Black Tape For a Blue Girl at Elysium's Halloween Ball

Long the local hangout for the Goth crowd, Elysium always throws a party on All Hallow’s Eve, especially since it coincides with the club’s anniversary. This year’s 9th birthday/Halloween ball features not only a steampunk theme (and a costume contest to go with it), but also the first Austin gig by American darkwave/Gothic music legend Black Tape For a Blue Girl in over a decade.

Led as ever by songwriter/soundshaper Sam Rosenthal (who also owns the long-running Goth label/distributor Projekt), BTFABG is touring the South in support of its most recent record 10 Neurotics. The album’s overt paeans to alternative eroticism come couched in a sound less ethereal than the ambient neoclassical art songs that make up most of the Black Tape catalog. Not that there’s a thing wrong with the music found on LPs like the appropriately-titled This Lush Garden Within, but the more earthy pleasures of 10 Neurotics allow Rosenthal to lead the group through the lobby and into the smoky interior of the darkest of cabarets, taking a table close to the Dresden Dolls without inhaling their secondhand smoke. It’s the perfect mood-setter for the bedroom power games to come.