So I’ve been listening to a lot of Death In June and Current 93 lately, bands which I never thought I’d like, and while I like them, I still have a few reservations about the neo-folk scene. Now initially I considered Death In June to be some weird industrial/ ambient variation like how I imagine Blood Axis sounds or like those Brian Eno/ Robert Fripp ambient records. My impression of Death In June sums up how I viewed the neo-folk scene as a whole, an industrial/ ambient offshoot that was all about “reinterpreting conceptions of music and sound, etc. etc.” which really had no interest to me. I find ambient, industrial, and noise music boring and pretentious, so I really had no desire to ever listen to any neo-folk. This impression was also fostered by the praise of neo-folk by people like Vijay Prozak and Michael Moynihan; Death In June to me was another non-metal “Prozak band.”
It wasn’t until my friend Mark burned me some Death In June albums that I decided to give the band a chance, and I was pleasantly surprised by what I heard: Death In June actually plays folk music. In a reductionist sense Death In June sound like Joy Division, if Joy Division played folk music: the vocals resemble Joy Division and Death In June utilize a lot of electronic effects as a back drop to an acoustic-folk base. This use of contemporary electronics is rather striking, considering folk musicians generally value traditionalism and frown upon contemporary music. The neo-folk scene is breath of fresh air in the contemporary folk-scene since in recent times folk has largely degenerated to a bunch of old people playing bland covers or near covers. The fact that neo-folk is equally informed by Comus and Love as it is by Joy Division and Throbbing Gristle means that it is able to reinvent folk, as shoe-gazing did for psychedelic music, while capturing the spirit of what made folk enjoyable in the first place.
In theory I should love neo-folk since I love both Love and Joy Division, however it is the seeming pretension of this scene that bums me out. This pretension is evidenced both in its common lyrical/aesthetic topics (death, fascism, paganism/ occultism, and symbolist literature) and in the company it keeps. Now while I find the topics neo-folk covers interesting it is the embarrassing seriousness with which they embrace these topics and the goth outlook that informs their approach that I find off-putting. The neo-folk scene also has connections to the goth/industrial scene*, and I find the inability or unwillingness of neo-folk to fully break from the industrial scene highly suspect. These connections also largely determine the audience of neo-folk, industrial fans, an audience that would shape interpretation of the neo-folk scene and constitute future neo-folk bands, as most audiences do. In short neo-folk is the music I can imagine early-90’s goth college students listening to, and we don’t need Seth Putnam to tell us what we think of them.
This pretension also relates to another gripe I have about neo-folk, and while it may be minor, one complaint that I have about neo-folk is how expected many of its topics are. While a band like Comus was completely unexpected within the 60’s folk scene, in neo-folk a band with the same musical and lyrical idiosyncrasies as Comus is quite de rigueur. One of the joys of Comus is the oddity of a FOLK band singing about rape, murder, and insanity. Comus almost reaches a level of absurdist comedy with its demented style, but within neo-folk this humor is replaced with a deadly seriousness that takes some of the fun out of listening to the music.
Maybe I should be stoked that there is a scene (as opposed to just one band) that further develops the sound of folk, acknowledges bands outside of traditional folk, and covers topics I’m interested in. Maybe my complaints are all for nothing. I’ll still listen to the music, but my advice to the bands, “get over yourselves!”
* Many of the early neo-folk bands in fact started off as industrial bands, which could be part of the problem
-all photos taken from Death In June's merch page
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