Far Out There character soundtrack: Vengeance

Well, it’s October, the spoooooooookiest month of the year if you happen to live in a region that celebrates Halloween. In that spirit (oooooh, you see what I did there?  GHOSTS!) let’s do a character soundtrack about Far Out There’s creeeeeepiet character who probably isn’t that bad at all: VENGEANCE! With a buildup like that, obviously we need some spooky music for Vengeance’s soundtrack, but what kind? Dramatic, gothic pipe organ music? Hellish death metal? Apocalyptic opera choirs? One of those Halloween sound effect CDs you can get a Party City? Well… would you believe Neo-Folk? You know, the modern day hippy music that really wants to sound like traditional European quasi-medieval folk tunes? For some reason, the minor key, morbid strands of that style of music is the single most eerie style of music there is. I’m sure that sounds silly to people actually FROM Europe who hear this kind of stuff as everyday old-timey rural folk music, just like those of us from the American South don’t find hillbillies and rednecks anywhere near as ominous as cityfolk, but for whatever reason it really hits all the right nerves for me. So Vengeance’s music of choice doesn’t so much conjure images of ruined cathedrals and stained glass so much as a burning wicker man. That’s arguably a lot scarier in and of itself, but we’re getting off track.

I’m of mixed feeling about Vengeance’s soundtrack. On the one hand, it’s another one where I’m really pleased by how everything flows together and maintains a consistent mood (the mood in this case being “I’m pretty sure I’m being stalked by an entire cult right now”), on the other hand… Okay, here’s the thing: Neo-Folk/Industrial/Experimental/Whatever group Current 93 (headed up by professional weirdo David Tibet) released an album in 2006 called Black Ships Ate The Sky, and about half the tracks of that album are actually guest artists performing different arrangements of the Charles Wesley hymn “Idumaea.” I really liked this touch, not only because I’m just a sucker for recurring themes in an album AND hearing the same work revisited in multiple forms, but also because “Idumaea” really helps build the apocalyptic atmosphere.  The first line is “And am I born to die” for crying out loud. Not only did I like idea of a thematic through line for a soundtrack, but the way this particular song comes across as ominous at first but really isn’t if you actually bother listen to it all the way through seemed especially appropriate for Vengeance. So I blatantly stole the whole thing for his soundtrack. Not just the idea of having a recurring song, LIKE the one in Black Ships Ate The Sky, I just straight up took all the versions of Idumaea and swapped out the original David Tibet tracks with songs by other artists. So technically, Current 93 shows up on this one soundtrack more than any other artist appears in ALL the other Far Out There soundtracks put together, even if most of these tracks feature artists other than Current 93’s key member (David Tibet is on the final version, but the rest are by Clodagh Simonds, Marc Almond, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Shirley Collins, Baby Dee, and Pantaleimon). The part of me that wants to take pride in being creative in the arrangement of these soundtracks can’t help but feel like I cheated by following another album’s template this way, even if I DID change the order a bit. I expect my wholesale re-purposing of songs I neither wrote nor own to be ORIGINAL, dang it!

Anyway, just what ARE those other songs in between all the Wesleyan hymns? Well, another reason I like the idea of a repeating theme of a song is because it helps create a sort of hypnotic drone, which works well with this type of material. In that same spirit, Vengeance’s soundtrack has a few repeat offenders beyond all the Current 93 stuff. Neo-Pagan/Wicker Man superfans Espers have three songs on the final draft of this playlist, and that’s whittled down quite a bit from earlier versions. The songs making the final cut are “Dead Queen,””Travel Mountains” and in a rather oddball choice, a cover of Blue Oyster Cut’s “Flaming Telepaths” (which is a rather appropriate choice for Vengeance in non-obvious ways I can’t elaborate on without giving away spoilers) While Espers are hippies of the modern day revivalist variety, we also have two songs from legit early 70s-era hippy freaks Comus: “Song To Comus” and “Drip Drip,” the latter of which especially sounds like the kill scene from some slasher movie sequel to The Wicker Man.

Espers and Comus both built their entire identities around a Neo-Folk sound, but the rest of the artists present on Vengeance’s soundtrack dabbled more as one-off experiments. Traffic contributes “John Barleycorn” off of John Barleycorn Must Die, which otherwise sounds nothing like it. Rock gods Led Zeppelin gives us the best Lord of the Rings filk song ever written, “The Battle Of Evermore.” Obscure West Coast Indie kids The Finches provide the atypically-spooky “Follow Me.” Hippy dippy psychepop stalwart Donovan and much more obscure  trio Forest admittedly did dabble in what could generally be referred to as “Neo-Folk” quite regularly, but usually in a lighter, friendlier mode than what’s present in this soundtrack. Thus, Donovan’s eerie “The River Song” and Forrest’s medieval “Famine Song” are still a bit anomalous.

