Light Conquers Shadow

Why this imaginary compilation

Rock music, through its stories, bears witness to this: it's possible to redeem yourself from your own misery. Even burdened by the gravest sins, after touching the darkest depths and tasting the bitter fruit of shame, rebirth is possible. Johnny Cash did it at least twice in his career, and people like Nick Cave and Trent Reznor know something about it too. Casal di Principe has nothing to do with rock – unless you want to consider the gunshots that for years marked its soundscape as a kind of living cover of an Unsane song – and yet it has recently “released” its own personal “American Recordings”. Or, more precisely  – to quote Mark Oliver Everett, another man who pulled himself out of unspeakable nightmares – its own “Blinking Lights And Other Revelations”. Blinking lights, revealing lights of a healthy reality trying to emerge from the shroud of darkness under which it has let itself be buried for years. “Light Conquers Shadow. The Uffizi in Casal di Principe” is the title of the exhibition that, until October 21st, will link the name of Italy's most important museum – itself the victim of a mafia bombing in 1993 that damaged one of its wings – to that of a territory best known for having given birth to the Camorra-style crime organization that has tarnished the name of an entire community, one which – let it be clear – is not free of very heavy responsibilities, but from which isolated heroic acts could hardly be expected amid the silence of God and the State.

The exhibition – curated by Uffizi director Antonio Natali and Fabrizio Vona – is staged inside a property confiscated from the Camorra and converted into a museum. It's the very first time such an ambitious and admirable experiment has been attempted, so much so that a team of sociologists from the Sorbonne rushed to Campania to study the case. The project, in fact, while using the exhibition as its main driving force, aims at the wider revaluation of a territory rich in history, culture and culinary excellence, within a broader vision of renewal aimed at the young locals who take part in the initiative on a voluntary basis. The Ambassadors of Rebirth – as they've been named – will be tasked with welcoming visitors, telling the story of the exhibition and the territory, putting their own faces to it, but also their commitment and skills, in order to restore an upstanding image to their disfigured land. When the exhibition closes its doors, it will be up to these young ambassadors to shoulder the burden of continuing down the path they've taken, since all proceeds from ticket sales will be reinvested to launch a cooperative dedicated to the cultural and environmental promotion of the area. That's where the real challenge will play out, and in this sense the title is a clear metaphorical reference to a social redemption to be pursued through dedication and beauty – beauty understood not as some sterile ideal, but, in a Kandinsky-esque sense, as that which speaks to the spirit.

But “Light Conquers Shadow” also carries another meaning, more specifically tied to the exhibition's curatorial path. The display – put together by art historians Marta Onali and Francesca De Luca –  is in fact centered on Caravaggesque painting in 17th-century Naples, an extraordinary historical moment in which artists of the caliber of Jusepe Ribera, Giovan Battista Caracciolo, Luca Giordano, Mattia Preti, Massimo Stanzione and Artemisia Gentileschi reinterpreted the aesthetic of Merisi – who had stayed in Naples twice, in 1606 and 1610 – grounded, as is well known, in the striking dialectical relationship between dark backdrops and the beams of light that cut through them. Physical light of a given hour of the day that gives substance to bodies and reveals things, but also metaphysical light that pierces the darkness by which the human soul is by nature besieged. To quote the evangelist John: “The light shone in the darkness, but the darkness did not understand it.” Caravaggio, despite having committed murder, understood it as an artist. Casal di Principe is now lighting that light, and OndaRock wants to lend its support in the way it knows best, with “its” music serving as an imaginary soundtrack to the event. A wish expressed in notes and words. “Remain In Light”, as the Talking Heads would say.

