I’m a giant sucker for heavy metal/shoegaze crossover. Whether it’s the post-metal of Isis or Pelican, or the black metal/shoegaze hybrid (I decline to call it “blackgaze” in deference to a gay friend who prefers African-American partners and who accordingly once made fun of me at great length for mentioning that I had been enjoying a lot of blackgaze) pioneered by Ulver and Alcest and made hip by Deafheaven, the unlikely synthesis of the brutal and the ethereal just hits me where I live.

Last week a band of that ilk released an excellent entry point to the subgenre—a doomgaze cover of an iconic Madchester song. Namely, “I Wanna Be Adored,” the lead-off track from Stone Roses’ 1989 eponymous debut LP, and one of the most stunning side-one-track-one songs in rock. The song was a strong declaration of intent, and was read as an answer to long time hometown fans who were disappointed that “their” band had signed a big-money deal with Silvertone, but the song had been recorded as early as 1985; its early provenance and the content of its minimal lyrics—“I don’t have to sell my soul, he’s already in me, I wanna be adored”—indicated that selling out was an impossibility as the band had sought pop stardom from the start. From Breaking Into Heaven: The Rise, Fall & Resurrection of The Stone Roses:

The album, like their live performances, opened with “I Wanna Be Adored,” an ominous, throbbing baseline from Mani winding out of the darkness, lit up by golden notes dripping from Squire’s guitar. Towards the end of the song, the lyrics changed, gaining intensity: ”I wanna … I wanna … I gotta be adored.” Brown whispered the words for the most part—the approach that always served his voice best; his vocals were sexy and arrogant, insinuating their way into the listener’s consciousness. It was the Roses’ clearest statement of intent to date—nothing less than adoration would do for four men capable of creating something so special.

 
If that was the only Stone Roses song you’d ever heard, you could be forgiven for assuming they were a shoegazing band—it’s slow-burning, hypnotic bass groove and oceanically HUGE reverbed-out guitar sound fit well with that style’s signature tropes, and combining that with its lyrical conceit of swapping in Satanic possession for their desire for stardom, it’s a wonder that a shoegazing metal band hasn’t taken on a cover sooner. But last week, King Woman stepped up exquisitely.

If you’re not familiar, the band is a project of Kristina Esfandiari, a former member of Whirr (she ended her association with that band well before they infamously disgraced themselves) who also releases music under the nom de rock Miserable. King Woman’s Created in the Image of Suffering was singled out by Pitchfork as one of 2017’s best albums, and justly so—her music is a compelling aggregate of Mazzy Star atmospherics and the menacing drone of Earth, and lyrically, she mines fittingly dark territory—some of her work is a response to the trauma of growing up in a Christian doomsday cult. From an interview on the Sargent House blog:

I’ve had anxiety and depression since I was a little kid, but I also had a lot of trauma while growing up, so who knows how they’re all connected. But ever since I was in kindergarten I wouldn’t talk in school at all. My teachers would tell my mom, ‘Your child has the worst type of social anxiety we’ve ever seen.’ And I didn’t know this until I got older, she never told me. Never got any help for it, never took me to a doctor or anything. So I just suffered and didn’t understand that I was suffering because I was so little…Really timid, no real sense of self. I was raised in a very religious environment so I had no backbone, no identity. And that’s just such a bad combination with anxiety and depression.

When we started writing the first King Woman EP, was when it all came out. It took me a while to realize that there’s nothing wrong with my darkness. There’s nothing wrong (with the fact) that I have a sense of dark and light; it’s a perfect balance. And, like, we need both of them. And there’s nothing wrong about me writing about my experience, and there’s nothing wrong with me being honest about what happened to me. It’s helping other people and I am getting flooded with emails from people around the world, telling me their experiences, and I’m doing something right.

It was a shitshow after that first EP came out and I started doing interviews. I got awful threatening mail, I got Christians saying whack shit to me, like they want to pray for me and they hope I see Christ’s light, and my family was pissed at me for saying the things I said, but I was like ‘Fuck all of you, I have suffered my whole life and I am not going to shut up. This is my experience. This is my story, and I don’t give a fuck about what any you think, because I’ve cared long enough, and I’ve been controlled long enough, and I’ve had no voice for long enough, and there’s so much that I need to say.’

“I Wanna Be Adored” is a digital-only single, and as such is a bargainous $1 on Bandcamp, and you can stream it right here. It’s illuminating to compare it with the Raveonettes’ version, IMO.
 

 
Tons of love to Beth P for turning me on to this, and it merits mentioning that her new album is pretty fucking badass, too.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Heavy meta: Scott Walker teams up with Sunn O))) to form Scott O)))
Stoner doom-mongers The Sword recreate Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ in doom metal style