Goth

While many legendary groups have felt pigeonholed by the G-word in the past, there’s more to goth music than minor-keyed melodrama and pore-clogging blocks of black makeup. Like the best strains of its sister scene, punk rock, goth is an attitude — a lifestyle choice that can mean any number of things: the icy, incredibly influential soundscapes of Joy Division; the ghastly, shape-shifting pop grooves of the Cure; the art-damaged punk of Siouxsie & The Banshees; or the nihilistic noise and deeply disturbing lyrics — envisioned by the one-and-only Nick Cave — of the Birthday Party.

And then there are our Next Steps, which unearth some unusual suspects from the doom-and-gloom game.

We know what you’re thinking, Bauhaus fans: what are Portishead and PJ Harvey doing near the top of our Goth playlist? We’ve got to be kidding, right? Nope. After all, “Down by the Water” and “Sour Times” maintain the same suffocating sense of menace and melancholy as “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” and “Telegram Sam.” And they’re not the only artists who have cleared the cobwebs on goth music over the years. While the Cocteau Twins had their heads in the clouds and their feet cutting across chain-linked effects pedals, Type O Negative wrote metallic death marches for people who worshipped Black Sabbath and Christian Death.

As for our Deep Cuts, it serves up some new-school names right alongside such goth godfathers as the Damned and Joy Division.

As easy as it is to draw a line between the bleak, jagged post-punk of Joy Division and such modern-day mood merchants as Interpol and the Faint, cult acts like the Chameleons (the spare, acoustic atmospheres of “Tears”) and Cranes (the piano-driven pop tendencies of “In the Night”) can be found lurking in the shadows of today’s songs as well. As a result, our Deep Cuts has a little bit of everything, including the ominous, widescreen storytelling skills of Nick Cave (“The Weeping Song”), This Mortal Coil’s otherworldly Tim Buckley cover (“Song to the Siren”), and the Damned’s pallid, prickly shades of punk rock (“In Dulce Decorum”).

As you’re about to hear in our heathen-approved Goth Essentials set, glam-metal dudes weren’t the only ones with huge teased hair and gobs of mascara running down their face in the ’80s. Thanks to children-of-the-night icons, like Robert Smith, Siouxsie Sioux, Peter Murphy, and Nick Cave, the pitch-dark side of pop music was born. Or as an early Bauhaus review claimed way back in 1981, the following songs are “as Gothic as a brick” — the building blocks of beautifully damaged bands that take in traces of black-lit synth pop (Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, Soft Cell), diesel-powered industrial (Nitzer Ebb, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Ministry), and punk/goth rock that’s as theatrical as an off-off-Broadway play (Siouxsie & The Banshees, the Damned, the Sisters of Mercy).