Before I write a few words about the song I’m prescribing for a healthy slab of darkness today, I want to acknowledge the fact that darkdose.com has survived for 2 years. That’s not to say we haven’t had to be resuscitated a few times, but that’s pretty damn good. Since June 2005, we’ve sporadically thrown out our best discoveries of dark music and hopefully turned a few of you onto a song, album or artist you love. We’ll try to keep it up. I wanted to also mention the launching of dark dose tv. While it’s in an embryonic state as of now, I have plans to expand it with many more videos and even original and live content. Unlike most other lifeless online video streams, any author of dark dose can actually broadcast live, share videos with you live, and so forth. The possibilities are exciting. I’ll write more on this later once we develop it a bit more. You can find a link to dark dose tv from the menu on our homepage.

It has always been hard for me to appreciate female vocals. I like broken voices, fragile ones, voices which can express a large
palette of emotions. And it seems I often found this in the voice of male singers. Female vocals are too often polished, sterilized on the altar of technical mastery. And what I consider being essential often disappears because of this. However, there is a few exceptions in my record collection. And Shannon Wright is probably my favorite one.

The 3rd and the Mortal. Norway has never had a shortage of highly experimental metal bands and The 3rd and the Mortal were no different. Their debut album “Tears Laid in Earth” pushed about all the boundaries you could think of at the time. The album wasn’t afraid to tenderly explore all corners of melancholy and held no limits to the amount sparse effected clean guitar and meandering leads as they saw fit. To top it all off, The 3rd and the Mortal were one of the first bands in the European scene with a female vocalist (many bands including The Gathering claim them as an influence). While the bands early material was often described as ‘doom metal,’ it’s clear their approach was more from the Pink Floyd direction than any classic metal bands.

I’ll keep this one short. It is time, yet again, to say goodbye to yet another year. I recall the excitement and anxiety of late 1999, when many thought something would be extraordinarily different about 2000. It was as if it had some spiritual significance, when in the end it was just another year. Another number. Another moment in time. One more page of memories marked in our mind.

Every once and a while I am overcome by a strong yearning to hear a song I haven’t heard in ages. It’s almost always a song which made an important impression on me at some point in my life. About a year ago it was “Rock me Amadeus” by Falco, which I recall as being obsessed with around age 6. Sure, that song is somehow still fun to me, but a recent yearning recalled a much more serious song. You probably know it — “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman.

When I was young, I would listen to the radio all day long, waiting to capture some song I liked onto cassette tape. In hindsight, I’m sure much of it was pop drivel, but I distinctly remember one song standing out; “Fade into You,” by Mazzy Star. The song was dark and hypnotic [...]

I like Pelican, but something about them irks me just a little bit. Maybe it’s the huge amount of undue credit they get in the media, the number of hipsters who have latched onto them, or how everyone seemed to know who they were overnight. The fact is, I really like them as [...]

Tenhi are one of those bands who I can consistently count on releasing album after album of top-tier dark music I will love. Their previous two albums, “Kauan” and “Väre” were masterpieces of beautiful and wildly creative neo-folk/rock (their EP’s are also every bit as good). My anticipation always rides high when I hear there [...]

“It’s all a game - avoiding failure - when true colors will bleed. All in the name - of misbehavior - and the things we don’t need.” If these lyrics don’t remind you of a certain 60s singer/song-writer, the vocalist in Poets of the Fall sure as hell should. That singer/song-writer being the brilliant Nick Drake. Anyone clearly influenced by this widely overlooked and magnificent man gets points in my book, so score one for this Finnish pop-rock/metal outfit.

And Jesus Christ, wouldn’t you know it but Andrew at Aversion beat me to post about a new band by several days yet again. Well, fuck it I can never touch what he does, or how well he does it, but this post means a lot to me so here it goes anyway…