I’ve said it before, I do love how the current generations of bands have decided to learn from 80s post-punk these days, and Detroit’s Ritual Howls has chosen to latch themselves specifically to Red Lorry Yellow Lorry and Bauhaus. The noisy guitars, the high treble of the drums, and the growly bass of the vocals, it all works out amazingly well.
They recently dropped their sixth album Ruin a few weeks ago on Halloween, and it’s been getting some play during my writing sessions these last few days. It’s definitely bringing me back to those goth and industrial shows I’d listen to on college radio back in the day.
I do have a soft spot (heh) for industrial music. I don’t listen to it all that often, but I’ve loved it since I first heard those dance beats, clanky percussion and crunchy guitars in the late 80s with bands like DAF and Front 242 and Skinny Puppy and Ministry. Which means I was into it well before all those sci-fi action films of the 90s used this genre for all those martial arts fight scenes! [Looking at you, Mortal Kombat and Matrix movies!]
I used to see KMFDM at the indie record stores all the time, which is a surprise considering Wax Trax! releases (the label they’d been on for years) weren’t always easy to find. They’ve been around since the early 80s themselves, starting out in Germany and eventually emigrating to the States. I’m pretty sure I’d heard one or two of their songs on WAMH back in 1988-89, as there was an industrial/techno/EBM show that would play stuff like this.
I owned only a few of their CDs back in the day, but I’d throw them on now and again when I needed the boost for something that would fit the Mendaihu Universe’s more tense moments that I was writing at the time. [Interestingly enough, this is the kind of music Alec Poe would listen to, which goes quite against the laid back aura he puts out through most of the trilogy. It’s all under the skin and hidden away with him.]
They’re still around these days, having dropped an original album (Let Go) early last year and a revisit of an older album this year (Hau Ruck 2025). They may not get a lot of airplay, but they’re definitely an interesting band to check out.
The other day on the way back from Costco we’d heard her single “Retributions of an Awful Life” from her 2023 EP A Comforting Notion and it occurred to me that she’s definitely someone I should listen to more often. Why? Because she somehow manages to capture what goth and post-punk sounded like in the late 80s and early 90s — a good ten years before she was born, mind you — and embraced that sound fully. Sometimes she sounds like mid-80s Siouxsie & the Banshees, and sometimes she sounds like early Garbage. And sometimes she sounds like Liliput. It’s all a wild mix of that cold and dark post-punk that I still gravitate to all these years later.
…a number of things lately! As always, my primary listening time has been during my writing sessions, and considering my current project is a space opera with an ensemble cast, I need a lot of mood music to keep me going. To wit…
Bob Moses’ latest album BLINK is excellent, but pretty much anything they do is something that fits perfectly with my work on writing science fiction. Moody, groovy and full of atmosphere.
The self-titled album by Packaging came to my attention via KEXP (as most things do these days), but I’m intrigued that this was a band that actually decided to describe itself as motorik — that almost-forgotten German electronic style of single-chord groove that feels like high speed driving (see bands like NEU! for the genre’s history, you won’t be let down). “Running Through the Airport” is not only perfect mood music, it’s surprisingly catchy.
I’ll admit that I thought Unbelievable Truth was a Bernard Sumner side project, as I thought it was him singing the track “You’ve Got It”, but it didn’t sound like New Order or Electronic. Come to find out, it’s actually the brother of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, which makes a lot more sense as the music definitely has that King of Limbs tension.
Crushed is an interesting band in that they’re like Curve but not as heavy; they’re Phantogram but not as noisy; they’re shoegazey but not as…reverb-y. The album no scope has grown on me over the last month and I find myself returning to it quite often.
Then there’s Nation of Language, which I’ve been a fan of for quite a few years now. They’ve fully embraced that indietronica sound that is more about sitting back and listening instead of dancing. Another album I find myself returning to.
…and an album that just dropped in physical format that I’m looking forward to listening to: Touch by Tortoise. It’s their first new album in nine years, and I had no idea it existed until I was looking at the new release list last Friday! [Yes, that still happens to me, and I love it every time.] They’re one of those interesting experimental rock bands from the late 90s and early 00s, with their style heavily inspired by jazz.
For me, Frank Zappa is up there with the Grateful Dead, Phish, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and his infinite number of projects, and other bands and musicians that many of my friends in college loved and yet they never quite resonated with me until much later in life. Perhaps it was the high-level prog nerdiness and/or the low-level meandering jams that I just didn’t have the patience or the focus to check them out.
Until recently, that is, as I’ve been doing a bit of a deep dive with Zappa. Mind you, I’m quite familiar with some of his more well-known tracks like the VERY 80s track he did with his daughter, “Valley Girl”…
…or his occasional appearance on The Dr Demento Show with the classic “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow”…
…or the deep cut “Flower Punk” (a wonderfully bent take on “Hey Joe”) that my freshman year roommate played me one day…
…or the twitchy “G-Spot Tornado” that showed up on MTV’s 120 Minutes every now and again.
Zappa was definitely one of those musicians that musicians loved. He was also someone you’d hear on the more adventurous AOR and Progressive Radio stations, like I did when I used to listen to WMDK back in the late 80s. You knew he had a ridiculously large discography that spanned studio, stage, and genre. And he was also extremely vocal (and very erudite) against music censorship in the 80s, and spoke at the PMRC Senate hearings.
He’s recently found a place in my ever-growing music library, and I’m eventually going to make my way through his body of work. I’m not sure if I’ll ever get through it all, but I’d like to further understand what he was all about other than being the extremely intelligent and inquisitive weirdo with very little social filter.
Let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions on what I should listen to! [And definitely let me know in the comments if there’s a biography about him that you think I’d enjoy!]
Walk In Silence 