Lowest Fi - The Werewolf (self-released)

Musical terms are always problematic. I mean, if I started throwing around the term “gothic,” for many, it would conjure images of black-clad, overly theatrical bands with drum machines and dry-ice pretending to be the lost boys of contemporary rock.

Well, with “The Werewolf,” Lowest Fi proves itself to be gothic in a more authentic and much more fulfilling sense. It is a song that seems to be more inspired by the works of literature such as Stoker, Poe and Polidori possibly even capturing the creeping dread and true sense of madness and menace that is found between the lines of Machen and Lovecraft than the usual sonic tip of the hat to the first Joy Division album.

As a song, it crawls towards the listener, a slow impending doom, shrouded in the blunt trauma of the beats, the depth-charge pulse of the bass and guitars, which wander between cold cleaving sonic edges and barbed and barbarous abrasiveness.

Gothic music, in its original form, quickly became a cliche, all style and little substance and then, under the captaincy of later generations was relegated to a sub-genre of metal, loosing what little style it still retained. Well, “The Werewolf” is the sound of all the things that made the genre great in the first place, its shaded menace, its otherness, its literary associations, its music of the apocalypse feeling, crawling back out of its shallow grave to beautifully infect the music world once more.

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