The Spiritual Bat

  I know this post on The Spiritual Bat is way the fuck late. Their tour brought them to Chicago's Live Wire Lounge some time in August 2016. Every time I see them I write. The last post on them was 2014. It amazes me the travel they do, all the way from Italy. That's their home where Rosetta teaches english. When touring, Chicago is in the middle, somewhere far from the light of the last stop.  Its important for me to be mindful of this and what that means. I light a candle to each moment remembered, until I have myself a shrine..... of sorts. This post on them kind of just surfaced like this all slow. Chicago audiences have been for them sometimes small and intimate. I cannot exactly

recall how many this time. Its the third time at Live Wire way, way up on Milwaukee Ave. There were many local familiar faces, the kind that surface for all things dark, and this is goth rock. I see this and I can't believe the culture is dying. Its aging, yeah....so? The Bats are goth rock and that filters and concentrates who shows up. Death rock people are the best, they hold nothing back.
  The foggy edges of memory favor old German Expressionist ways of laying out the dirt road. Youtube fills in a lot of gaps, and that is awesome to see someone uploaded video of them playing live. It helps to activate dormant memories of them saying random shit in between songs, the personal minute shit that does not move along any fucking storyline but it colors shit another shade of black. Rosetta gets into it with sneers and gritting teeth. Her passionate performance of new and old work never lets dormant glowing embers of memory fade.
  Seeing them this one time intensifies the first memory and the rest like a chain reaction.  I'm always glad to see the Bats period, and now also for the little reasons that peel off the onion. They are a goth band touring a land that likes to think the culture it belongs to is an aging costume. Goth is always fucking again dying, Neo is closed. You Hot Topic mall goths that age in dog years, are bringing the rest of us with you. So to see this on a stage makes me glad I can fit in some of them aging black pants and shirts. The Spiritual Bat is still an old outfit, an old goth band with roots stretching into the 90's. They have aged with me. They have aged like me. And here they are performing new work. That means they are still active. Their tours have taken them to WGT and Whitby Gothic Weekend, Castle Party, all the last bastions of goth...and Mexico! Yet touring the world is still a recent mastery. I was not aware of them before 2008. I like the new songs I heard from them on this tour of 2016. Its great to have something to look forward to from an old goth band. Hmmm, yeah, I know they are not that, that old, but are we waiting that long for y'all to appreciate?
Zig