Da qui. A firsthand account

Some time ago at the Cellar Theory, a small venue in Naples, Emidio Clementi came to present “Notturno Americano“, his latest project dedicated to the figure of Emanuel Carnevali. At the end of the show I went up to him to thank him for the 22 seconds of “Da qui”. I told him I was from Casal di Principe, that at seventeen I had bought “Along the edges”, and that the part where he said “Nobody chose to live here but there's something that keeps us here because even when there's no love, sometimes, sometimes there's something else” had helped me enormously to survive in a context in which I felt like an alien. Ever so kind, he smiled at me and replied: “You know you're not the only one, right? A guy from Bagheria once said something similar to me.” In that exact moment I felt two things. First I thought about how good it felt to say “thank you,” then I suddenly felt seventeen again. Freed, this time, from the weight of feeling alone.

See, when you grow up in a town that trains you – through an implicit, invisible coercion – to accept wrongdoing as the norm, to keep your distance if you really don't want to buy into its wicked ways of thinking, you feel alone. You grow up with the deep-rooted conviction that that place will never give you anything. And yet – as Cesare Pavese once wrote –  “a town means not being alone, knowing that something of you survives in its people, its plants, its soil, that it waits there for you even when you're not there.” And so it can happen that, without quite realizing it, you find yourself right in the middle of a cultural initiative that could make history. You find yourself there because you survived a kind of enclave of darkness. A darkness that, thankfully, you never looked straight in the eye, yet you still felt its presence, mute and grim, shadowing every step of your life. Still, one thing I'm certain of: without music, I never would have made it out.

This compilation is OndaRock's gift to Casal di Principe, but it's also my own personal thank-you (the reader will forgive me) – which, at this moment of rebirth for my hometown – I owe to music. For not leaving me alone to rot in the inability to imagine a future, for not abandoning me to the urge for self-destruction when the only alternatives to the boredom of spending evenings riding a moped in aimless circles seemed to be vandalism and drugs. I never gave in to either. Not because I was better than my peers, but simply because I didn't need to. I had music, and the losers were everyone else. If you take drugs in Milan or Turin, maybe you don't realize you're trading your right to get high for something far more precious: social integrity. I never even touched harmless, sweet-smelling marijuana – not because I didn't want to, but because doing so would have made me feel complicit in an illegal dealing system run by the Camorra. It might sound like a rather un-rock kind of puritanism, but I've always experienced it as a punk attitude. It was “Combat Rock” by the Clash applied to the microcosm I live in. On the flip side, the total absence of rules in Casal di Principe sometimes made me feel entitled to smash a bottle and go cause trouble in the street, sowing further ruin in an already ruined place. I didn't do it because I could vent all my bile and resentment straight through the mouth of Johnny Rotten; I didn't do it because I could escape at any moment and turn my town's main street into David Bowie's heroic Berlin, into the road to Albuquerque sung by Neil Young (even though I had no idea where the hell Albuquerque even was), or even – why not – into the face of the moon, on Roger Waters's dark side or Nick Drake's pink one. In time I'd learn that what makes the difference isn't the place you live in, but how you choose to live in it. You can be born in London or in the most godforsaken hole on the planet, and you'll still need to dream of a better world, and the moment you dream, you're doomed to believe in it. That's what music taught me. I once used to point the finger at my fellow townspeople who spent the rest of their days loitering outside bars between card games and Camorra mythology. They surely have their own heavy shortcomings, but continuing to blame them would just be an excuse to absolve myself of responsibility. They probably never had a dream, never stumbled upon one. They, for instance, wouldn't even know what an album like “Daydream Nation” is. I do, and I can't afford to betray it.

Instructions for use

In one of his very short essays, Claudio Strinati – the esteemed art historian and foremost expert on the work of Merisi – questions the hidden reasons behind Caravaggio's shadowy pictorial language. It's a question that reaches well beyond purely stylistic matters, rooted not so much, or not only, in the work of other Lombard painters – such as Romanino and Savoldo, who had already grappled with the relationship between matter and light in what might be called a leaden setting – but above all in the lived, as well as theoretical, experience of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo. A key figure in the development of Lombard painting in the second half of the 16th century, Lomazzo – despite having gone blind – persisted in his theoretical speculation, continuing to consider himself, despite his visual impairment, a painter. It was probably from him that Caravaggio learned the most important lesson of his career: the painter is the one who, in the dark, singles out what is not dark and offers it to others' sight in the form of light, of a recreated world. Taken to its fullest extent, one could say that, regardless of discipline, the work of every artist – every true artist – consists precisely of this: fighting against the dark. The musician is no exception, or rather the songwriter, to use a term dear to these virtual pages.

