At some point in the mid-'90s—right about the same time that Marilyn Manson became the style icon of choice for teens looking for new ways to horrify their parents—the concept of "goth" started to get a bad rap. For those of us who grew up discretely smoking clove cigarettes while listening to Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance records in the '80s, seeing goth culture hijacked by the likes of Hot Topic and Korn was something more tragic than Rozz Williams’ suicide. It was the death of an aesthetic. Goth became, for all intents and purposes, a pejorative.
So it’s with no small sense of gratitude that, in recent years, aging goths such as myself have seen a slew of young bands (Trust, the Horrors, Zola Jesus) exploring the genre’s spidery, tear-stained roots. Such is the case with Australia’s Nite Fields, a four-piece band whose full-length debut, the somber Depersonalisation, could almost pass for a long-lost Lonely Is an Eyesore-era 4AD compilation from the late '80s. That the record so thoroughly mimics its forbears—imagine a nearly seamless union of vintage New Order (when they still leaned more heavily on guitars than synths), Clan of Xymox, and early Cure—is both a blessing and a curse. Depersonalisation ____plays with a kind of intense familiarity that goes down so easily that the record seems to end before it even gets started—like a fog that rolls through the room and evaporates before you realize it was there. Clocking in at 35 minutes, the nine songs (two of which are instrumental) are both beautiful and slight, which in this case turns out to be the perfect combination.
Aligning dark atmospherics with a basic rock setup, Depersonalisation ____is a thing of mostly spectral simplicity. Front man Danny Venzin’s voice hovers somewhere in the range of ghostly baritone, which lends standout tracks like "Fill the Void" and "Hell Happy" a perfect, deathly glamour. "You want to whip the heart from my inside/ take away the beat," he intones on "Prescription"—a track that boasts guitar lines that would have made both Peter Hook and Robert Smith cry envious tears of blood at some point in 1983. It’s also a song that strongly puts forth the record’s most pervasive themes—disassociation, dissipation, disappointment, evaporation—all of which are echoed in the record’s consistently moribund lyrics: "I go out in the night/ Nothing happens but nothing’s something."
Given the perfectly considered aesthetic of Depersonalisation, it’s not surprising that the band’s front man also runs a record label (Brisbane’s Lost Race, specializing in "Unpopular Music from Australia") or that the band cites "Michael Hutchence on a rope" as an influence on their Facebook page. They may be unrepentantly moody, but they are not entirely humorless. The way in which Nite Fields melds nihilist post-punk with Cocteau-friendly shoegaze vibes indicates a coterie of musicians who have likely spent a lifetime absorbing old Dif Juz and This Mortal Coil records. Nowhere is this fascination more evident than album closer "Winter’s Gone"—a seven-minute moodscape that unspools some serious The Moon and the Melodies-style Harold Budd/Robin Guthrie guitar ripples (complete with underwater saxophone squalls) that one wishes could go on for approximately forever. For those who grew up worshipping at the altar of such ephemeral sounds, a record like Depersonalisation is a welcome bit of gloom, even if it ultimately feels like a record you probably already own.
