for the best explanation of that culture one could ever require. Maybe they were waiting for the imminent collapse of Daisy Chainsaw vocalist Katie Jane Garside. Maybe they thought they'd get really lucky and have ring-side seats when the most highly-strung performer in pop, bubbly to the point of derangement, finally cracked. Wow, you could really boast about that. It finally happened and it was not pretty and my commiserations go out to Miss Garside. Mental collapse isn't a fashion statement. It's an affliction. However, it's tied up with Gothdom, and not in a "woe is me, pity poor I", Anne Rice quoting, Big Frock and cheap speed fashion. When Goth is good, when Goth is pure, it's a dark expression of sorrow and nihilism. It just happens that when those emotions were expressed in the 1980s and early 1990s, it had local cultural twists. San Francisco produced thrash. LA had the more destructive edge of the glam scene. Seattle had grunge. Chicago had industrial. Britain had Goth. All sides of the same experience. Cut away the imitator and the second raters, the Testaments and the Silverchairs and the Pigs and the Every New Dead Ghost. That's why, this late in the day, Katie Jane Garside can make her come-back album a Goth album and it still sounds utterly vital. It's Goth as a state of mind, not as your sister's Dorothy Perkins maroon lycra stretch pants. It's almost impossible to conceive of the gap between Daisy Chainsaw and Queen Adreena. Even though it sees Garside re-united with Chainsaw mainstay Crispin Gray, there's none of the sleazy, wheezy pop mentality that pervaded their first project. Instead, there's the rabid self-castigation of the soul exposed to examination for far too long. The perverted nursery rhyme of Cold Fish is a baptism by flaying, a hyper-fuzzed whirl that stretches and distorts into the screw-thread-twist of Soda Dreamer, a funeral march for Bohemia. As unapologetic as a hallucination, there's a freakshow skip to the proceedings, off-kilter and off-time like Siamese twins waltzing, while Garside meanders and wafts through her lyrics, like a half-remembered grand mal seizure. That's before the remorseless, unreasoning, piercing spirits of I Adore You, an adoration of the toxic abandonment that come from desire. Balanced somewhere between renouncing and relishing the comforting horrors of derangement, the album is much more an act of guileless seduction than the live trauma of Queen Adreena. Garside, the prime musical and lyrical force behind the throne, is truly terrifying live, but in the studio there's a consciousness of estrangement, more on awareness of the sense of loss and hopelessness that Goth was supposed to suggest but so rarely achieved. There's no cheap theatrics here, but instead the kind of revelation and power-dread that has made Lydia Lunch and Inger Lorre so awe-inspiring. Indeed, although utterly different in musical aspirations, there is more than a passing connection between Taxidermy and Lorre's equally confessional and accusatory Transcendental Medication. Of course, it's easy to get caught up in comparing Garside's work here with that of other female artists: her relationship with Gray will remind some of that between Budgie and Souxsie, for example, or the obvious Lydia Lunch personal vivisection and Courtney Love scuzzy baby doll sexuality analogies, for example. But if we look further and deeper, there's traces of the self-destructive tendencies of Trent Reznor circa The Downward Spiral, or Korn's Jonathon Davies, back on the coruscating vibrance of their first album, not to mention the backwoods perversions of Nick Cave. Insidious, rather than subtle, it insinuates through Garside's wilderness wind tones, then scratches and bludgeons with Gray's glitterstab guitar. Possibly, depending on your mood, it may be a little too Alice Impaled On The Looking Glass for your tastes, but on those darker moments, your ability to empathize with the dour sensibilities of the sepulchral strip-joint theme of Hide From Time or the neo-folk of the deathly Pretty Polly will make you file this under worryingly easy listening. The only real question for Queen Adreena now is whither next? How dangerous would continuing this public flagellation and flagellation of the public become to health and wealth? As Garside herself asks "are these songs my disease?" Wonderful as it is to think that there'll be a second album, the idea that they may feel so driven and despairing as to have to is simply terrifying. Taxidermy by Queen Adreena is out on Blanco y Negro records. RMW

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