Roadside Memorial, Anthony Jones, and Information Society at the DNA Lounge.
The week of 21 March 2016 marked the 23rd anniversary of Death Guild, the longest running goth/industrial night in the United States and second-oldest in the world. In a community where club nights may exist for a handful of years and then vanish, only to be replaced by a new team of promoters Death Guild stands out as the archetypal club night: If you visit SF and you like to dance, you really need to stop by the DNA Lounge on Monday night. The evening of 23 March 2016 was a very special night indeed because three locally prominent bands performed that night to celebrate: Good, old-fashioned goth from Roadside Memorial, storytelling new-school goth by Anthony Jones and his band featuring UnWoman on electric cello and vocals and accompanied by Ariellah, and Information Society celebrating the release of their latest album, a collection of covers of music that helped shape their sound called Orders of Magnitude (which debuted at #10 on the Billboard Electronic Dance Music Charts).
Roadside Memorial is a band that very much plays in the old-school vein - rumbling bass, reedy guitars and at least two octaves of vocals that are fun to listen to and pretty much assured to get you dancing if you're familiar with the music already (full disclosure: I'm not but I'm going to be tracking their work down soon). The closest I can compare Anthony Jones to is the Cruxshadows, because Jones tells coherent stories in at least some of his songs, vamps for the crowd in some of the same ways, and has a few distinct story arcs that cover multiple songs (which I always seem to fall in the middle of, for some reason). I didn't expect to see UnWoman on stage with them - I haven't seen her live since Hexenfest a couple of years back. InSoc was... InSoc. If you've listened to their work over the years, turn it up a couple of notches and you've got their stage show. It's fun, you never know what to expect from them (say, coming out wearing spandex hoods and calf-length mad scientist coats), and if you know the songs it's hard to not sing along. Which I spent much of the night doing, I'm not ashamed to admit.
I think you can tell that I had an incredible time that night. When the bands weren't on stage I was dancing to the DJs (perhaps a little too hard...) and generally having a great time.
Anyway, here are the pictures I took from the dancefloor. When I wasn't taking pictures I was singing at the tops of my lungs or cutting a rug.