12 Songs: Moderate Melancholy
Robert Smith was once quoted having said the following about The Cure’s darkest and least listener-friendly release, 1982’s proto-goth opus Pornography:
“I wanted to make the ultimate ‘fuck off record’. So a lot of that was just us being dark just for the sake of being dark, with no real substance.”
Although I actually love that record, I’ve always felt a similar way about most “goth” music in general; most of what I hear of the genre ends up sounding more like an aesthetic statement than an actual artistic endeavor, at least to my ears. On the other hand, artists who can successfully thread the line between gloomy melodrama and a more profound, pensive kind of melancholy are the ones really worth a listen.
The following playlist consists of tunes that satisfy this criteria — not quite goth (save for the one Bauhaus track), but certainly void of any sunshine. Nothing too moody, but still dark and brooding enough to evoke your inner poet (see: Nick Cave’s 7 minute biblical epic The Mercy Seat). Moderate Melancholy is this week’s theme, enjoy accordingly.—Jackson Todd
Listen to 12 Songs Moderate Melancholy on Spotify here.
[Above Artwork: Vija Celmins, Untitled (Web 1), 2001, mezzotint on paper, 17.78 x 19.68 cm, private collection]
