The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep

A British dance-pop group which found fame thanks to the antics of androgynous frontman Pete Burns, Dead or Alive formed in Liverpool in 1980. Burns first surfaced three years prior in the Mystery Girls, later heading the proto-goth rockers Nightmares in Wax; he founded Dead or Alive with keyboardist Marty Healey, guitarist Mitch, bassist Sue James, and drummer Joe Musker, debuting in 1980 with the Ian Broudie-produced Doors soundalike "I'm Falling." "Number Eleven" followed, but just as the group was gaining momentum, they were swept aside by the emergence of the New Romantic movement, with Burns subsequently charging that fellow androgyne Boy George of Culture Club had merely stolen his outrageous image.

I've been following this gloomy Norwegian gothic death metal group fer many a year now, and their career isn't the simplest to sum up. Let's try shall we, since this'll be their lastest album. They've veered from their first two records of mournful epics uplifted by operatic vocals, to hate-fuelled, Dimmu-style melodic extremities with the next two, and recently to a more compact sound partway between Tristania and Penumbra…