Greetings friends.  How has this current week been treating you so far?  Are you slipping gradually into the arms of senility?  Have you been drowning your sorrows in pumpkin spice lattes and buying all sorts of spoopy shit for your backyard?  October is upon us and this is the first Trash/Thrash Tuesday of October 2015 and this is a track I’ve been saving for you guys for a while.

Does anyone aside from me remember being the spookiest goth ever in high school but you only listened to 1980s goth shit and one day you came upon Death in June and the whole world of goth dark folk/neo folk opened up to you and soon moody ass acoustic guitar shit became your intense jam?  Okay so let’s be real here – Death in June is tits, and if you don’t like their music you can fuck off right off this page and deposit yourself into a garbage can somewhere.  I’m a huge fan of neofolk, and that is evident in my tastes for Current 93, Wovenhand, Chelsea Wolfe, Of the Wand and the Moon, Swans and Sol Invictus.  Those records all feature prominently in my collection of much spoopy music, and a couple years ago I got to hear King Dude by a very happy accident.  King Dude brought me back to that moment of hearing Death in June for the first time in high school and having this happy hazy world opened back up to me and it really got me to thinking about the importance of this style of music.

Let’s be frank here – if you listen to nothing but metal, you are probably either 14 and hard as fuck or a serial killer, or you’re just boring.  The thing with all the dark and leather clad brethren is that we desire for substance in our music, and that substance can be pretty absent in a lot of forms of popular or “regular” music, which is why we all gravitate towards heavy music.  I think neofolk allows for an expression of darkness that doesn’t have to be so heavy/distorted/cranked the fuck up.

When I have a difficult day and feel those super complicated emotions that aren’t adequately expressed with the flat out anger of metal, this is the music that I gravitate to, and in particular King Dude.  With a voice like Tom Waits and multilayered lyrics about the devil, redemption and despair, I often feel like this music speaks directly to that forlorn part of my being.

This song in particular is a favourite of mine, and it actually isn’t even sung by T.J. Cowgill whose throaty whiskey parched voice makes up the haunting vocals of King Dude – rather this track is sung by his wife.

If I were a spider and my mother was the moon
Out came the sun and dried off her cocoon
Underneath the water I would lay and die to soon
If I were a spider and my mother was the moon

Fallen from my web I have landed in the stream
Been drifting on a while or forever so it seems
My mother cries above me: “you have left the world too soon”
If I were a spider and my mother was the moon

So I come to rest now down in my riverbed
Dreaming of the life I left tangled up in the web
My mother sits upon the hill singing a song or two
If I were a spider and my mother was the moon

Spooky shit right?  Super eerie and ghostly and I felt pretty sure that it would make a great intro to our October magick!  I don’t know where you all readers are currently located, but here in British Columbia, it is cold and foggy and dark.  The smell of fall is in the air and present in the leaves of the plants that are still trying to hang onto their lives.

It’s beautiful here and I feel really good deep inside my dark heart today.  Happy Thrashing on this Tuesday my dear darklings.  Until next time.