The imaginary compilation you'll find below sets out, then, to represent through emblematic songs the dynamics of this struggle, to transfigure into music the passage from darkness into light, daring to translate the aesthetics and poetics of Caravaggio – the star of the exhibition – into a fifteen-song playlist, but also, and above all, to trace a metaphorical path of rebirth, of individual or collective ascent. The title “Light Conquers Shadow” thus also proves useful for an imaginary vinyl record split into two sides: a side A given over to darkness, with seven tracks that dissolve every trace of light, gradually thickening shadows and mist until they weave a monochrome black fresco of deep, inconsolable spiritual grief. Dawn is born already faded (“New Dawn Fades”), shadows erase what's left of it (“Shadows”), darkness looms before our eyes (“I See A Darkness”). Days can no longer be told apart from nights, only nights darker than others (“The Darkest Night Of All”), which refuse even the mercy of the stars (“All The Stars Are Dead Now”). The darkness is all-consuming and oppressive, the foot soldiers of a “New Dark Age” in which every impulse of love is renounced. So “I Don't Love” – the somber chant of Have A Nice Life –  closes the first side in an atmosphere of irreversible apathy.

At this point, though, side B begins, devoted – with its eight songs (tellingly, one more than side A) – to the light. A light that is always a gift and – like every gift – must be earned. The essential prerequisite in this sense is to desire it, which is why the second half opens with “I Want To See The Bright Lights, Tonight”, where the key image isn't the bright lights but rather that I Want. The will above all else, the belief that anyone can create the magic of illumination. But this magic must be defended. Fiercely. Hence the presence of “Rock For Light” by Bad Brains, hardcore guerrilla warfare on a mission to kindle a light: “Shine A Light”, in fact, perhaps the finest song the Stones ever wrote. Every genuine light has two qualities: it's white (“White Light”) – it's left to the prism to break it down into colors – and eternal (“Eternal Light”), able, that is, to act as a beacon for whoever sees it (“Guiding Light”) and to shine on into other lights (“Lights Go Up”). And so, those who in life have had the tenacity to reflect a light amid the glimmer of thousands of others can then say they've reached the end of that path whose starting point men call hope. Right on cue, closing out the compilation, comes “Hope”, the song with which Bauhaus bid farewell to the world before splitting up. And it's certainly paradoxical, yet also wonderfully fitting, that the closing track of their final album – at least until their improbable 2008 reunion – remains the only sunlit song in a catalog made up mostly of devilish dances, dark pagan rituals and infernal symphonies. Further proof that not everything in the dark is dark. Enjoy the listen. Or rather, enjoy the light.

Side A: Shadow

1. Joy Division – New Dawn Fades

When God – in Genesis – separated light from darkness, He probably started from something like “New Dawn Fades”, the song that laid the foundations of dark aesthetics on the album that invented dark-punk: Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division. When people talk about the band, all the attention usually gathers around the tragic, existentialist figure of Ian Curtis. In truth – as this immense track proves – the whole band was a perfect, organic mechanism, in which every single member complemented the others, producer included. “New Dawn Fades”, in fact, opens with a Martin Hannett touch, reversing a line from another song, “Insight”, over which Stephen Morris comes in with slow, solemn drum hits.  Peter Hook falls in with one of his grim bass grooves that already sketch out the melody, Bernard Sumner weaves a web of harmony that culminates in a guitar solo like a Tony Iommi riff played in slow motion. Last comes Curtis's listless vocal: the Dostoevskian undercurrent of abjection crammed into the voice of a man who saw a locked door where others would have seen a way out. “A loaded gun won't set you free,” he sings. The darkness at the bottom of the light.

