Gallows’ Eve, “For The Black Birds”

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Gallows' Eve - For The Black Birds

Gallows’ Eve
For The Black Birds
M&A Musicart

By the time their first LP, a compilation of existing singles and new material, was released Swedish trio Gallows’ Eve had their particular read on goth on lock. Stormy, anthemic, and decidedly rock, 13 Thorns was as tight and strong a debut as a band could hope for. Follow up record For The Black Birds arrives a little over a year later and doesn’t deviate from the formula it’s predecessor set forth, apart from perhaps blending its different components into a more unified and regulated sound.

Gallows’ Eve’s sturm und drang style lifts from the long tradition of continental, metal-adjacent goth rock, but is much more flexible and, frankly, memorable and hooky than nearly all of the gloom merchants in that vein one might name dating back to the Nephilim. Tunes like “The Damage”, with its seething and measured verses building to a wind-whipped half-time chorus adorned with squalling leads and Andreas Lundberg’s wounded bellow exemplify how much movement and drama Gallows’ Eve can pack into tight four-minute structures. Even when they tilt a bit more towards the Leeds style of goth on opener “Ars Corax” or straight-up butt rock on “We Chase The Dark”, the well-blended instrumentation and slick production leaves no doubt about who’s playing.

Much of the above could certainly be taken as an accurate accounting of 13 Thorns, and really it’s the fact that most of the nine tracks here contain a little bit of each of those core elements, rather than casting out into more specifically thrashing or chamber-goth directions, which distinguishes For The Black Birds from it. The epic (read: slow) balladeering of closer “The Hunger” and “Let The Storm In”, with its lithe synth-string focus, are perhaps the tracks lying the farthest afield from that core sound. Hell, even the degree to which the album’s titular corvids are repeatedly mentioned in the lyrics makes for a consistent thread. Thankfully, a fairly tight run-time and the band’s already established talent for immediate hooks keeps that sense of unity from ever feeling homogenous.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” isn’t exactly the most compelling pitch for a record, but it’s a strategy that works for Gallows’ Eve. The audience drawn to them by their previous work was likely drawn in by their talent for a style which simply isn’t executed well very often these days, and are likely hoping they keep the hot hand going. Luckily for them, For The Black Birds sits ably beside its predecessor and helps to clarify both Gallows’ Eve’s style and their place as one of the strongest trad goth bands going today. Recommended.

Buy it.

For The Black Birds by Gallows' Eve

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We Have a Technical 562: To The Left

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Douglas McCarthy

The passing of legendary Nitzer Ebb frontman Douglas J. McCarthy is the only thing we could talk about on this week’s podcast. Forgive us if this episode is a bit more scattered than usual; news of McCarthy’s passing came out less than an hour before our recording, but we wanted to at least get some of our thoughts about his work and legacy out, as well as personal remembrances. As always, you can rate and subscribe on iTunes, download directly, or listen through the widget down below.

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Lead Into Gold, “Knife the Ally”

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Lead Into Gold
Knife The Ally
Artoffact Records

Knife the Ally is Lead Into Gold’s third album since Paul Barker reactivated the project, and seems to be a culmination of the celebrated producer and bassist’s approach to music in this millennium. Where 2018’s The Sun Behind The Sun referred back to the classic Wax Trax sound that Barker helped define with his work as a producer and member of Ministry during that band’s imperial period, and 2023’s The Eternal Present looked forward into an abstracted version of industrial rock, 2025’s Knife The Ally finds the mid-point between its predecessors; it’s a record that features both clamorous programmed percussion and deep bass rhythms, but departs from standard industrial rock song structures in intriguing fashion.

A track like “Lionize” nicely encapsulates the current ethos of Lead Into Gold; it’s got familiar rolling drums and strategically placed samples of ghostly melodies and noisy squeals, while its bassline and Barker’s weird, keening vocal establish a much chiller and more freeform groove between the spikes of the more aggressive sounds. Elsewhere, the title track opens with a short loop of mechanical noise that becomes the basis for an escalating charge forward, never resolving its movement between verse and chorus, but adding weight with each layer of synths and noise until it all comes to a crashing halt.

Sometimes low-to-the-ground and smooth (the economical industrial dub of “It’s All a Sign”), sometimes strident and forceful (the piston-pumping mid-tempo attack of “From Tomorrow”), Knife the Ally is rarely calm, but conversely rarely chaotic. As with his best classic and modern material, Barker understands the value of centering rhythm and movement in his compositions, never derailing or getting stuck running in circles. Listen to how he turns the lope of closer “Dripping from the Hilt” into a slow motion swirl of textures, half-waltz, half atonal avant-garde modular synth workout, all joined via a simple assembly of drums and bass. Alternately, the abrasive “We Can Be Paralyzed” is all rusted out cymbals and distorted synthlines but stays in a pocket with root-note bass and simple kick-snares. There’s always a lot going on sonically, but the economy of the track times helps it all stay on course; at less than a half-hour in length, no song on the record has time to exhaust itself, or the listener.

Knife the Ally is a record that splits the difference between Barker’s work as a technician and as an artist, and nicely highlights his proficiency in both. While not strictly improvisational and never loose structurally, it does have an almost jazz-like experimentalism in its heart: it’s an exploration of possibilities within established forms that only those who have already mastered their standard shape can undertake. Paul Barker is a musician of that calibre in the world of post-industrial, and this is him showing where he can take the sounds and ideas he helped pioneer.

Buy it.

