Albums: The New Despair, The Tragic Treasury, New Despair EP

The Gothic Archies are a novelty band featuring Stephin Merritt, more famously of The Magnetic Fields (a band which Lemony Snicket's literary and social representative, Daniel Handler, is also occasionally involved in). The name is a pun on Gothic Arch (see: Gothic architecture) and The Archies. They released one EP in 1997 entitled "The New Despair" which was essentially a half-serious satire of goth music, including songs like "Your Long White Fingers" and "The Abandoned Castle of My Soul".

The band has more recently begun to receive a bit more prominence from performing the theme music for the audiobook versions of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, as well as Neil Gaiman's Coraline. One song is recorded for each of the thirteen books, and all thirteen songs (plus two extras) were released on an album, The Tragic Treasury, on October 10th, 2006. There are thirteen books in the series.

The music, like the writing in the books themselves, is hilariously exaggerated, including lines such as "How I pray for death to begin / when you play the violin" and "Some people act as if there were nothing wrong, / due to the fact they haven't heard this song". Each song's lyrics naturally have something to do with the story itself, and are often implicitly written in the voice of one of the corresponding book's characters. For example, "The World Is a Very Scary Place" is probably "sung" by Aunt Josephine, while "When You Play the Violin" is clearly in the voice of one of the book's five orphans.

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