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While the rock and pop genres often seemed, and indeed still do, at odds with each other, opposite camps with never the twain shall meet attitudes towards each other, the gothic world never had any problems dancing deftly with either entity. This new single from Ashton Nyte’s The Awakening is a great example of one of its most consistent sonic dark lords seducing both of those sonic worlds and turning them to his will.
As a taster of The Awakening’s new, eponymous album to follow, the band’s twelfth, “Mirror Midnight,” proves that fantastic dark sonic matter can be forged in equal measures from rich, pop-aware accessibility and driving dance grooves, guitars that run from the raw to the razor-edged, and darkwave delicacy, energetic crescendos and understated passages, brooding basslines and anthemic sonic heights.
And, if “Mirror Midnight” is about how mass media can, and will, fan the flames of the individual’s self-obsession and how the two feed off each other to create their own self-contained world that has become untethered from reality, a situation that Baudrillard called The Simulacra, then who better to point out the dangers than someone like Ashton Nyte. Not only someone who plys his trade in the limelight of the public gaze but who has, amongst other enlightening ventures, presented a lecture series at US universities focusing on tolerance and acceptance, two things in short supply in the world right now.
As a taste of the album to come, “Mirror Midnight” does its job admirably. After listening to its dark majesty, who isn’t ready for a whole album of such deft and delicious sonic beauty?
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