2. Red House Painters – Shadows

Man's greatest fear is not death, but happiness. Some have elevated this fear to ecstasy, building an entire band on it. An immense band. Mark Kozelek's Red House Painters truly were immense, at least until "Ocean Beach", the last of the four albums released on Ivo Watts-Russell's 4AD. It's the album that essentially already announced the prototype of what would later become Sun Kil Moon, the project Kozelek would launch in 2001 after the Painters split up. On "Ocean Beach", then, the sound is less spartan and oppressive than on the first three albums: the claustrophobic, slow-core-branded harmonies loosen up thanks to arrangements that remain enveloping but breathe with a distinctly folk feel. There are roots-blues gallops reminiscent of Ry Cooder ("Cabezon"), Arcadian violins that ease the martial gait of the gorgeous "San Geronimo", and even a piano ballad. This desolate "Shadows" condenses Kozelek's entire poetics on the irredeemability of human unhappiness, and grants it one last, hushed possibility: to materialize in the virginal weeping of a Hammond organ. The only way to disarm fear is to frighten it with purity.

3. Bonnie Prince Billy – I See A Darkness

In an old interview given to Pitchfork, Will Oldham explains what "I See A Darkness" is about, recalling a high-school classmate of his who believed there were only two ways to represent oneself: an essentially good person who, in the world, tries to do harm, or an essentially bad person who, in the world, tries to do good. One day she asked Will which category he saw himself in, and he answered: "an essentially bad person who tries, in the world, to do good." It's almost impossible not to think of Paul of Tarsus: "When I want to do good, evil is right there beside me." That's what "I See A Darkness" is about: about the good we fail to do. About commendable intentions defamed by the pitiless verdict of time: "I hope that someday, buddy, we can both live in peace, in this life and in death, alone or with our wives, and we can stop all our whoring and lose the smile of the guilty, and get back what we started with, and give up the sleeping alone." More than a wish, it's a cry for help written on a Post-it stuck to the fridge of an abandoned house. Will's voice thins out until it goes off-key, the piano seems to hold back its own chimes. It's too late. For everything. No one will ever read it.

4.  Lisa Germano – The Darkest Night Of All

Vulnerability as catharsis. Lisa Germano – besides being an outstanding songwriter and musician – is a formidable woman. One of those women who doesn't need to flaunt some artificial riot-girl aggression to prove her strength; one who has plunged her head into a sea of a thousand nightmares and resurfaced thanks to the battling fragility of her feminine self. "The Darkest Night Of All" is a summa of the intimate, fairy-tale-like universe that defines her. A dark fable, though, pitch-black, closing "Happiness" – the Indiana songwriter's second album, a record of a thousand stylistic facets – with the soliloquy of an insomniac, a lullaby for nights that never end. The voice is a gentle whisper, the shimmering guitar harmonics mirror themselves in the nocturnal piano like the moon in a puddle of tar left on the road. Everything is smoky, sticky, murky. It's always like this in Lisa Germano's songs, but if you dig beneath the tons of haze, you find hidden wonders, all the "secrets that nobody needs to know." We, on the other hand, need to know them, Lisa's secrets. Not out of morbid emotional voyeurism. Out of a need to share.

5. Current 93 – All The Stars Are Dead Now

David Tibet is a shaman of our times. Over the past thirty years, with Current 93, he has traversed the most esoteric genres (from acid-drenched industrial to the apocalyptic folk of which he is the undisputed druid) and the most controversial subject matter, being accused at various times of blasphemy, satanism, and even Nazi sympathies. Idle speculation, since anyone who has genuinely engaged with Tibet's poetic cosmos knows that his positions are those of a mystic close to Gnosticism – a fact borne out, moreover, by the title of the album "Thunder Perfect Mind", inspired by a Gnostic manuscript found in Egypt in 1945, from which this long dithyramb for acoustic guitar and flute in honor of William Blake is drawn. According to Tibet's own account, the visionary poet par excellence appeared to him – on a night devoid of stars, fittingly – to reveal the prophecy at the heart of a spectral track that quotes the prophet Daniel (in Aramaic!), stitches the metaphor of the Apocalypse onto modern Western society ("Great Babylon has fallen"), and swallows whole, twisting it beyond recognition, the famous jazz standard "Summertime" ("Summertime when the living is easy, summertime when the dying is easy"). Every age has its visionaries.

