New Zero God
: Of Love and Death
(Bandcamp)
CD | DL
Released: 14 February, 2025
New Zero God send songs back from the brink on their new album, and find magic in life.
New Zero God are a much celebrated Greek post-punk/goth band whose members have long histories in that countries rock scene. Frontman Mike Pougounas was a member of Flowers Of Romance, a band formed in 1981 and considered one of the most important and visionary post-punk and gothic bands on the Greek underground scene.
New Zero God were formed in 2006 and have released four previous albums. Of Love and Death, thematically at least, is reminiscent of Loud Reed’s Magic and Loss, considering as it does the fragility and harshness of life juxtaposed against the beauty and love of life. But whereas Reed’s album was a cathartic reaction to the loss of close friends, Of Love and Death is told from the standpoint of a survivor, someone who has been on the precipice of death and returned. Pougounas wrote most of the lyrics for the album on his hospital bed.
The album sounds like a dark cabaret, as though you’ve wandered, past midnight, into a subterranean club and discovered a band playing a jazz-goth hybrid and the singer part beat poet, part soothsayer, part singing, part reciting the words.
Opening track, Turning Darkness Into Magick, sets the scene with its very title – how to find something beautiful when you are suffering pain almost unto death. Musically it’s a slowed down industrial beat and over this Pougounas recites Kerouac’s Roman Candles – a call to experience life in all its madness, to taste experience and burn like a roman candle.
Keep me Safe from Pain starts with a heartbeat rhythm. There is a coldness to the music, a steeliness, and you can feel the antiseptic chill of the operating theatre. But as it continues the guitar begins to soar, either to return to life or to the next world. The music builds up as the drums hurtle down, whilst the guitar’s lift it into a sedative dream. Then there is a segue into a calm moment as Pougounas counts backwards and slips into unconsciousness. It reminds me again of Reed, but this time his Berlin period. There is a cold, visceral reality here.
End of the Ride is a song from the edge of life, where you realise it could be your last glimpse of the sky and you hang on to the doctors every word, for they hold your survival in their hands: Doctors look like gods on earth/You pay attention to everything they say/A little comma might make a big difference/A little mistake might put you in a coma. The lyrics delivered in jazz-goth beat poet style over manic fever dream music as he listens to other people on the ward and hears their illnesses vomiting or coughing in the night. And on Room 1316 the vocals are delivered in a shimmering way, over a musical soundscape, that bubbles up from some unconscious underground.
The atmosphere begins to lighten on …And I Found You, where the magic of life and love begins to emerge. It opens with an arpeggio guitar riff in swirling lush waves and the lyrics are softly poignant. It creates the feeling, the build up, to that moment when everything in our lives changes when we meet that one person we never knew we were looking for: And I was alone/In crowded rooms/And In Dance Halls/Beating the odds/Alone…/…and I found you.
Similarly, Lady Wolf is a straight out love song, if somewhat animalistic, with a cool bass line that brings to mind early (David Sylvian’s) Japan.
Mr. Crimson Dust has a funereal, sinister sound to it, with tribal drumming and chanting. If I’m hearing it right it’s about how people can touch our lives, even when their gone: A man was playing the violin/When he saw the crimson dust falling/And as it covered the violin’s strings/The melody haunted the passersby.
The final song on the album, Tell The Bees, acts as a beautiful coda to the album. It sounds like the last song played by a band in a darkened club. The singer lounges on a stool, collar undone, tie askew. A whisky sits on the piano. A cigarette burns in an ashtray. The patrons lost in thoughts of their own, driven to melancholic reverie by the ‘mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time…’ And the words drift like pollinating bees through the dark club of shadows: When all my songs have been sung/When all my dreams have been dreamt/When all my whispers have been said aloud/I will always find you in the end.
Goth is often derided for what some see as its camp take on horror and death – but here is a man who has been to the edge and returned to tell his tale. At times it is a harrowing, but ultimately hopeful, contemplation of death and life that only those who have been on the line between those immensities can reveal.
It creates magic from darkness.
~
You can find New Zero God on Bandcamp, Facebook, and YouTube.
All words by Mark Ray. More writing by Mark Ray can be found at his author archive. And he can be found on Instagram.
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