Goths on Drugs
Volume 1

This time I overdid it. There's the mainstream, okay, and then there's the underground, but here, we're bordering on the esoteric. And I can't take it anymore. I need to escape from it, free myself from this demon that haunts my nights and makes me wet myself constantly. I apologize for the frankness, but I need to vent: it can't be that something discovered absolutely by chance (and I can't remember how) then hurts this much.

At the origin of all this is a certain Jud Winter, an Australian rasta who is also the classic desperate, disillusioned, Schopenhauerian sociopath who, to our delight, erupts and vomits his paranoias and apocalyptic warnings through a pile of notes. A sick mind that gives birth to demonic designs (see here) and indulges in certain clichés, like eating gall in a bathtub (only the gun in the mouth is missing and we're all set). For certain compositions, however, he himself admitted that he collaborates with his...wife?! Oh dear.

Anyway, one bad day our friend decides to bring to life the project "Goths on Drugs", a one-man band - of course - to share with the world a fragment of his raging bitterness: that fragment is simply called, "Volume 1", nicely packaged. A creation that required some time, also because Jud wanted to organize things properly - supposedly he himself uploaded the album on YouTube. Now, I don't believe that "Goths" refers to people like Theodoric or Sisebut, and anyway, I doubt today's goths would need to plunge a syringe to produce something like this. This is truly "insane music for insane people", a category I fear I now belong to.

If I understand correctly, the album should illustrate dreams that lead us to watch the demons dwelling within us, without neglecting an anarchic matrix. Well! Just look at the cover, damn it, look at that cover: the dream tissue represented in a Klee-like manner torn apart by the terrible epiphany of the death we carry within us. The music? A bastard, almost unintelligible chimera. The vocals are typical of black metal, but for the rest of the genre, apart from some isolated episodes, there's really not much: it ranges from clear industrial influences to aggrotech that tends to become predominant towards the end, all garnished here and there with piano textures that can remind of a certain symphonic black. Essentially, "Volume 1" is "generally experimental": I suppose the anarchic matrix lies—also—in this.

Now, the point is this: in this album, there are numerous interesting ideas, which, however, will need to be better utilized and developed. Each track somehow manages to convey the concept at its core, but in the end, the work turns out a bit too disordered and inconsistent, even in quality: it goes from moments I consider noteworthy (because this is an album that lives on moments, not tracks) to decidedly less memorable episodes. The very fact that there are sixteen songs over 40 minutes, in this case, confirms that we are indeed dealing with a record of ideas. Let's hope, therefore, that the possible "Volume 2" will be more compact and, indeed... voluminous.

Some already consider "Goths on Drugs" one of the best black metal bands on the planet (which then isn’t black, but oh well), others would use this album as a coaster. In any case, it's something that can't leave anyone indifferent. And it wouldn't deserve four stars, I know. But I give it one more anyway, because that image, those feelings, in the end, stay with you. And listening to the whole volume in one go, you don't come out well. Often, it matters that this remains: an image, an idea.