Christian Death
Only Theater of Pain

A fundamental and seminal album in the goth-rock and death-rock genres, "Only Theater of Pain" was released in 1982 by the debuting Californian band Christian Death. A band destined for alternating fortunes and an inglorious decline. Nevertheless, thanks to this album and the subsequent ones produced with singer and songwriter Rozz Williams (aka Roger Alan Painter) before the split, Christian Death secured a prominent place in the goth scene during the '80s. This debut album was among the first to establish and define the sound and stylistic elements of the genre, thanks to the guitar imprint of Rikk Agnew - already a founder of the hardcore punk group Adolescents - and to Williams' hoarse and disenchanted vocals reciting his litanies of death and visions suspended between surrealism and the most extreme esoteric currents. Rikk Agnew, in particular, along with Daniel Ash of the British band Bauhaus, inaugurated a new approach to guitar playing, with a massive use of effects combined with distortion, giving the tracks a psychedelic dimension clad in sinister dark suggestions. A new direction that influenced countless musicians for at least two decades, not only in the gothic scene. Paired with an unmistakably horror-gothic look, that kind of sound forever marked the boundary between early punk and its most obvious evolution: the anarchic and asocial spirit that screamed rebellion at all costs against the system and conformity transformed into anguish and depressed rejection, shifting that same rebellion onto themes of suicide, gnostic Satanism, and ritual hallucination.

Thus, the titles and lyrics of the album's formidable and impactful ten tracks assume a depth that goes beyond mere provocation. Rozz Williams, an androgynous restless creature who would die by suicide in 1998, enunciates his deathly verses over Agnew's furious riffs and strident excursions, supported by the direct and effective bass and drum lines of James McGearthy to George Belanger. Enriched with learned quotations, biblical references, and enigmatic phrases written backward, the lyrics transport the listener to a dark dimension that grazes European culture and contrasts it with a desecrating effect against the sunny and affluent idea of the American West Coast. A land of cinema and hedonism where a dark and theatrical band like Christian Death could not fail to attract attention. From "Cavity" to "Stairs," from "Spiritual Cramp" to "Romeo's Distress" (perhaps the album's most famous track), through the admirable "Burnt Offerings" (the most impactful for the guitar style), Christian Death weaves their web of inexorable black prophecies and culminates with the experimental "Prayer" in their sonic journey that will leave a mark.

"Only Theater of Pain" would later give rise to a sort of European remake thanks to the French label Invitation Au Suicide (with an intensely violent cover featuring Rochegrosse's painting "Andromaque") which reprinted the album's original version and then published an EP titled "Deathwish," containing new versions of three tracks plus three previously unreleased tracks.

The original title of the album in its initial version features the word "theater" in the American spelling, while all subsequent official versions display "theatre" in the British spelling.