My band Vazum‘s new album Vampyre Villa has a variety of moods and styles which people have picked up on. It floats between deathrock, shoegaze, goth, and post-punk which is why we call ourselves a deathgaze band. We’re interested in combining the rawness of deathrock with the depth of shoegaze.
We are the goth rockers, Black Angel, from Los Angeles (even though I hail from 80’s England) and have just released an extended version of our debut album “The Widow.” Initially released in October 2019, some may think this is a little quick for an extended version. But while the first version was awesome, something wasn’t quite right.
It was mastered for the “headphone and streaming” generation, and it just didn’t have the bollocks it needed for a Goth/Post-punk album – not the ones I grew up listening to. I should have gone with my gut, I shouldn’t have catered to this popular way of mastering songs, should have stuck to my guns. So now I’m doing it again. And I couldn’t just re-release it, so we thought let’s just make it longer and more impressive, so fans have a reason to want it.
Growing up as a Tempe child but switching places in the outskirts of SoCal or forced to go to church every Sunday, took its toll. I found myself at darker times and darker places of wanting to let go.
I may have seemed happy to some, but I wasn’t… I felt trapped and I didn’t like any of it. And it didn’t help that I had an attention problem or that I kept falling ill…
The ambition of Syrenomelia is to find back the strangeness, the dirtiness, the emotion and passion which characterised the alternative rock music between the 60ties and late 90ties – defying the industrialised and genre-focussed ways of making music that have been so ubiquitous in the last 20 years.
I started playing with bands in 1997, and all I cared about was playing live, seeing people see and hear me. I wasn’t concerned with whether they liked it or hated it, so long as they felt something. Here we are, 20-something years later, and not much has changed for me, but the rest of the world is a different animal entirely.