Plunder the Tombs: Danielle Dax – Jesus Egg That Wept (Awesome Records, 1984)

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Danielle Dax – Jesus Egg That Wept (Awesome Records, 1984)

It goes without saying that Danielle Dax’s early works are very strange by any measure. The mini-album Jesus Egg That Wept represents her second solo effort after her earlier project, the experimental post-punk of The Lemon Kittens had ground to a halt. A much more coherent effort than the very eccentric Pop Eyes (Initial Records, 1983) that had proceeded it, and as such, constitutes much less of a cautionary tale on the hazards of combining folk & world music with powerful hallucinogens than did its predecessor.

Nevertheless, folks hoping for anything approaching mainstream are destined for disappointment here as Danielle subverts New Orleans honky tonk ("Evil Honky Stomp"), 60’s girl bands ("Fortune Cheats"), and middle eastern sounds ("Ostrich") to her own nefarious purposes. Her own very unique contributions are not absent here either with the voodoo / early zombie film evoking "Pariah" (possibly my own favourite of anything she’s ever done) or the Kate Bush-like "Hammerheads". The album also includes a vastly improved version of “Here Come the Harvest Buns” originally found on Pop Eyes. The lush cover art is provided by the immaculate Holly Warburton who would go on to illustrate most of Danielle Dax's later work.

I’ve often wondered quite how Danielle Dax came to be associated with the Goth scene since she quite clearly comes from a very different musical pedigree than most of the bands more often viewed as part of that genre. Nevertheless, she had the look, and played gigs at London’s infamous Batcave. The Goths liked her, and she evidently liked the Goths. Perhaps they adopted each other?

As Danielle Dax’s career progressed she would tend to become, not so much more commercial, but definitely more accessible. Dark Adapted Eye (Sire, 1988) is an excellent retrospective compilation, and those folks who prefer her more accessible work could do far worse than to consider Blast the Human Flower (Sire/Warner, 1990). It is however, light years away from the sheer strangeness to be found on Jesus Egg That Wept.

An excellent album albeit something of an acquired taste.

Track Listing:

Evil Honky Stomp
Pariah
Fortune Cheats
Hammerheads
Here Come the Harvest Buns
Ostrich
The Spoil Factor

Line Up: Danielle Dax (voice, instrumentation) additional instrumentation provided by David Knight and Karl Blake.

http://danielledax.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danielle_Dax

http://www.vargol.demon.co.uk/Dax/dax.html

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=danielle+dax&aq=0

2 comments:

AnonymousSeptember 19, 2010 at 6:16 AM
To me this is her Gothiest album. It's brooding at times and enigmatic, but beautifully so, in an artistic agony....which is what Goth usually is.
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James Von SutekhDecember 8, 2010 at 8:30 PM
It's becoming quite evident that Danielle Dax has a huge underground cult following out there - not only is this the most viewed post on Plunder the Tombs, but it has more than twice as many hits as the next most visited.
Damn impressive stuff.
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A Welcome and Introduction

Plunder the Tombs was started back in 2010 by way of looking back on a musical past that I felt in sore need of curation.

It was a strange and sad time when what passed for “Goth” in clubs seemed a pale imitator of what once was, following first a decade of cookie-cutter Sisters of the Nephilim clone bands and then another decade of industrial dance being palmed off to younger audiences as a type of faux goth. When on rare occasion DJs in “Goth” clubs did finally become brave enough to play something like Bauhaus it was not untypical to have the dance floor clear, and it became obvious that the memory, meaning and legacy of much that had gone before had been lost.

It’s probably safe to say that the boundaries of what was “Goth” were never clearly defined. An absolute blessing for those bands on the original scene before it had a name pinned to the donkey, but an outright curse for those who came later and found rules had been imposed to dictate that which was and that which was not acceptable. Worse still was to come in the 90s from a lazy and unquestioning media who simply assumed that anything that wore black and make up was by definition “Goth”, thus allowing all manner of pretenders licence, and maximising confusion as to what the term actually referred to.

This has gone on for way too long and its time is at an end. Neo Post-Punk bands now proliferate across Europe, old long dead Goth bands rise from their crypts in the UK, and new deathrock bands are breeding like rabbits up the west coast of America. It is time to reclaim our scene back from metal bands and ravers in disguise.

While the Plunder the Tombs of old focused on what had gone before, there are now far too many exciting new things to ignore. We roar back to life in a reboot, covering past , present and things yet to come.

Let us plunder the tombs….