6. Sound – New Dark Age

If life worked in reverse, love affairs would begin in tears and end with a kiss. And Adrian Borland would probably still be alive, enjoying the recognition he deserved after years in which his band was inexplicably, culpably overlooked. In darkwave circles, in fact, Sound take a back seat to no one, not even to standard-bearers Joy Division. The only difference is that Adrian Borland never had the tragic fortune of becoming Ian Curtis. And so he died at forty-two, in obscurity, defeated by a depression that drove him to throw himself under a train at Wimbledon station. Yet it's genuinely hard to imagine what the dark-wave revival of the last decade would have looked like without the Sound blueprint. Interpol, to name just one prominent example, owe them practically everything, since Borland's outfit was the first to make dark-punk more martial and epic, sharpening it with funk-edged angles. Sadly, though, life works the way it works, and Adrian Borland took his own life one April morning in 1999 – bitterly ironic timing, just before new generations of musicians would start waving the name Sound like a badge of honor. "New Dark Age" – taken from their second album "From The Lions Mouth" – is one of the great anthems of new wave as a whole: ushered in by Mike Duddley's ominous drumming, carved by Borland's own razor-sharp riffs, and launched skyward by Calvin Mayers's hieratic keyboards toward the empyrean. There's an empyrean for the damned too.

7. Have A Nice Life – I Don’t Love

David's "The Death of Marat" on the cover, an eighty-page booklet – written by a university professor – analyzing the heavy themes of the lyrics (death, loneliness, despair, apathy), promoted as the most depressing record in the history of music. "Deathconsciousness" – the debut by American act Have A Nice Life – radiates joy from every possible angle. Jokes aside, you need an unshakeable conviction that music is a perpetual exorcism of the malaise of living to debut with such a monumental double album. In its lyrics as in its sound, its ninety minutes survey much – if not all – of the stylistic spectrum that falls under the musical concept of "dark": from ethereal dream-pop vocal interplay to distorted shoegaze-derived bursts, from drum-machine hammering lifted from Sisters Of Mercy to the witchy charge of Banshees. "I Don't Love" is the epitome of this stylistic convoy, but above all it's an annihilating essay on the terror of one's own feelings, on the need to anesthetize the soul: "I don't love. I don't feel anything." It's horror vacui with the horror stripped away, because emptiness no longer scares you once you realize that you yourself have become the emptiness.

Side B: Light

8. Richard & Linda Thompson –  I Want To See The Bright Lights, Tonight

Blessed are those who eat milk and cereal for breakfast. It was thanks to a cornflakes commercial that Richard Thompson – at the time in Fairport Convention – met Linda Peters, who for years would be not only his wife but also his musical partner. It was 1969, and Thompson was busy recording "Liege & Lief" at Sound Techniques Studios in London. In the room next door, Linda was recording an advertising jingle for a cereal brand. The following year, Richard – craving artistic independence – would leave Fairport Convention to go it alone; in 1972 he married Linda, and two years later brought her in on his second solo record: "I Want To See The Bright Lights, Tonight". Despite the title, it's an album whose mood is anything but bright, one that – to borrow Greil Marcus's incisive words – "mocks the stupidity of human faith and curses God with every breath." Yet Thompson's folk-rock unfolds through subtle contrasts, electroacoustic chiaroscuros of which the title track is a perfect example. The guitar sobs out bluesy flourishes, the brass section counterpoints beautifully, a choir of female voices lays down a gospel carpet for Linda's magnetic entrance: "Take me to the dance and hold me tight / I want to see the bright lights tonight". Amen.

