Halloween Countdown: October 6 – I’m running towards nothing

Up for some gothic metal? Too bad, that’s what you’re getting, in the form of the delightfully named Creaming Jesus covering The Cure’s “A Forest.” The track originally appeared (alongside a cover of The Smiths’ “This Charming Man”) on Bark, a 12” EP released in 1990.

It’s a surprisingly listenable track, considering how much I love the original version and how I much I despise the gothic metal genre, that noxious musical cul-de-sac the scene turned onto in the mid-eighties. There was a time when goth music was a merely a thematic blanket term which encompassed whatever gothic fashion victims happened to be listening to, be it Joy Division, Danielle Dax, or Adam Ant’s early stuff. Diversity and atmospheric dread has given way to bland metallic dirges; as if we needed yet another pretentious metal subculture.

I once got into a heated argument with a Finnish college student who insisted gothic music began with the Sisters of Mercy. Every time I’d bring up things like Bauhaus, Killing Joke, Siouxsie Sioux, the Batcave scene, or any other gothic precursors or pioneers, she’d merely respond, “That’s one version of the truth.” It’s a wonder I didn’t murder her.