Before I get stuck into the song’s specifics, “Someone To Blame” is a reminder that all that dark, post-punk stuff, all that gothic invention and musical exploration that spilled over into the 80’s, was more akin to the alternative dance scene than the guitar-wielding longhairs of the rock and roll world. If the latter owed its heritage to decades of blues-based evolution, here was a revolution sparked by all those disillusioned punks who were now rewiring broken keyboards to their own will and pushing the frontiers of music on a daily basis. And fifty years on, thanks to bands like Holy Death Temple, that sound is as exciting, forceful, frenzied, and energetic as ever. And I love it!
“Someone To Blame” is a digital force of nature, an onslaught of scything synths and searing guitars, pummelling beats and vocals that are simultaneously scary and seductive. It’s dance music taken to industrial levels, groove squared, dark and desirous and delicious and delirious, how can you resist?
And if the music blurs the lines between more traditional analog sound and cutting-edge electronica, between the old world and the new, musically speaking, then the message does the same. Here, front man Bryan Edward reminds us that military uniforms, and particularly those of units such as The SS, were designed to carry an erotic undercurrent, a seductive quality designed to make you submit to the wearer’s ideologies, just as the fringes of the gothic scene and the world of S&M similarly overlap.
What does it all mean? Well, perhaps don’t read too much into it, just let the music carry you away. But before long, it will work its mystique and magic on you, after all, this isn’t just a song, it’s a sonic ritual, an orgy of sound (or perhaps the sound of an orgy!!), an intoxicating creative urge… submit and see where it takes you…you know you want to! As the great George Bernard Shaw himself noted “dancing is a socially acceptable, vertical expression of a horizontal desire.”
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