Delphine Coma – Leaving The Scene
(Swiss Dark Nights)
Reviewed by Ambient Light.
‘Leaving the Scene’ is the debut album from US coldwave/post-punk/gothgaze project Delphine Coma. Currently receiving rave reviews from fan media in Germany, Italy and Belgium, the album is available in both CD and digital download formats from European specialist label Swiss Dark Nights (via Bandcamp).
Beginning life in 2012 as the solo recording vehicle for one Ashe Rüppe from Portland, Oregon (now based in Charlotte, North Carolina), Delphine Coma also involves occasional collaborators, most notably Amendoa Lizzbeth Tamburri. From Houston, Texas, Tamburri fronted garage punk band Rosebuds during the early-mid ‘90s, and (like Rüppe) is a veteran DJ/promoter, based mainly out of Austin, Texas from 1995-2018. Although appearing as guest guitarist on just one track from the album, behind the scenes Tamburri has become a fulltime collaborator in every aspect of the project, from writing and conceptual input through to photography/visuals and day-to-day administration. As such, Delphine Coma’s public face increasingly takes the form of a duo.
Ashe Rüppe’s background in the US goth and darkwave music scene stretches back to the late eighties, with an extensive list of bands and projects making up his recording and touring resume. He was a member of Portland goth rock band Nocturne from 1995, and by 1997, at the height of a boom in the American darkwave scene fostered by the Cleopatra and Projekt labels, he was a touring member of Trance to the Sun, and later Submarine Fleet featuring members of Trance to the Sun and Blade Fetish. He is also the sole member of the dark ambient/drone project The Elysium Façade (est. 1998); and in between countless other bands and recording projects along the way, he’s been equally active and prolific as an event promoter, DJ, producer and remix artist.
To all intents and purposes, however, Delphine Coma’s ‘Leaving the Scene’ comes very close to wiping the slate clean and rendering much of that past irrelevant. Ashe has long been vocal in his jaded disdain for the US goth scene’s complacency and stagnation; a formerly vibrant scene that, like many others, upon reaching its zenith gradually dwindled in size and impact through both an image-obsessed audience’s apathy towards new music, and a failure on the part of bands at the forefront to remain relevant and progressive. Against that backdrop, this album and its title form an apparent manifesto statement, outlining Delphine Coma’s explicit intention to quit the dying scene and make haste for fertile new ground.
Taking cues from comparatively forward-looking developments in the present decade’s wave of post-punk revivalism, ‘Leaving the Scene’ hybridises the backbone of traditional goth and post-punk with elements of coldwave, darkwave, minimal synth, dark ambience and shoegaze guitars (not to mention countless internet microgenres of witch house, screwgaze, chillwave and so on). The reader could be forgiven for imagining that such an amalgam of specialty subgenres simply barrels down a supermarket isle of whatever stylistic bandwagon happens to be trending with neo-post-punk-proto-goth-gaze-wave hipsters right now, throwing into the cart a packet of this and a bottle of that at whim. But what of it if they do? What happens when they get home and start cooking is what matters.
Granted, some of Delphine Coma’s niche territory sits right alongside roads already traversed by names slightly better known in the scene: Ash Code (whom DC have remixed), Ritual Howls, The Soft Moon, Drab Majesty, Night Sins, Veil of Light, This Cold Night and Hante all spring to mind as useful points of reference. But from out of that that post-millennial milieu, Delphine Coma succeed in plucking out very particular strands to weave into their own distinct and cohesive sound.
The inescapable spectre of early Sisters of Mercy (esp. ‘The Reptile House E.P.’) looms over the detached vocals and stark, minimal drum-machine, but rather than simply regurgitating those influences verbatim, ‘Leaving the Scene’ transplants and repurposes them. The drum-machine in turn colludes with synth textures drawn from the dark ambient, coldwave and minimal synth genres, to produce a cavernous, flickering aural space akin to distant echoes in an ice cave. But perhaps the most striking, defining feature of the Delphine Coma sound is the way in which these elements are cloaked in densely saturated layers of textural guitars, creating a darker, more visceral iteration of shoegaze and ethereal darkwave. With so much of the album characterised by cold, synthetic despondency and detachment, it’s often within that dizzying maelstrom of guitars that more organic human emotions become most tangible.
Cohesion is the other striking feature of ‘Leaving the Scene’, and a sustained atmosphere and identity runs throughout the album. Opener ‘Touch’ is both atmospheric and lively at one, Lizzbeth contributing ghostly, swooning guitars against a droning bass guitar and a twitching, flickering backbeat. ‘We Never Sleep’ sets a more ominous tone with rumbling, abrasive synths; big, resonant drum-machines; and monochromatic guitars. ‘Moth Meets Flame’ combines robotic synth-bass, mechanical rhythms and atmospheric washes of synths, guitars and voices. ‘Is This Forever’ enlivens the pace with cutting lead guitar melodies and one of the album’s most immediate vocal hooklines. Four tracks into the album and all four would easily constitute immediate highlights, with ‘Is This Forever’ the most accessible of the bunch.
The album’s longest track, ‘Comatose’ lurches into view around the middle of the album with a brooding, oppressive mood suggestive of The Sisterhood while distant guitars drone and wail like Garlands/Head Over Heels-era Cocteau Twins. Nearing the halfway mark, it hits a sustained crescendo that rides out the remainder of the track, dominated by still more layers of guitar and ardent repetition of the line, “I wanted to believe in this life”. ‘Out of My Head’ is yet another standout, which fleetingly appeared online earlier under the name of ‘500 Years’, and which is memorable above all for the album’s most stunning example of soaring, squalling, wall-of-noise guitars. Apparently not yet content with the number of potential singles already on the album, ‘Beautiful Disaster’ is the album’s most urgent, energetic track, driven by a vigorous drum-machine, the gothic-grind of chorusing bass guitar and sharp, jarring stabs of post-punk guitars.
‘Broken Glass’ returns to more foreboding, moody synth and synth-bass territories, more of the trademark “gothgaze” guitars, and is essentially an instrumental, save for some barely audible incidental vocal sounds drifting in and out of the backdrop. ‘Regret’ lives up to its name, with an overriding sense of emptiness accentuated by the absence of any instrument to occupy the bass register. Abrasive guitars swirl about in the backdrop while simple, repetitive snare drums echo, and despondent vocals only occasionally interject to brood over that which is “gone forever”. These latter two tracks are perhaps a little less memorable than others, if only because their strongest features have already been showcased impressively elsewhere.
Fittingly, the closing track ‘The End is The Beginning is The End’ hints at potential exploration of still more stylistic influences culled from other emergent neo-genres. Synths are suggestive of retro SciFi soundtracks from the likes of Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre and John Carpenter, but despite this, it never comes particularly close to full-blown synthwave, so much as just skimming and absorbing some of the genre’s characteristics into the extant Delphine Coma framework.
‘Leaving the Scene’ is an excellent debut, highly recommended to fans of post-punk, goth, darkwave, coldwave, minimal synth and shoegaze, and above all for those wanting to hear those elements expertly crafted into something new and unique.
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