9. Bad Brains – Rock For Light

"I had a rough childhood and I was looking for answers. Punk, sure, was powerful and fun, but it didn't really have any answers for me. Bad Brains, on the other hand, were people who could give you illumination through music without preaching," says John Joseph of the Cro-Mags. For his part, Ian McKaye has stated that the first time he saw those four Black men with dreadlocks tear the place apart at a club in Boston, it turned his life upside down. Bad Brains had an incalculable impact on Washington D.C.'s hardcore scene in the '80s. They played at breathtaking speed combined with a level of technical skill exceptional for the genre. They came out of fusion (Mahavishnu Orchestra was their touchstone), they loved reggae, and they had embraced the Rastafari faith. Then one day they discovered the Dead Boys and the Ramones, and found their path: playing jazz-rock's pyrotechnic chord progressions with the incendiary fury of the Dead Kennedys. The minute and forty seconds of "Rock For Light" is the manifesto of their formula, a concentrate of tight-knit rhythm, lightning-fast guitar soloing, and barricade-storming vocals foaming with constructive rage: "We don't want war, we don't want violence. We just want justice." The bright side of devastating music.

10. Rolling Stones – Shine A Light

It's hard to believe the band that recorded "Shine A Light" is the same one that also wrote "Sympathy For The Devil". If the latter was a rock'n'roll sabbath in honor of the devil, "Shine A Light" sounds like the benediction of someone forced to love another from a distance ("I can't seem to find the right line"). "May the good Lord shine a light on you" is a simple, beautiful wish addressed perhaps to a prostitute, perhaps to an addict. The song took its definitive shape in 1972 and stands as one of the crowning moments of "Exile On Main Street", but it had actually been written back in 1969 by Jagger under a different title, "Get A Line On You", with a specific person in mind: Brian Jones, who at the time was mired in the drug problems that would, in some way, contribute to his tragic end. After his former bandmate's death, Jagger changed the song's title and subject; it was recorded in December '71 at Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles with Jim Keltner on drums and Billy Preston on piano and, above all, organ. It's thanks to his touch – and to the adamantine Black backing vocals of Vanetta Fields and Clydie King – that "Shine A Light" is, quite simply, the most moving rock prayer of all time.

11. Gene Clark – White Light

"Here Without You", "Set You Free This Time", "Eight Miles High". These are just three of the songs from the Byrds' songbook penned by Gene Clark. Without a doubt, one of the greatest American songwriters of all time. Perentory confirmation of this comes from his self-titled 1971 album, a kind of second solo debut for the man from Tipton, given that a tentative attempt to leave the mothership had already been made in 1966. Things hadn't gone particularly well, though, and good old Gene wisely decided to return to the fold in October 1967. This second Byrdsian stint, however, was extremely short-lived; just long enough for him to suffer a panic attack during a show in Minneapolis and make a cameo appearance on "The Notorious Byrd Brothers". At his second "first time", though — after two albums released in tandem with Doug Dillard — Gene knocked out nine songs, each more beautiful than the last, and, backed by Jesse Ed Davis not just as guitarist but also as producer, recorded a masterpiece titled simply with his own name. As if it really were a debut. In fact, it was down to a printing error that the original cover ended up missing what should have been the album's true title: "White Light". Just like the third track on the record: an irresistible, swaying folk song sung with the vocal swagger and narrative charisma of his friend Bob Dylan.

12. Teenage Fanclub – Eternal Light

Just like the Byrds — who besides Gene Clark could also count on two other relentless songwriters in Roger McGuinn and David Crosby — Teenage Fanclub were also one of the rare bands lucky enough to have not one but three excellent "composers" in their ranks: Norman Blake, Gerard Love and Raymond McGinley. Two other groups to have enjoyed the same good fortune were the Beatles and Big Star. And it's no coincidence that these very three bands were the fixed reference points the Scottish outfit looked to with particular admiration, though never in a slavishly imitative spirit. Also because before the essential trilogy of "Bandwagonesque", "Thirteen" and "Grand Prix", their guitar pop showed the influence of American noise-rockers like Dinosaur Jr. That phase produced their debut "A Catholic Education", from which this radiant "Eternal Light" is taken — its crystalline yet incendiary sound and buoyant melody already hinting at the delightful fruits soon to come.

