This Corrosion
The Sisters of Mercy
Everything about this song is excessive by design — the runtime stretches past nine minutes, the production piles gospel choir against industrial percussion against a synthesized string arrangement of absurd grandeur, and Andrew Eldritch's voice descends from somewhere below ordinary baritone into a register that barely seems human, each syllable arriving with the deliberateness of someone who has never doubted a word they've said. Jim Steinman's production applies Meat Loaf-scale maximalism to goth rock and the result is preposterous and irresistible simultaneously, a cathedral built for a congregation of black-clad teenagers. The choir vocals create a liturgical weight that plays earnestly against the melodrama, as if no one told the singers this might be camp. It belongs to a mid-eighties moment when certain artists were making darkness huge and theatrical, refusing the underground's aversion to ambition. This is music for when you want to feel enormous — driving too fast, the volume at the limit, occupying more space in the world than you ordinarily permit yourself.
medium
1980s
dense, grandiose, maximalist
British goth rock
Gothic Rock, Post-Punk. Goth rock. grandiose, defiant. Sustains maximum theatrical excess across its entire nine-minute runtime, accumulating gospel choir and industrial percussion into an overwhelming dark liturgical triumph.. energy 8. medium. danceability 6. valence 5. vocals: deep sub-baritone male, deliberate, theatrically certain, barely human register. production: gospel choir, industrial percussion, synthesized strings, Jim Steinman maximalism, cathedral-scale arrangement. texture: dense, grandiose, maximalist. acousticness 1. era: 1980s. British goth rock. Driving too fast with the volume at its limit when you want to feel enormous and occupy more space in the world than you ordinarily permit yourself.