Knife The Ally by PAUL ION BARKER

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Tracks: June 10th, 2025

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Annnnnd we’re back. With Bruce’s return from his ancestral homeland, and Alex emerging from a sweat induced coma brought on by some unseasonably warm Vancouver weather, the mothership that is www.idieyoudie.com will resume our normal posting schedule after this slightly shortened week. We hope you didn’t miss us too much (we hope you missed us at least a little though), and while we did have plenty of podcasts during the break in written content featuring the likes of Psyched, Bootblacks, and Jason Pettigrew, there’s always something nice about doing the thing that brought us to the dance: writing about new music from the world of Our Thing. And speaking of which, we got a fresh batch of Tracks for your pleasure right below. Enjoy!

Pixel Grip at their most them

Pixel Grip, “Reason to Stay”
Chicago trio Pixel Grip have been on an absolute tear with their recent singles, between the high-key dramatic groove of “I Bet You Do” to the bump-and-ground-to-dust of “Stamina” and the almost sweet uplift of “Split”. Their most recent missive is “Reason to Stay”, a track that finds them exploring both their softer emotional side and their righteous anger in equal measure; the cut starts with a typically funky bassline and vocalist Rita Lukea showing some vulnerability before launching into a cutting attack on someone who pushed her too far. New album has been a long wait, but if the whole lives up to the songs we’ve heard so far, it’s gonna be a burner.
Reason to Stay by Pixel Grip

Rhys Fulber feat. Barkosina, “Only Love Will Save Us”
Rhys Fulber (you don’t need us to run down the man’s credits, you know who he is) has made a real career of doing industrial techno under his own name in recent years, applying much of the programming and sound design that has influenced generations of artists to a genre where he can explore his brutalist tendencies in full. The singles from his Artoffact debut Memory Impulse Autonomy has thus far dipped into some territory that Fulber hasn’t necessarily touched on in his solo productions thus far, finding a nice balance between melodics and vocals and his pounding drums and programming – check out “Only Love Will Save Us”, where the voice of Years of Denials’ Barkosina inhabits an instrumental that is both propulsive and emotive, steadfast and bold without giving up on sincerity and emotion.
Memory Impulse Autonomy by Rhys Fulber

Slighter feat. Craig Huxtable, “Stories to Tell”
The relationship between Slighter’s Colin Cameron and friend of the site Craig Huxtable of Landscape Body Machine and Ohmelectronic goes back for a few years, a case of two artists finding a commonality in philosophy and complimenting one another’s strengths. New single “Stories to Tell” has the detailed production and highly textured ambience that is synonymous with Slighter, while Huxtable’s vocals move further than ever before into emotive, melodic territory. It’s a combination that puts us in mind of Architect, an unexpected but not at all unwelcome territory for these two to explore together.
Stories To Tell (Single) by Slighter x Craig Joseph Huxtable

ESA, “Pound of Flesh”
Maybe it’s weird to use a descriptor for an act as acerbic and aggressive as ESA, but it’s hard to think of a band that has quite the same batting average when it comes to putting out records that consistently deliver, while pushing the project’s envelope. “Pound of Flesh” from the forthcoming Sounds for Your Happiness is pretty much everything we want from an ESA club track; pounding drum programming, Jamie Blacker’s powerful vocals and some deceptively clever arrangement choices that marry the project’s technoid and rhythmic noise roots to modern bass sounds. Play this loud, it’s worth it.
Sounds for your Happiness by ESA

HIDE, “DEEPER THAN DEATH (here on earth) I DESTROY”
Oh shit, HIDE is back, everyone look busy. Jokes aside, we’ve always been fans of the Chicago-based duo, from their earliest more beat oriented material to their current noisy experimentalism, not far off from power electronics but with the cheap shocks replaced with substantial politic and artistic vitriol. “DEEPER THAN DEATH (here on earth) I DESTROY” is pretty much what we’ve come to expect from HIDE, with screeching loops that are neither formless nor arranged in easy sequence, and the excoriating vocals of Heather Hannoura tearing their way through the din. Something to throw if you’re having a good day and want to ruin it a little, or a bad day and need something to scrape off the filth.
DEEPER THAN DEATH (here on earth) I DESTROY by HIDE

SOFT VEIN, “Here Comes the Rain Again”
When we wrote up the most recent album from California depressive post-punk/darkwave act SOFT VEIN, we noted that the project’s bleak outlook was balanced by mild glimmers of hope. The soon to be released EP From Another Room does a fine job building on those glimpses of a brighter light with some remixes from the likes of Twin Tribes and QUAL, and this quite lovely cover of the Eurhythmics “Here Comes the Rain Again”, a fine subject for the project to take on and that matches their melancholic outlook to a tee.
FROM ANOTHER ROOM (EP) by SOFT VEIN

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We Have a Technical 561: A Place on Earth

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On this week’s episode of We Have a Technical, Alex is joined by Chris Hewitt of Terminus Festival to discuss the history of our favourite annual gathering of bands and fans of Our Thing, as well as the logistics of putting on a big event, the finer points of arranging a line-up, and what acts we’re most excited for in this year’s fest! It’s a great convo with a long time friend of the site, and one that has us excited to pack our bags for Calgary seven weeks out! As always, you can rate and subscribe on iTunes, download directly, or listen through the widget down below.

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We Have a Commentary: Jason Pettigrew on his 33 1/3 for Ministry’s “The Land of Rape and Honey”

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This month’s We Have a Commentary takes on a special form as Alex welcomes Jason Pettigrew to the podcast, where the longtime Ministry chronicler fills us in on his new 33 1/3 on Ministry’s immortal industrial classic The Land of Rape and Honey. Join us as the former Alt. Press Editor in Chief and alternative music writer extraordinaire outlines how the book came together, who he spoke to (and he didn’t) and his personal feelings on the legacy of one of Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker’s most enduring contributions to our shared musical history. As always, you can rate and subscribe on iTunes, download directly, or listen through the widget down below.

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