13. Television – Guiding Light

Whenever one writes about Television, it has by now become obligatory to cite the famous line with which Patti Smith described the sound of Tom Verlaine's guitar: "The scream of a thousand birds". An evocative image, worthy of the rock poetess, which perfectly captured the shrill tone of the Fender belonging to her partner in crime back in the days of CBGB's, where the two of them, right at its birth, transformed punk into new wave. And yet that definition, however apt and lyrical, leaves out another peculiarity of Verlaine's shapeshifting style: his ability to create synaesthesia, to conjure visual sensations through sound. Genuine acoustic illuminations, achieved by deploying a wholly original array of reverbs, delays and echo effects. In this sense, the ungainly ballad "Guiding Light" is a bouquet of harmonic filigree and vibrato, interwoven with the granite riffs and thorny phrasing of the other guitarist, Richard Lloyd. The song is a romantic plea for protection addressed to a woman, invoked as a guiding light in the night. Love is a theophany, and so is Verlaine's guitar. Patti Smith was right to call it the scream of a thousand birds. She should only have added: birds that have just glimpsed the light of God.

14. Fucked Up – Lights Go Up

David works in a lightbulb factory. One day he falls in love with Veronica, a political activist, and together they plot to blow up the company he works for by planting a bomb beneath the building. The device explodes, leaving the factory unscathed but killing Veronica. David is torn apart by grief and guilt and can't find a way out. In this fraught process of mourning, he meets Vivian, through whom he discovers that he is a character inside a story created by a narrator named Octavio St. Laurent. The two clash and David comes out worse for it, but at this point Vivian confesses to him that the one truly responsible for Veronica's death is Octavio, who claims responsibility for his action by insisting that his role in the story is precisely to be the villain. Having come to terms with the situation, David finally accepts his own role, and at the same time Veronica returns to him in spirit form. "David Comes To Life" is such a masterpiece that describing it only diminishes it. A sort of implausible cross between "Quadrophenia" and "Zen Arcade" built on a postmodern, metalinguistic dramaturgical framework, somewhere between Pirandello and "The Matrix". Eighteen songs, hardcore in their progressions but surprisingly melodic in their guitar crescendos, howled with the impassioned growl of Pink Eyes. This "Lights Go Up" is the final act, the curtain falling on an old-fashioned rock opera that begins with the torments of a young man unable to find a reason to live and ends with "a new sun in the sky and a love that will never die". Try, if you can, to hold back the tears.

15. Bauhaus – Hope

If someone who had never heard Bauhaus were to approach the band for the first time through this "Hope", they'd likely come away with a completely mistaken idea of the characteristic sound of David Murphy's band. For starters, there's not even an echo of the sardonic vocalist's theatrical baritone. That's because here it's Daniel Ash singing, whose guitar doesn't indulge in one of his legendary dissonant symphonies, just as David Jay reins in the morbid pulsations that made him one of the most effective bassists of the goth scene. The catacomb-like atmospheres of "In The Flat Field" and "Mask" are light years away. "Hope", at most, resembles a "Sunday Morning" purged of Lou Reed's toxic decadence. It opens with a flourish of crisp riffs and shimmering reverb, and culminates in a joyous, disorienting chorus — strange to hear on a Bauhaus album, even though this one is "Burning From The Inside", the softest of their four classic releases. The lyrics are even more surreal when you consider they were written by the very same people who spawned the terrifying nightmare of "Stigmata Martyr", but perhaps it's exactly this circumstance that makes these words shine all the brighter: "Your mornings will be brighter, break the lines, tear up the rules, get the best from a million no's". The sky is clear, just one step outside of hell.

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