Get your corpse paint on paint your nails and hope that that’s a fog filling up the room and not your house on fire.

I’m reliably informed that The Venus Fly Trap which has had a new lease of life from the late ’80s were born from ATTRITION, ISAWS, RELIGIOUS OVERDOSE, WHERES LISSE? & TEMPEST.  Hatched in the mid-’80s it wasn’t for a few years that this album was originally released mixing electronic with a dark Goth mood sort of Depeche Mode with guitars or the Sisters with that snappy Alesis drum machine snare sound.  Songs like ‘(I Get) Flowers’ are total ’80s Goth and its a sound that hasn’t really dated that well.  There are some decent melodies here like the aforementioned tune and I like the riff but was never a bit fan of that Soft Cell snare.

They try to create the mood with ‘Morphine’ but having that low-fi guitar fuzz that sounds like its barely in tune is a throwback to bands like Joy Division.  I wouldn’t mind betting vocalist Alex was a fan of Ian Curtis and the way the band would construct their songs. The time really shows through on this reissue although I do like that bass line on ‘Ruby Red’ coming across as Dave Vanian fronting the Sisters its a good tune and the arrangement is great regardless of what decade it is.

Is that a Roland Jupiter I hear tweaking and whirling away on ‘Desolation Railway’ what a fantastic lyric and title. I guess what comes around goes around and it would seem about time fo ran 80’s synth / Goth crossover reunion where the Mode meets Eldrich meets pop meets the modern age kinda thing – how glorious would that be?  With today’s technical advances in sound, this record would sound absolutely huge and songs like this would fill cathedrals.

‘Catalyst’ is like a dark Goth ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ from the mind of Nick Cave.  It’s not that I dislike it at all because I don’t and there are some good songs on offer but the cliches of the time that haven’t stood the test of time and they weigh heavily. Maybe played loudly I’d like ‘How The Mighty’ because I love The Mission and like the Mish, ‘Violins & Violence’ is trying new things and that’s cool and we all like the Kennedy mystery and this is better than Saxons ‘Dallas 1 PM’ for covering that topic.

Maybe this would have been better left and be one of those albums you stumble across and hail as a long lost treasure or maybe I wide of the mark and it’s just me.  Yeah, that’ll be it.  It’s just me.

Bandcamp

Author: Dom Daley