REASONS TO LIVE
1. The Darkness, Last of Our Kind (Canary Dwarf/Sony). Some “serious” music scholars still equate the abundant sense of humour that has in the past compelled the Darkness to title songs “Knockers” and “Get Your Hands Off My Woman” with the Darkness itself being a joke. Really, though, the Darkness, like most of the ridiculous ’70s and ’80s rock and metal acts to which it pays debt on Last of Our
Kind is just in on the joke: this sort of music was born ridiculous and needs to be ridiculous if it’s gonna be done well. And the Darkness, holding stronger 12 years and three albums on from Permis
sion to Land than few would dare have predicted in 2003, continues to do it well. Granted, the U.K. quartet’s decision to open Last of Our Kind with a daft metal epic about the 865 A.D. Viking invasion of East Anglia (“Remorseless Norsemen swim ashore . . . shirtless in the rain”) won’t help convince its detractors of the seriousness behind the silliness. But screw them. “Barbarians” catapults into the stratosphere the instant Justin Hawkins’s caterwauling “Ah-aah-ah-aah-ahAAAAH” vocal hook rides in atop the song’s storming central riff, and the remainder of Last of Our Kind should continue to similarly activate your pleasure centres if you, too, can appreciate the songcraft, instrumental swagger and outsized showmanship that made Sad Wings
of Destiny and Electric and Pyromania so
great.
2. Honeymoon. All love to Netflix for continuing to surprise this ravenous horror consumer with fresh grist for my nightmares. The 2014 cheapie Honey
moon is a gnawingly patient exercise in ultra-minimalist psychological squirminess that takes the worst of worst-case new-relationship scenarios — the giddy couples getaway that falls apart in a hurry — and methodically extrapolates upon it to bizarre and suggestive extremes even seasoned fright-flick aficionados won’t see coming. You know this is one honeymoon that’ll be over quickly, obviously, since newlyweds Bea and Paul (Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway, basically carrying the entire film by themselves) haven’t seen enough movies to realize that an isolated cabin in the woods is the absolute worst of all possible locations in which to consummate young love. But first-time writer/director Leigh Janiak toys with her unfortunate protagonists and her audience in sufficiently vague fashion that once Bea suddenly gets distant and absent-minded and starts wandering about
the forest naked in the middle of the night and developing weird sores on her body,
Honeymoon’s slow trudge to gritty, grisly denouement is anything but predictable. Fans of Cronenberg-ian body horror and the blank terror of Ti West’s The House of
the Devil and The Sacrament will subsequently be pleased. Bonus points for UFO content.
3. Vanbot, Perfect Storm (Lisch Recordings). Stockholm synth-popster Ester “Vanbot” Ideskog seemed quite capable of charming her way to imminent transAtlantic recognition whilst making the rounds at the South by Southwest festival in 2012, yet then vanished into the ether so swiftly I didn’t think of her again until
Perfect Storm showed up out of the blue a couple of weeks ago. She scrapped an entire first attempt at a followup to her eponymous 2011 debut in the interim, apparently, and the battered-but-bouncing-back tone of the new album implies that a bad breakup of some sort detonated somewhere along the way, too. “They warned me your moves would distract me,” Ideskog curses on “Bite the Bullet.” With assistance from Knife/I Break Horses producer Johannes Berglund,
Perfect Storm henceforth steers itself away from elevated Scandinavian techno-bubblegum redolent of Robyn or Annie through a pocket of faintly trap-esque darkness on “Maniac” and then further and further into cathartic, “I will dance through this” pseudo-rave territory on “Seven” and the tingly “Better in the Light.” It sounds a lot like Lights gone “Euro” so I’m cool with it.