VELVET FUNERAL NOIRE — “THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME” 🇬🇧 ENGLAND
GOTHIC ROCK • POST-PUNK • DARKWAVE • DARK ROCK
Single Review
Review by Gordon Lawrence Taylor — Voice In The Void
Infectious Unease Radio • Subterranean Zone Radio
There are songs that announce themselves through spectacle, and there are others that arrive through atmosphere — slowly tightening their grip until the listener finds themselves inside the song rather than simply listening to it.
Velvet Funeral Noire — “THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME” belongs firmly to the second category.
Based in Blackpool, England, Velvet Funeral Noire describe themselves as a six-piece Goth Rock project. Manager Ace Vale submitted the track to Infectious Unease Radio and described it as part of the project’s movement toward a stronger Gothic Rock direction. Velvet Funeral Noire — THERE’S …
Velvet Funeral Noire’s public material describes a sound centred around the rough, raspy voice of NOK, atmospheric Post-Punk guitar textures, dark melodic bass and cinematic storytelling.
But even those descriptions only establish the outer framework.
“THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME” deserves to be examined entirely on its own terms.
Once its lyrics are taken into account, the song becomes considerably more than a dark piece of Gothic Rock. It becomes an exploration of emotional repression, masking, alienation, self-questioning, identity, damage, survival and ultimately the refusal to continue hiding simply to make somebody else comfortable.
That emotional journey is where the song finds its real power.
THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME
The title establishes the psychological territory immediately.
It does not say:
Something is wrong.
It says:
“There’s something wrong with me.”
That distinction is fundamental.
The unease has been internalised.
Whatever conflict exists in the outside world has been absorbed until the narrator begins looking inward and questioning themselves.
Then the opening lyric makes that experience painfully clear:
“There’s something wrong with me.
I learned to smile
When I should’ve screamed.”
That is a remarkable opening image.
Smiling and screaming are emotional opposites.
One makes everybody around you comfortable.
The other announces distress.
The narrator has learned to substitute the socially acceptable response for the authentic one.
They have learned concealment.
They have learned performance.
Perhaps most significantly, they have learned survival.
The following idea — learning to hide what nobody sees — extends that emotional division.
There is the person visible to everybody else.
And there is the person underneath.
EVERY BURIED THING STILL MAKES A SOUND
The first verse then delivers one of the strongest images in the song:
“I kept it quiet,
I kept it down,
But every buried thing
Still makes a sound.”
The Gothic imagery here is psychological rather than decorative.
Something has been buried.
Emotion.
Anger.
Fear.
Identity.
Pain.
Perhaps an entire part of the self.
But burial does not mean disappearance.
That is what makes “every buried thing still makes a sound” such an effective line.
Things forced beneath the surface remain present.
They move underneath.
They return.
Eventually they demand to be heard.
The song is already telling us that suppression cannot continue forever.
TRYING TO CHANGE YOURSELF
The language becomes more severe:
“I tried to kill it,
I tried to change,
But every time I ran
It knew my name.”
The narrator has moved beyond simply concealing part of themselves.
Now they are trying to destroy it.
Yet whatever this unwanted part is, it knows their name.
That phrase changes everything.
Something that knows your name is personal.
Intimate.
Connected to identity.
You can run away from a place.
You can leave another person.
You can escape a particular situation.
But escaping something that forms part of your own identity is another matter entirely.
It raises one of the song’s central questions:
Is something actually wrong with this person — or have they been taught to regard part of themselves as wrong?
The song does not provide an easy answer.
Nor should it.
THE SOUND OF UNEASE
The submitted recording runs approximately three minutes and forty seconds.
One of its strengths is the way it develops rather than revealing its entire weight immediately.
The song makes deliberate use of space.
Atmosphere is allowed to establish itself.
Textures build.
Pressure accumulates.
The recording gradually becomes more forceful as the emotional argument develops.
Rather than simply presenting verse, chorus, verse and chorus as mechanical structural units, the arrangement feels increasingly like psychological compression.
The atmosphere closes in.
And as it does, the title starts behaving almost like an obsessive internal thought:
There’s something wrong with me.
Again.
And again.
But every time those words return, their meaning changes slightly.
That becomes one of the smartest structural elements of the song.
GOTHIC ROCK AS PSYCHOLOGICAL SPACE
The track inhabits recognisable Gothic Rock, Post-Punk and Darkwave territory, but its strongest characteristic is not genre decoration.
It is mood.
Darkness alone is easy.
Blackness, shadow and theatrical presentation are not enough to give Gothic music emotional substance.
What matters is what exists inside the darkness.
Here there is tension.
Melancholy.
Isolation.
Unease.
But underneath those elements lies something considerably more important:
vulnerability.
That vulnerability prevents “THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME” from becoming merely theatrical.
The darkness has an emotional reason to exist.
The Gothic becomes psychological rather than decorative.
That point was central to the earlier review and remains important. Pasted text
THE CHORUS — THE MEANING STARTS TO CHANGE
Then comes:
“There’s something wrong with me,
And I don’t care anymore.
I’m done pretending.”
The title sounded like confession at the beginning.
Now it starts becoming defiance.
The narrator does not suddenly claim that everything is fine.
That would make the song much less interesting.
Instead, they begin rejecting the obligation to conceal themselves.
“I don’t care anymore.”
There is exhaustion in those words.
But there is also resistance.
Then:
“I’m done pretending.”
That is one of the song’s pivotal statements.
Pretending was the mechanism established in the first verse.
Smile when you should scream.
Keep everything quiet.
Keep everything down.
Hide.
Perform.
Now that mechanism begins breaking apart.
“I’M WHAT YOU CAME HERE FOR”
Then an unnamed you enters the lyric:
“I’m what you came here for.”
The song never explains exactly who that person is.
That ambiguity is important.
It could be intimate.
It could be personal.
It could represent several people rather than one.
It could even represent the wider outside world.
By leaving the identity unresolved, the song allows listeners to place their own experiences into that space.
The conflict therefore becomes larger than one specific relationship.
“YOU CAN SEE IT IN MY EYES”
Then:
“You can see it in my eyes.”