Sunday, December 7, 2008

Beautiful Skin - Revolve

Beautiful Skin were a very overlooked, but excellent post-punk/electro band from New York City made up of keyboardist Ross Totino and former Rorschach guitarist Nick Forte. Admittedly, Forte's background in hardcore was an initial selling point of this band for me, but having listened to this record many times over the past few years, I think I enjoy this more than his work with Rorschach.

Although Beautiful Skin's brand of dark, hypnotic synth-pop isn't nearly as groundbreaking as what Rorschach did with hardcore, they were definitely on the forefront of the post-punk resurgence that occurred in the early to mid 2000's. However, unlike the upbeat post-punk that became incredibly popular after their break up, the band had more in common with the deadpan vocal delivery of Peter Murphy and the cold, ethereal synth of early OMD and German Krautrock bands like Neu! Periodically, they veer from the course of darkwave into more experimental and abrasive territory, but they mostly stick to that formula and pull it off quite well. Unfortunately this was their only proper LP, but they did release a few EP's and a collection of material entitled Everything, All This and More posthumously that are worth looking into. With that said, the name of this blog is taken from a song on this record called "Harsh Distractions." So, I feel like if you've ever read this blog, you should probably check this record out.

Beautiful Skin - Revolve

7 comments:

dirty judas said...

LINK IS DEAD RIP LINK

Stephen said...

Reupped!

Anonymous said...

After 2 years, if I ask you to re-upload it, would it be too much? I loath the day I lost their folder on my PC...

Stephen said...

No problem, I'll re-post when I get home.

Stephen said...

Reupped my dog

Anonymous said...

Thank you. I want to send you my left kidney, if you accept...

Stephen said...

Haha save it for the future, someone else might need it. I appreciate the sentiment though.