I have a lot of crafting and DIY posts I want to write, but I haven’t had a chance to get some pictures taken… so in the meantime I’d like to write a brief review for one of my best purchases ever!

Now, I’m not exactly a scene kid, mind you, and my musical taste is rather eclectic. I pretty much never listen to the radio and I don’t really go clubbing… so I discover most of my music via random searching on iTunes.

About 8 months ago I was on iTunes, trying to find some new music to listen to. I decided to go ahead and just type “goth” into the search bar to see what would show up. There were a few results, but the one that caught my eye was “Unquiet Grave.” Apparently this collection was originally released on several separate discs… but iTunes offers the entire collection for just $16! And its 131 songs! I pretty much thought that given how many songs there were, I was guaranteed to like a least a few of them. So I went ahead and bought the album / collection… it took awhile to download, but as soon as it finished I put it on my iPod and started listening…

I was really thrilled to discover how many of the songs I liked. I recognized some of the artists, but other than Abney Park, I hadn’t really listen to any of them. There were a few songs which I immediately loved:

“Dark Romantics” by The Awakening

“Breathe” by Flowers & Machines

“Vision in Black” by Advent Sleep

“Love Lies Bleeding (Part Two)” by Black Atmosphere

“Funeral Night” by Bella Morte

“Vote for Love” by Tiamat

And a handful of others….

When I first get a CD, I click through all the songs and pick out the ones that catch my attention. Later I’ll listen to the whole album while I’ve working or crafting, and then I discover a second set of great songs. So, for Unquiet Grave, the second set of songs that I fell in love with tended to be some of the slightly slower / softer songs, such as:

“The Sky is Blushing” by Jennifer Hope

“This, My Melancholic Masquerade” by Autumn Tears

“Bell, Book & Candle” by Stare

“Doganch” by October Hill

“Raining in Kyoto” by Adenosine Tri Phosphate

“Fireworks” by Ocean 8

“At Mortlake” by Peter Ulrich

“Dragon Song” by Corpus Delicti

“myphilosophy” by Inner

“Desert Snow” by October Hill

And other…

The collection has a pretty wide range of music types.. from industrial, to IDM, to rock, to “ambiance” types… One thing you’ll notice is that none of the stereotypical, old-school goth artists are present (Sisters of Mercy, The Cure, etc)… but in my opinion that is a good thing, because we’ve all heard of those artists anyways!

The only disappointment came when I decided to get back on iTunes to check out some of the artists that I had liked songs from… Either I couldn’t find them on iTunes (I guess they aren’t popular / current enough), or I didn’t like what I did find. Of course, as we all know, sometimes it can be hard to decide if you like a song just by listening to the sample snippet on iTunes, but I also don’t want to buy an entire album just because I happened to like a single song by that artist. (So I guess what I need to do is go to Barnes & Nobles and see if I can listen to some longer samples.) I also am guessing that perhaps some of the artists featured in the collection were sort of “one-hit-wonders,” at least in regards to goth-y music, or that their usual style isn’t properly represented by the single song included in the Unquiet grave collection.

That being said, I highly recommend this collection of music. Especially if you are new to goth music or are looking to sample a larger selection of artists. I mean, come on, its only $16! Which is like $0.12 / song! I’m sure that you’ll find at least a few songs you like, and perhaps a lot more than that!