Single Saturdays: October 14, 2023

Single Saturdays is Five Cent Sound’s weekly roundup, where our staff members share a song that they’ve fallen in love with and make their case for why others should give it a listen.

“Female Vampire” by Jenny Hval

by solia simpson

“Female Vampire” by Jenny Hval is a song simultaneously off putting and enjoyable, a blend perfect for the halloween season. It follows a vampire woman who is exhausted from the monotony of killing, compelled to continue for the sake of performance. Lyrics like,  “I must justify my presence by losing it,” give a sense of the crisis she is inviting you into, the poetic and chaotic hopelessness. The rest of her 2016 album Blood Bitch, is a great listen as well. Hval’s dreamy vocals and heavy gothic influence creates a dissociative yet entrancing sound that I am currently addicted to, and listening while walking down the streets is cleansing for anyone with pent up female rage. 

“The Killing Moon” by Echo & The Bunnymen

by izzy astuto

My favorite relationships have always been ones tinged with tragedy. Maybe this is because most of my favorite characters are queer, and queer love is practically required to be marked by disaster. I love getting invested in some new homoerotic book or TV show— oftentimes the further away the characters are from being “confirmed” queer, the better. Most of the time, the characters hate each other to some degree, but also somehow manage to be closer to one another than anyone else. I like my love interests to have an equal chance of killing each other as they do fucking.

I don’t know what this says for my love life, but I do know what it says about my music taste! Some of my favorite music has an elegant quality to it, sweeping strings over wailing vocals, the personification of draping yourself across a piano. 

New wave and gothic music are perfect for my dramatic tastes, which is where I very quickly found “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen. From the band’s most popular album Ocean Rain, lead singer Ian McCulloch said the phrase “fate up against your will” from the chorus simply showed up in his brain one morning. He credits the song partially to God, and I can’t help agreeing, listening to these lyrics that paint a relationship between some otherworldly being and the singer.
The song details a dynamic so near impossible to breach, and as the singer croons about giving yourself over to the unspecified, cruel “him,” I can’t help but feel impossibly charmed.

“Stigmata martyr” by bauhaus

by maya eberlin

The iconic moody sound of Bauhaus’ classic debut album In the Flat Field overtakes my On Repeat playlist each fall. Best known for pioneering goth subculture in the late 70s with the release of their first single, the band has had a notably unique sound since their earliest days. The haunting track “Stigmata Martyr,” whose jerky bass notes are punctuated by beautiful yet monotonously delivered lyrics, serves as a perfect example of early gothic rock—what better to listen to while applying dark lipstick, pulling on a tattered DIY fishnet shirt and teasing your black box-dyed, flattening-iron seared hair for your impending night out?

Over a dark, pulsing melody, frontman Peter Murphy’s macabre lyrics vividly depict the crucifix, or the image of the execution of Jesus Christ. The word “stigmata” itself refers to the gashes left in Christ’s hands and feet following the crucifixion. During the track’s intense closing, Murphy’s voice rises to crescendo as he repeatedly cries out a Latin phrase that translates to “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Loud, pained wails can be heard over this chant, reminding listeners of the brutality of the scene previously described. The use of Catholic iconography in the secular context of this song is, in a sense, haunting—shifting the focus from the biblical idea of salvation to the agonizing pain of the worshiped figure. 

Dark, creepy and intense, this song is perfect to play on your well-loved childhood CD player; the one whose hot pink outer shell is almost entirely obscured by a mass of peeling stickers, your teenage attempt at blending it into your witchy high-school era bedroom decor. If you forgot to pack it, though, a perfectly acceptable substitution is to blast it in your headphones during your trek across Boylston Street in the chilled October air.

“Kiss Me Until My Lips Fall Off” by Lebanon Hanover

by emie mcathie

Is there a better way to spend the fall months than daydreaming about falling in love with a ghost? Probably, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting. And every perfect daydream session is required to have an appropriate playlist. In this case, I often go for anything dark, gothic, and grossly sappy.

Eerily romantic, “Kiss Me Until My Lips Fall Off” by German-British duo Lebanon Hanover is my go to song when I feel like embracing a little bit of dreariness. Despite being from their 2018 album Let Them Be Alien, the song perfectly executes an authentic darkwave sound that’s reminiscent of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. It holds onto the synth of new wave, allowing for a beat that makes anyone want to bop their head, while the lyrics reflect a far darker message of escapism and numbness.

Even though it’s one of my favorite songs any time of the year, “Kiss Me Until My Lips Fall Off” is especially comforting in the fall and winter. Its morbid, gothic rock vibes encapsulate the feeling of everlasting desire that has me desperately wanting to sit in a graveyard at night. But it’s also perfect for some solitary dancing in your room.

So, the next time you decide to take a late night walk, put on “Kiss Me Until My Lips Fall Off” and if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll find a ghostly soulmate.