To the Return of Darkness and Synth; Post Death Soundtrack’s You Can’t Go Back

Let’s talk. I’m thinking delicious electronic music, what about you? Do you like Nine Inch Nails? Ohgr? Doll Factory? Depeche Mode (1997 and forward)? Mesh? Blaqk Audio?

Are you a goth? Rivethead? Even just a club-kid who happens to enjoy their clothing in shades of black and neon?

Then I have totally got the band for you. Let me introduce you to Post Death Soundtrack, a Calgary/Vancouver cross-project who opened for one of the all-time greats, Front Line Assembly, just last September. Founded by Steve Moore and Kenneth Buck, they released their first album, Music as Weaponry, in 2008. Since then, they’ve picked up Jon Ireson and Colin Everall for both their live sets (unfortunately few and far between) and in-studio recording.

Ranging in sound from synth-pop to EBM to industrial, with moments of plain old rock ‘n’ roll thrown into the mix, this is a band that has a little bit of everything I love. Tripping rhythms. Decadent bass. An achingly hypnotic vocal assault coming at you from both ranges (Moore is a baritone and Buck is tenor). Bitter, dangerous, intelligent lyrics. Their sound is pure black yet playful, and some of it… Well, I’ll get to that.

There are stirrings of new life on the Post Death front after Steve took an extended break from all his projects (skip on back to read In The Years of Hymns and Prophecies for the why). Their new website has been up for a while now, and they are beginning to fill it with many delicious goodies.

Do you want to catch up on what you’ve been missing and download their debut album? Of course you do. Want to hear remixes and live tracks? Well, who wouldn’t? Looking for eerie, sombre covers? Look no more. Head on down to Post Death Soundtrack’s official site, click on the Listen button and have at ‘er.

The most important thing you will find on that site, though, are the original tracks just waiting for their own little album to call home. Some are b-sides and some are for a late 2011/early 2012 release. You may recognize Our Time is Now and Ultraviolence if you were paying attention to the band in late 2010. There is an official video for Ultraviolence, directed by Jeevin Johal. The video itself is a disturbing mix of Mark Romanek and Quentin Tarantino and the song was inspired by Outside-era David Bowie. You can check that out here. “Oh, you can scream if you want to. Dear child, can you hear the sound?” I mentioned the dangerous lyrics, yes?

A song not on that list is Little Alice, which you can listen to while viewing a cut-together of old Alice in Wonderland movies here. It is the single most lusciously evil song I have ever heard in my life. I practically fell out of my chair the first time I heard it and have been longing for an mp3 of it for over a year now. (Insert a huge, melodramatic sigh here.) And let me tell you…live? Decadence and delicious decay. Luckily, the song is in Jon Ireson’s hands getting its finishing touches before becoming official…please, please sometime soon.

The most recent addition to Post Death’s collection of beautiful, deadly songs is You Can’t Go Back. The reason I am writing today.

It opens with tightly layered vocals over an almost barren soundscape, fleshing out with occasional moody guitar and sustained synths. There is a twitch of wrongness at the edge of the sound that speeds up my pulse, fighting against the soft, resigned words of the verses. “You can never go back once you’ve crossed over. You can’t go back; the system is out of order.” The words are chilling and dangerous until the chorus swells into defiance. “We all throw our hands out…serpents lashing out like…serpents lashing out like…serpents lashing out!”

During the last minute it dissolves into a chaos of wailing and echoes and backwards loops, making my skin crawl. Think 1983. The Cure. Pornography. Only more desperate and terrifying, if that is even possible. So you can go on ahead to Post Death Soundtrack’s official site and download it, or you can cheat and click here.  Right now. And let yourself dissolve into the song.

In the Years of Hymns and Prophecies

As a teenager, the driving force in my life was music. I used to wear my favourite CDs out by playing them too often, and would then just tie the scratched ones onto my backpack to give the band patches company. I even used shards of CDs as a source of texture and soul in a number of collages I obsessively pieced together. Not a moment went by when I wasn’t hiding behind my headphones, randomly bursting out with phrases from Nine Inch Nails songs, or idly scrawling my favourite lyrics all over my binders, notes, assignments, and tests. Music was what I breathed for.

Then when I was 21, I had what I can only describe as a crisis of self. My already tenuous grasp on social relations started slipping, I quit reading, and I somehow lost touch with the music. It was the balancing point of 2004 and 2005 when the reviews I used to write at least once a week stopped happening. There was a brief resurgence in 2006 that consisted of two, count ‘em, two reviews. I still listened, but I no longer participated. I stopped learning the names of songs, didn’t bother opening lyric books, and would only hum along to refrains whose words I had never learned.

These were all symptoms of a very dark time in my life, one that I have finally begun to leave behind me with the help of music. Most specifically, the music of one man.

I first met Steve Moore in 2006. I was 23 years old and was taken completely by surprise. To me, Inner Surge (the band he was fronting at that point) wasn’t just a Calgary band with a small local following. It was already one of the most important musical fixtures in my life. While much of what I listened to had fallen to the wayside, the raw and personal Solus Verum (a one-man-band demo) struck nerves in me that were otherwise dead.

The CD was never physically mine, so it moved to BC with an ex-roommate in 2005. I was content with the digital version until I accidently found Inner Surge’s Signals Screaming at the Southland Crossing Tramps. I had Solus Verum on my computer and Matrika on CD, but I’d never even thought to look up the band online and see what else they might have. When I took Signals Screaming home, something of the ice and apathy inside me started to melt. The music made sense in a way that nothing had for years. It gave me back a piece of my passion and solid ground to stand on. So of course I realized that I needed to once again get myself a physical copy of Solus Verum in order to feel whole. To the internet I went.

Let’s just say I wasn’t prepared for Moore’s unorthodox delivery style.