“It is the eve of St. George’s Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?”

Those are words spoken by a superstitious old woman to Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). Fearing for the outsider’s safety, she gives him a crucifix. “I did not know what to do,” Harker writes, “for, as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such a state of mind.”

But later, overcome with terror in the bowels of the Count’s Transylvanian castle, he has reason to be most grateful:

Bless that good, good woman who hung the crucifix round my neck! For it is a comfort and a strength to me whenever I touch it. It is odd that a thing which I have been taught to regard with disfavour and as idolatrous should in a time of loneliness and trouble be of help. Is it that there is something in the essence of the thing itself, or that it is a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort? Some time, if it may be, I must examine this matter and try to make up my mind about it. In the meantime I must find out all I can about Count Dracula. . . .

Over a century later, Stephenie Meyer managed to write four bestselling books concerning vampires (later translated into a quartet of popular movies) without the word crucifix appearing even a single time in her hundreds of thousands of words. The toothsome undead in HBO’s True Blood (based off of Charlaine Harris’ popular, sex-drenched “Southern Vampire” novels) are similarly unconcerned with the possibility of their nocturnal bacchanalia being interrupted by the appearance of a cross. In these movies, it’s not God but other bloodsuckers who provide supernatural support for the good guys. (more…)

Marc Almond is best known as the singer for Soft Cell, a duo that had a huge hit many moons ago with ‘Tainted Love’* although metal-oriented readers may be more familiar with the version recorded by the mediocre Alice Cooper impersonator Marilyn Manson. But whereas Manson’s interpretation was characteristically both overblown and juvenile in its attempt to conjure up an atmosphere of depravity, Soft Cell’s clinical electronic backing and smooth vocals were effortlessly decadent. 

Tainted Love was the beginning and the end of Soft Cell in the USA as far as I’m aware, although in the UK the group had a string of hits while Marc Almond acquired a reputation for mind-bending excess. After that, he went on to pursue an eccentric/eclectic solo career that saw him duet with Gene Pitney, record the songs of Jacques Brel  and join the Church of Satan, founded by tedious baldy Anton LaVey, AKA the most boring man in the world. 

And yet in spite of that last affiliation (shared with Marilyn Manson) Almond is a genuinely bold artist, willing to take great risks, even if they don’t always pay off. A few years ago he released the hardly commercial Heart on Snow, an album of English versions of popular Russian songs. Almond knew the subject matter well- he had been performing regularly in Moscow since the early 90s, perhaps attracted to the city’s atmosphere of 1920s Weimar style madness. Even so, Heart on Snow is an uneasy mix of rock, folk, pop and soviet ballads, of electronic arrangements and military choirs. As Russian music emphasizes lyrics over melody the songs also seemed a bit amorphous, even though the translations were not terrible. Heart on Snow is certainly an interesting curio, but hardly necessary.  (more…)