I fear many will hastily compare Party music for graveyards with the latest release by the Finns The 69 Eyes. An unforgivable mistake, if we carefully analyse the contents of this record and, above all, the concrete substance that has set apart what the two bands have produced over the years. Jyrki(e) 69 and his ravaged companions have come a very long way from their sleazy/street beginnings, well documented by "Motor City resurrection", before arriving at their most recent "Back'n'blood", managing to synthesise the ardour of their early years (and the barely concealed, obvious affection for their godfathers Hanoi Rocks) with goth melancholy à la "Blessed be", thanks also and above all to the work of producer Matt Hyde.
Our own Bloody Mary have always shown a marked hard/glam/goth attitude, and the opening trio "Velvet", "Better down" and "Sobibor" is here to prove it, with mighty choruses, emphatic singing and very tight playing as the load-bearing columns of an architecture as essential as a martyr's cenotaph. All of it clearly tinted black, as the record's theme and the musicians' innate nature demand.
Which brings us to the lyrical content of PMfG: in short, the all-too-human vicissitudes of a scientist who, in the early 1930s, is carrying out his studies in the company of his beloved, who, struck by a deadly illness, leaves him forever. The man cannot resign himself and tries to create a perfect copy of the woman, going so far as to visit cemeteries in the dead of night to dig up the corpses of young women, from which to recover glands, parts of brains, nerves.
"Somebody to love" is measured and dramatic, resting on a mighty, very dark and epic chorus, and is one of the central episodes of Party music for graveyards, a song steeped in gloomy, self-indulgent grandiloquence that clearly expresses the concept the band wanted to highlight as the hinge of the whole record: it is the story being told that forms the real soundtrack, the sound is the protagonist, and every single song narrates the emotions the scholar - driven mad by grief and above all by excess - feels in his slow and inexorable descent into the deepest abysses of depravity, in an orgiastic ritual of Death and madness.
The beautiful "The right way" underlines the skill of Aldebaran and companions in writing songs that are not trivial, revealing BM's considerable potential; they are clearly not content to diligently repeat the same little exercise forever.
The measured use of electronics and inventive rhythmic solutions make Party music for graveyards (with its Burtonesque artwork) a pleasure, and reveal details and nuances that help define perfectly the varied sonic palette created by the band's music, relating to the peculiar trademarks of Zeromancer and Deathstars ("Gettin' older").
In this context, the weak link in the black chain seems to be "Pet semetary", the Ramones cover (well, there was certainly no need to point that out...) already on the 2007 EP "Dig up for the party" - not by chance the only song not made by Bloody Mary. Because our friends clearly know how to manage perfectly well on their own...
First published in Italian; in English here. Where it appeared ↗