Here's a picture I stole from Grave Babies' myspace page
Seattle’s seemingly abortion-obsessed Grave Babies play goth that remembers the genre was originally an offshoot of punk. This is not frilly shirt and makeup goth, this is rainy, grimy street and leather jacket goth. The punk kids from Demons would find Grave Babies to be a great band to blast on their cassette deck on the way to getting killed by a bunch of zombies in a movie theater. If you were in Sacramento last Friday when they played and instead went to some silly club to dance like you were waving a broadsword around whilst listening to the teary-eyed house music that pervades goth culture, you missed out son. Sorry, that was a bit of a run-on sentence.
I picked up a copy of Grave Babies’ VHS release “Pro-Death”. It’s a compendium of videos made of grainy, home shot footage of people dancing around in masks, and scenes from bizarre, forgotten films, soundtracked by Grave Babies’ appropriately lo-fi recordings. The music is perfect for this format, you could swear that this release was from 25 years ago. The archaic drum machine (augmented to great effect by a live drummer at shows), fuzzy guitars, and moaning, chant like multi -tracked vocals lend the videos a mysterious vibe. Of course, the band use more than their fair share of reverb. They don’t sound much like The Birthday Party, but I have the urge to watch Pleasure Heads Must Burn now because I got the same vibe from the “Nick the Stripper” video on the. Hold on a minute… now I’ve put that on. Grave Babies obviously have a sense of humor, as they drop in scenes from an anti-abortion video between songs (again with the dead babies). That, and their record label is called “Skrot Up Records”. Sample the fruits of their loins here:
