Dark Carnival | Frozen Statues

I’ve been revisiting some of my Minneapolis music past and there is one band that managed to evade all of my attempts in the past to locate any of their music in physical format or online: Dark Carnival.

This is not the superband from Detroit by the same name that involved Stooges members and had a female lead… yeller? (I was not impressed, suffice it to say.)

This iteration of Dark Carnival was from a slightly earlier period of 1983-1988, and probably classes as more as proto-goth than goth. I’m fairly certain I saw them live at least a few times at one of the many popup alley and record store gigs, outdoor block parties and all-age shows I managed to find when I was too young to be admitted to drinking shows.

I definitely recall one of the burnouts in the Uptown area deriding them as “crap” when their name came up in conversation — one, I might add, he was not invited to participate in — as we discussed their sound over shite McDonald’s coffee on a cold autumn Friday or Saturday night around 1987. He also labeled several other bands (Sisters of Mercy, C—— Death, and Bauhaus, to name a few) as “crap” while he tried to remember if it was evening or early morning, so his opinion didn’t amount to much.

And I recall seeing their demo cassette at the local record heaven, and almost chose it over something like Death In June on vinyl. I should have chose the cassette…

They did have a brief moment of localized “fame” when the local Public Television station developed a punksploitation film around 1987-1988 called “Half Life”. It was a fairly awful 48-minute teledrama about a kid leaving a pig farm in Minnesota to seek city life in Minneapolis. There, he falls in love with a punk rock girl. To impress her he starts singing Arthur Rimbaud poetry in a punk rock band that was more goth than punk. That “band” was Dark Carnival. While most of it was terrible, it is nice to check out because it captured some of the “scenery” of downtown Minneapolis that has been razed since then.

He gets the girl, but it eventually, that ends up not being the greatest relationship and he washes out his Fire-engine red Manic Panic and goes back to the pig farm.

On a side note, I was going to audition for the film when I saw a listing in the local rag “City Pages”, where they were looking for people from the underground music “scene” to act as extras. That was probably 1986, as I distinctly recall my father telling me that I was not allowed to audition, under penalty of grounding and possibly being sent to military academy (or something like that) if he found out that I had auditioned. It was a conflict-filled period at the time where my family and we had an uneasy truce after I ran away for being told that my summer plans (bought and paid for) that year were irrelevant and that I was just going to have to eat the money I had spent. My mother was traveling and I was allowed to stay home, suspected of being a pothead (although I never much cared for the stuff) and having committed the crime of being caught wearing eyeliner and coloring my hair without permission. Dad… Well, he exerted his authority where he could.

In working on research for Everything Falls Apart, I was looking up some bands from an adjacent time period, and Dark Carnival was one of those I tried to find again, not expecting much success. One link lead to another and I stumbled upon their Soundcloud page. Or, at least, a page dedicated to uploading their rare studio recordings from that period.

It’s about how I remember it. Less melodic than more popular goth bands, but it still has that edgy raw goth appeal for me. If I were to list a band that made it (slightly bigger and later), I’d probably say they are reminiscent of Mephisto Walz. It’s a sound that I would have liked to have explored when I was younger but, of course, it was too far “out there” at the time to find other people to play with. Most were trying to emulate the Cure, Joy Division, Smiths, etc. by the time I was an acceptable bass player (which was fine by me, but I liked experimentation too). This sound was a little too far away from that more palatable sound the bands looking for an amateur bassist were willing to pursue.

Let me know what you think in the comments.