Dressed In Black: Goth Divas From The Dark Side – Album Review

Various Artists: Dressed In Black – Goth Divas From The Dark Side 1941-2025

(Ace Records)

Released 26 June 2026

CD | Vinyl

4.0 out of 5.0 stars4.0

Cathi Unsworth’s history of Goth, Season Of The Witch, was one of Louder Than War’s 2023 books of the year. Now she has assembled a companion 20-track compilation, Dressed In Black, foregrounding the female protagonists who birthed the music. It’s none more dark, says Robert Plummer.

In the beginning comes the revolution: afterwards, it takes years of analysis to grasp the root causes. That’s true of regime changes, but also of unruly musical movements. Before there was Goth, there were a thousand bad seeds waiting to germinate – and this compilation digs deep in the soil to unearth a select few.

Goth was and is unlike any other musical genre in the breadth of its literary and cultural hinterland. Unsworth’s book was notable for its exploration of the influences that shaped its progress, including potted biographies of the Gothmothers and Gothfathers who served as the movement’s sonic precursors. Dressed In Black takes that approach a step further: it ranges across time and space to summon a supernatural “coven of women” whose influence pervades every page of her work.

If you’re after a conventional collection of the tunes that exemplified the genre – and let’s be honest, hardly any classic Goth bands ever explicitly embraced the label – then look elsewhere. Unsworth’s project is a different one, doing for Goth what the 2013 compilation Oh Yes We Can Love did for glam rock. If you missed it, that five-CD set featured T. Rex and Slade alongside the likes of Noel Coward and Jacques Brel, placing the music in a broader conceptual context.

The earliest recording here is Billie Holiday’s 1941 rendition of Gloomy Sunday, a song that Unsworth describes in her book as “notoriously cursed”. Then the timeline glides forward to 1955, with existentialist torch singer Juliette Gréco recounting a visit to Earth by the Devil.

All stuff to induce goose-pimples, but perhaps the most inspired bit of sequencing is to follow Bobbie Gentry’s Ode To Billie Joe with Julie Driscoll’s Season Of The Witch. They’re among six of the album’s 20 songs that come from the sombre side of the Sixties, more than any other decade. That allows Unsworth to take in vocal excursions by Nico and Nina Simone, as well as Road To Nowhere, a doom-laden end-of-tether epic by obscure folkie Judy Henske.

The album takes its title from a number by the Shangri-Las, the most sinister of all the 1960s girl groups. “He walks alone, a shadow in the night,” they sing of their black-clad beau, tapping into the James Dean archetype that is the touchstone for so many male Goth performers. No light without shade: no wonder Gothic influences are everywhere once you start looking.

Naturally, some of Goth’s biggest femmes fatales of the 1970s and 1980s are present and correct here. Take a bow Siouxsie Sioux (the album’s cover star), Cramps guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach, Lydia Lunch, Danielle Dax, Diamanda Galás and Anita Lane. The Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser has also been drafted in as another dark diva, although featured track Iceblink Luck sees the band a long way from their Goth origins.

More recent recordings include folk revival singer Shirley Collins’s spine-chilling version of plague ballad Death And The Lady, taken from her 2016 comeback album Lodestar. Its lyrics tell the story of a woman of wealth and taste who tries to bargain with the Grim Reaper in an effort to extend her life. He, however, is having none of it – and the tale of her demise, penned in the late 14^th Century, still resonates down the years.

Another time-honoured folk song, Katie Cruel, turns up in a home recording by the late Karen Dalton that surfaced in 2012, nearly two decades after she perished alone in a camper van. It recounts the experience of a prostitute shunned by society, sung by a woman who was herself an outcast because of her heroin addiction. Sometimes the songs themselves, like the otherworldly forces they invoke, refuse to die.

Neglected multi-instrumentalist Annie Hogan, known for her collaborations with Marc Almond, contributes an affecting self-composed chanson. Meanwhile, Anna Calvi brings the Batcave tradition up to date with the haunting, Rocket USA-referencing Ain’t No Grave. And more are following in the Gothmothers’ footsteps, as shown by the newest song here, Idiot Milk by up-and-coming duo Mummy.

Dressed In Black is a compilation that sets out to celebrate the female creative impulse essential to Gothic culture, and in that, it succeeds brilliantly. But gratifyingly, it refuses to limit itself to the big names of the genre: the lesser-known artists and songs featured are among its most beguiling inclusions. Cathi Unsworth’s auteur vision shrewdly avoids aural thesis territory – this is a supremely listenable collection, with chills and spills to last you all the way to Hallowe’en.

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Cathi Unsworth is a crime novelist and music journalist: you can find her official website here. She is also on Facebookand Instagram.

All words by Robert Plummer. More writing by Robert can be found at hisauthor’s archive. He is also on X as @robertp926.