indarknessletmedwell
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(4/1/04 6:27 pm)
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All Music Guide Reviews
The following reviews are taken from the website www.allmusic.com - the copyright belongs to AEC One Stop Group. Please visit the All Music site for more information.
NATURE UNVEILED:
Elegant Gregorian chants and cut-and-paste environmental recordings provide a bed for the muddy, disturbing gothic folk on this collection of Tibet's early-'80s recordings. — John Bush
DOGS BLOOD RISING:
Having established his art on initial releases, Tibet makes a stunning declaration of purpose on Dogs Blood Rising, one of the most frightening, nerve-wracking records ever released. Interspersing quicker tracks and two lengthy evocations of destruction, Dogs Blood shows Tibet and his collaborators — including, as always, Stapleton — combining everything from invocations of Yukio Mishima to Christianity in a harrowing blend. Opening track "Christus Christus" sets the tone with its heavily flanged and looped vocals, chanting the title over and over again against a wash of sound, but it's the following track, "Falling Back in Fields of Rape," which truly begins to set this album apart. With guest vocals courtesy of Crass singer Steve Ignorant, who recites lyrics clearly meant to play on both senses of the word 'rape,' everything from recurrent chants of "War!" and other choral moans and varying percussion to heavily treated musical snippets and fragments loops, builds and fades throughout the mix. When a young girl's voice takes over the main lyrics after a snippet of a nursery rhyme is sung, the sheer sense of creepout grows even higher. It's even further intensified as Ignorant's rasping shouts of the main lyric start floating up through the mix like a mantra from hell. "From Broken Cross, Locusts" provides a semi-respite in ways, but only just, chanting from Tibet and others floating low in the mix as a recurrent, strange drum loop sets the overall pace before a sudden, frazzled ending. "Raio No Terrasu (Jesus Wept)" ratchets up everything to the level of apocalypse — the music doesn't pound and explode, but the ever-more pained, wailed voices chanting the title phrase or other similarly disturbed lines, or simply calling and keening unintelligibly, becomes a disturbing, fractured and tape-treated collage of sound. "St. Peters Keys All Bloody" concludes the album on a perversely calm note, with Tibet speaking in a snarl, then softly singing "The Sounds of Silence" and "Scarborough Fair" by Simon and Garfunkel. It's a chilling coda to a striking album. — Ned Raggett
IMPERIUM:
If Current 93 was darkly difficult before — all scarred industrial landscapes, ticker-tape percussion, and Gregorian goth-folk — there was no longer any doubt where the band stood after Imperium's release. With four dissolving, soundtrack-ish introductory title tracks taken to varying levels of old seer, spoken word, and slasher techno, the album's impact largely relied on the listener's acceptance of experimental repetition. It could be unreal and disconcerting, much like Mark Spybey and Mick Harris' successful Bad Roads Young Drivers, just as it could be irritatingly, compositionally oblique. By this point, it was too early to tell if Imperium was a fitting end to a phase or the start of a sharp, steep decline. — Dean Carlson
ALL THE PRETTY LITTLE HORSES:
A central figure in the British post-industrial "esoteric" movement (Nurse With Wound, Coil, Death in June), David Tibet, after a brief stint with Genesis P-Orridge's Psychic TV, formed Current 93 (essentially his solo project, but more often than not the result of intensive collaboration with Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton) in the early '80s. After a series of apocalyptic and often disturbing albums, Tibet discovered the music of English folksinger Shirley Collins in the early '90s; since then his output has become more overtly lyrical and folk-inflected, though still shot through with heavy doses of eschatological imagery and Blakean mysticism. "All the Pretty Horses," which Tibet describes as a personal favorite, features guest appearances from Coil's John Balance and Nick Cave, and Stapleton's surrealistic tape manipulations are once more to the fore, transforming what would be reasonably normal folk guitar stylings into strangely queasy pitch-shifted nightmares. Tibet's texts are clearly enunciated (and reproduced in the CD booklet) and the album is beautifully structured to build to a shattering climax with the terrifying disembodied voices of "Twilight Twilight Nihil Nihil" and "The Inmost Light Itself," after which Nick Cave's reprise of the title track, which might seem maudlin out of context, makes perfect sense. Cave also reads the text (from the Pensées of Blaise Pascal) on the closing "Patripassian," built over a reverberant loop of English 16th century choral music, another one of Tibet's passions. — Dan Warburton
BRIGHT YELLOW MOON:
Two of the U.K.'s most enigmatic goth/post-industrial groups, David Tibet's Current 93 and Steven Stapleton's Nurse With Wound, have simultaneously shunned and defined genres in their respective projects. The groups have evidently worked together in the past, but this release is the first official, and inevitable, collaboration between the two projects under their combined names. Stapleton is responsible for inventing British industrial, experimental noise, working nearly exclusively under the Nurse With Wound banner, while Tibet has played with everyone from Death in June to 23 Skidoo and Psychic TV. The pair created this album based on lyrics written by Tibet while in a hospital as he recovered from a nearly fatal appendix disease; subsequent hallucinations and visions of death inspired the text for Bright Yellow Moon. There are great moments of Tibet's "apocalyptic folk" and passages with striking similarities to NWW's Homotopy to Marie, yet the collaboration unfortunately doesn't quite gel into the musical tension one would expect from the duo. Passages of spoken word from Tibet break things up, lending the album little more than a sporadic fractured mixture of ideas. The outstanding highlight is "Mothering Sunday (Legion Legion)," which is an astonishing sound collage recalling the musique concrète of Iannis Xenakis. This piece is followed by "Nichts," an acoustic piece reflective of the British folk revival evidently dear to Tibet; in all its bleak droning, the piece recalls the devastating sadness of Shirley Collins and Bert Jansch. Tibet's rumination on the futility of human existence becomes a little bit heavy-handed and hard to swallow after a while; nonetheless, the album is a great late-night loner album even if it is a little substandard for what listeners could expect from two overlooked geniuses. — Skip Jansen
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