Album Review: Senex IV - "Gods And Taboos"

 

Hailing from Ipswich, this is Senex IV's second album and a cursory glance at the artwork here (not to mention song titles such as Dancing Witches and Black Cat) should be a bit of a giveaway that we are very much heading into goth territory here. And sure enough, opening track Soul Eater kicks in with a rumbling bassline, some squalling guitars and vocals which sound oddly like a cross between Peter Murphy and Mark E Smith. Not a bad start all told.

While some of this album goes down the Sisters/Mission direction you'd probably expect like Drop Dead and Shadow of the Dog, songs such as The Great Idea with its ominous piano intro before the song kicks in and the grinding bass and pounding tribal drums on Brother Grim show that this is a band who can keep things varied enough to maintain your interest and it's this which is really Gods & Taboos' saving grace and prevents it from plummeting into the dreaded Goth 101 territory. It's there on the way that the aforementioned Dancing Witches goes into full-on Bauhaus style goth disco territory or the seasick lurch of Get Out.

If there's a slight complaint to be made here, it's that while there's plenty of variety here, it suffers a bit from slightly rough around the edges production (which, to be fair, might be seen as a plus in the eyes of some) and that it doesn't quite have a proper top drawer tune to really elevate it up to essential listening. But still, this isn't a bad album at all and should appeal to any Bauhaus or 69 Eyes fans looking for something new to listen to at the moment.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑🌑 (7/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A brief return from the dead...

Image
  Yup, we're back. Don't all get excited at once. I’d been toying with the idea of doing an end of year list again this year and after a lot of umming and aahing eventually decided to go for it. As with last year, inevitably there were bumps along the way. As of the start of December, I thought this list would be around 40 albums but inevitably reading other people’s lists pointed me towards a bunch of stuff that had passed me by earlier in the year. Plus of course there’s always a few teasing buggers who put stuff out at the last possible moment. So 40 became 50 which became 60 which finally became 70. You lucky people. Actually though, reading through this list, the main thing that strikes me is that I think this might be the most musically varied end of year list that Nite Songs has ever done. From gentle acoustics through acclaimed indie veterans to punk thrash and good old fashioned scuzzy rock ‘n’ roll via some decidedly unexpected diversions (industrial folk music? Check...
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #90: Soho Roses - "The Third And Final Insult" (1989)

Image
  "If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!"  - Soho Roses  - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure, ...
Read more

Album Review: The Fades - "Night Terrors"

Image
  Hailing from South London, the Fades are gaining a reputation of one of the premier garage rock bands in the capital these days and, as with a few albums we've reviewed in these webpages of late, Night Terrors  was written during the lockdown as it was a recurring feature of life for the band's frontman Dave during the lockdown. As befits its title and subject matter, Night Terrors  is an off-kilter effort which might take a few listens to get into but rewards those who persevere with it. Certainly, the discordant vocals and guitars often give the impression of the whole operation being on the verge of collapse on the likes of The Pessimist  and Known It All Along  while Lost My Job  goes into XTC/Nightingales style post-punk territory. However, the likes of People In General  show that they can rein the weirdness in and build up an intriguing multi-part epic which starts off as tuneful new wave before drifting into a nightmarish state-of-the-nation ...
Read more