A Life Less Lived, over the course of three CDs, documents the goth scene, from its origins (roughly L.A.'s loose-knit "death rock" movement of the early post-punk years) to its assimilation into the broader cultural morass (somewhere in between Flesh For Lulu's Postcards From Paradise and the opening of the first Hot Topic). Whether goth was actually a musical style or a broad web of cultural signifiers in which music played an important but not central role would be a hotly debated question if anybody actually cared. What's certain, though, is that A Life Less Lived presents the music of the period less as a cohesive stylistic movement constrained by genre limitations than as a vague template of suggestions: mid-tempo rock/pop songs, sticking largely to minor keys and performed or produced with a host of subcultural signifiers pushed up front.

If that sounds like a negative, it shouldn't. The surest way to limit a genre's shelf life is to tie its hands behind its back; the tighter the restrictions on style, the less room there's going to be for creativity, which will make your genre quite inviting for chronic handwashers but unappealing to, y'know, artists. The glory of goth, as it turns out, isn't the hair (though it certainly was awesome) or the fishnets (though I'd personally pay money to ensure their return to prominence) or even the band names (though on a pound-for-pound basis they make the current crop of MySpace favorites look like schoolmarms) — it's the fun of it all. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the songs turn out to be normal pop songs sung by dudes in makeup. Their voices, though, practically drip with conviction; everybody involved is certain that they're onto something exciting and new, and, as it always does, that youthful cockiness makes all the difference. The Bolshoi's "Away," for example, whose lyrics are more pedestrian than a sidewalk, seems to have been made by a band who think they've outdone "Gimme Shelter," while the Cult (who began life as Southern Death Cult, then shortened it to Death Cult, and finally just gave up and got rich) chase the zeitgeist like greyhounds after a mechanical rabbit. These tracks, along with a few queens-for-a-day whose names would vanish but for sets like this one, practically seethe with energy. There is a lot to be said for living in any moment; here is evidence of people who decided to do so for a season or two.

Still, it's these half-remembered singularities that elevate the genre from mere historical curiosity, and three of them come from straight from goth's Californian birth pangs. 45 Grave's "Partytime" is familiar to anybody who's seen Return of the Living Dead; its intro sounds rather remarkably like Pavement, its verses like Motley Crue. In business, they call this sort of combination "win-win." Elsewhere, "Romeo's Distress," from the only original-lineup album that Christian Death released, tries so hard to shock the listener that one doesn't want to give it the satisfaction; but its soaring coda is a triumph of self-absorption, one whose lyrics could be cut, copied and pasted into approximately one-third of existing LiveJournals with no noticeable difference in content. It dazzles. Finally, Kommunity FK's "To Blame" is so flat-out fantastic and grand that one wonders how much other amazing stuff is down there gathering dust in history's cut-out bins: Patrick Mata has better vocal chops than anybody here except maybe Peter Murphy, and that he's singing in badly compromised fidelity for an imagined audience so small that it wouldn't quite fill the Starwood only ratchets up the intensity.

Back up these stunning anomalies with the set's undeniably classic tracks — the ones by Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Birthday Party, Bauhaus, The Cure, Cocteau Twins, and a full dozen others whose names weren't as big but whose visions very nearly were — and you have a remarkable document of a muddy aesthetic whose very triumph is its vagueness. It has given me as much pleasure as anything else I've heard this year. It also comes with a DVD, but real goths only watch the Trinity Broadcasting Network, so you'll have to judge that part for yourself.

(j_darnielle@citypaper.net)