Midas Fall - Eleven Return & Revert [Album]

  

Monotreme Records

Sooner or later we had to get around to it; after reinventing almost every possible musical genre from the desperate eighties, Edinburgh five piece Midas Fall have taken an awkward step further into the abyss by partially resuscitating the hitherto lifeless corpse of goth.

Ok, maybe lifeless corpse constitutes an exaggeration. We know that in many senses the motherload soundtrack of teenage angst and doomed romanticism has never really gone away, a fact best evidenced by the army of trench coated and booted adolescent miserablists in attendance outside Leeds Corn Exchange on a typical Saturday afternoon. All our (mostly deserved) mockery it seems has only made the movement's tenebrous roots grow deeper into the underground.

Thankfully, Eleven, Return & Revert isn't the kind of Temple of Love style bombast that took it cues from punk and glam as did the original vampire-toned Eldritches and Astbury's, instead drawing inspiration mainly from their modern partial descendants Puressence and Porcupine Tree. In vocalist/writer Liz Heaton, Midas Fall have also found a creative lead which appreciates some old style virtues, her elaborate lyrical storytelling matched by a twin guitar chime that hints at the less virtuoso elements of that other much abused backwood, prog rock.

Goth-prog? well, shit, written down it has all attractiveness of a rattlesnake in a lucky dip, but as opener 'Movie Screens' proves, there's still a drive towards accessibility amongst all the angst. True, often Heaton's words tend to float in the background, leaving the melodic complexity of 'Half Horizon' and 'Century' to battle it out with the starker tones of 'Stalking Moon' for your attention. More often than not, proceedings fall just short of epic, and for those with short attention spans, it should be noted that only 'Fog Sky Nun' here clocks in at under four minutes long.

Perversely, the longer and more episodic Heaton's tales get, the more absorbing they become, with the episodic seven minutes of Nautical Song crashing down like waves, each twist fluttering around like a butterfly in a maze. It's equally true - and only fair - to point out that Eleven. Return & Revert's unavoidable pretensions will be anathema to many people raised on the find- it-grab-it-fuck- it premise of our glorious twenty first century. Midas Fall have taken the dead and made it good, whether they can breathe new life into it is still to be seen.