Given how many times I’ve used The Wicker Man as a point of reference for why Neo-Folk can sound creepy to me, it’d only fitting that I single out “Gently Johnny” by Paul Giovanni for special mention all by itself, as it’s the one song on this entire soundtrack that actually IS from The Wicker Man. See? I’m not just relying too heavily on a single horror movie reference because I otherwise don’t really know that much about this genre. It’s totally justified!

Also worth singling out is the final track, another Current 93 song that’s actually the only one David Tibet wrote himself (and, aside from the final version of “Idumaea,” the only one he actually performs) “Lucifer Over London.” Ironically, after all these guest artist covers from Black Ships Ate The Sky, the one Current 93 track that actually IS a Current 93 showcase isn’t off of Black Ships at all, but is rather the title track of an earlier EP. It also rivals Comus’ “Drip Drip” for sheer manic lunacy, to the point that the opening quote of the riff to Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” is probably the LEAST heavy thing about it. Also, because there’s no graceful way to transition into it, I’ve repeatedly heard rumors that Andrew “Party Hard” W.K. was a guitar player of some Current 93 sessions. Aside from being an utterly useless piece of trivia that might not even turn out to be true, the thought of such an aggressively Good Times guy in the midst of such unsettling music is also strangely appropriate for a character like Vengeance. Maybe. Honestly I just wanted an excuse to throw that in somewhere, but it SORT of works as a closing thought, right?

(Well, I didn’t have to worry about finding any Japanese videos for this playlist, so it ought to have been relatively easy to put together, right? Well, on the whole it WAS easier than the previous few, but there were still a few odd hiccups to deal with. For one thing, the version of Black Ships Ate The Sky that I have on iTunes just lists every track as being by Current 93, meaning I had to do a LOT of cross referencing to make sure I was looking up the right versions on YouTube, and it’s something of a miracle that the versions I found that were accessible everywhere all had the guest artists clearly listed in the titles. Speaking of being accessible in different regions, I discovered something WEIRD about the “Lucifer Over London” video. The one I’m using in the playlist is the official Current 93 posting rather than some fan video, which are usually blocked in most places outside North America. In this case, though, the song is available everywhere… except Saint Barthélemy. Don’t know where Saint Barthélemy is? I think I’ve mentioned it in “This video is blocked in weird places” rants before, but I still had to look it up all over again. Turns out it’s a Caribbean island that’s governed by France. It’s also THE ONLY PLACE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD where the “Lucifer Over London” video is blocked. Not just one of the places, the ONLY place. Mainland France and all its other territories? Just fine. The rest of the Caribbean? No problem. Repeat offenders like China or Russia or Japan? All clear. Various theocratic places that might object to a video with “Lucifer” in the title? No problems that the website I’m using to check things knows about. It’s JUST this one little rock in the West Indies that blocks this video. It’s just weird, is all. But that’s not the biggest story I have about Vengeance’s soundtrack. When you actually go watch the playlist, you might notice that the video for The Finches’ “Follow Me” has way, WAY fewer views than all the others. You might also notice that the account that posted the video is named “Ichabod Kendall.” Boy, what are the odds that somebody posting one of the songs I need for this Far Out There soundtrack would JUST SO HAPPEN to have the exact same name as one of Far Out There’s characters? Impossible, I’d say, because that’s me.  Yep, for the first time since the debacle with the original Jimi Hendrix version of “Little Wing,” I could find absolutely no trace of “Follow Me” on YouTube, and barely anything by The Finches in general. It’s not all that surprising, as they’re a VERY obscure indie band. I only know about them because Pandora’s algorithm coughed this song up when I was still maintaining Far Out There stations over there. Still, even though I could have just left that song out and literally no one other than me would ever know, I just couldn’t. I like “Follow Me” and want at least SOMEONE else to hear it. Besides, I’ve never had to completely give up on a song yet. Even those troublesome tracks on Avatar and Mariska’s playlists still got represented by SOMETHING. So I went out on a limb, set up a burner account, and posted the dong on YouTube myself. It’s unlisted, so nobody should be able to see it unless they have the playlist link, and whatever multinational media conglomerate owns the intellectual properties of tiny West Coast indie bands hasn’t given it a copyright strike yet, so I guess it should be good for a while. And before someone asks: no, I’m not going back and replacing the odd posts on those other playlists with new tracks posted myself. I don’t mind linking to OTHER PEOPLE’S violation of copyright law when I need to, but I’m not gonna resort to it myself unless there’s literally no other form of a video on the entire site. Also, posting new videos myself is too much like actual WORK.)

Vengeance's YouTube Playlist