Track Listing: Tie Me Up Tie Me Down, Push The Button Featuring Billie Ray Martin, I Want Your Number, Psycho Killer Featuring Pravda, Marilyn Featuring Amanda Lepore And Cazwell, Hotline, Do You Believe In Heaven?, Venus In Furs, Plastic Lover Featuring Pravda And The Specimen, Superstitious Featuring Andrea B And Crackdown, Déshabille-Toi, Can’t Stop, Disorder Featuring Ultrafox, Tie Me Up Tie Me Down Video By Pvonb.

This debut album by French/Welsh duo Natalie and Huw looks back to My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult back in their sexploitation disco days. Even a cover of the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” gets rendered with a layer of electro sleaze. But between occasionally auto-tuned vocals, random rap, video game synthesizers, and hollow drum machine beats, Tie Me Up Tie Me Down manages to sound pleasant but dated – and not in the futurist fashion of Ladytron.

Sexually-charged lyrics (a la The Nuns) tinged with bondage, stripping, and phone sex add a familiar frisson; “Superstitious” is the sultry, seductive standout. The songs suffer from repetitiveness, however, that even sampling can’t relieve. Result: missed opportunities, as in their disappointing, humourless, unsexy counterpart to “Voulez-Vous Couchez Avec Moi?” titled “Déshabille Toi” (undress yourself), and songs that musically overlap each other into a lack of distinction.

For more information, visit their Myspace page.

Track Listing: Ivory (Part 1 + 2), Indian Summer Rain, Upon The Water, A Carnival Of Souls, Frozen, Nothing Like The Rain, Where The Shadow Goes, Open, Prayer For The Song, Alone.

With a classic, muscular goth rock sound rooted in Ashton Nyte’s cavernous vocals and the band’s hard guitar work, it’s easy to understand The Awakening’s success in South Africa and throughout the international scene. Here’s a Big Dark sound seasoned with metal and Peter Murphy that, without overtaking anyone, harkens to Rosetta Stone, London After Midnight, The Wake, Meridian, and, dare it be said, Sisters of Mercy. If anything, it’s the lack of surprise that keeps the album from being anything other the tried-and-true done particularly well. But while Tales of Absolution and Obsoletion doesn’t exactly count as avant-garde, admittedly an uncharitable disappointment, it does offer more than enough to satisfy.

For more information, visit their website.

Track Listing: Rum Hee, Alaska, Inatemessa, Vista (Alt Version), Typewriter (Alt Version), Parachute (Alt Version), Rum Hee (Oorutaichi Remix), Rum Hee (Deerhoof Remix).

The EP’s first track, “Rum Hee”, brims with bells and whistles, toys and percussion, and bright vocals – enough to sound like multi-instrumental hippie music with which to sell hybrid convertibles or anti-depressants. That feeling of being thrust into a more complex but no less enthusiastic version of “It’s A Small World” only intensifies with subsequent tracks “Alaska” and the instrumental toy-pop “Inatemessa”. This sort of unbridled perkiness is as nerve-wracking as the prospect of coming down from a sugar rush, but there’s no denying Shogo Tokumaru’s compositional skill.

Unlike Arcade Fire whose orchestral layering amounts to a muddle, Tokumaru, if not for every taste, at least achieves a clean, intricate sound. Consume carefully – and keep an antidote of Cinema Strange nearby.

For more information, visit the website.

Track Listing: Pigface, God’s Own Movie, The Blue Waltz, Mother’s Song, Church, The White Waltz, Seven Levels, Our Lady Damned, Riversong (He Set Me Free), The Black Waltz/The Red Waltz.

“Can I smell treason or true love on your breath?/Those countless pearls you wear are the teeth of a million dead,” sings Nick Cliff in the visually evocative, mournful Lady Damned.

With gloriously dramatic lyrics, Nick Cave’s storytelling instinct, and a thoughtful melancholy worthy of Johnny Indovina, the intriguingly named Long Dead Sevens are a robust five-piece chamber gloom ensemble chock-full of guitars, violins, piano, accordion, and tasteful theatricality. An American counterpart to Romanian cold-wave band Arc Gotic, as it were, if a rough comparison is needed. Their debut album draws on influences ranging from folk and bluegrass to gypsy. But best of all the Long Dead Sevens prove that romanticism, in all its beating heart and bloody glory, isn’t dead. Bonus: you can actually dance a waltz to the colour-coded waltz songs, too.

For more information, visit their website or Myspace page.