CROOKED CROSSES FOR THE NODDING GOD

Current 93's Swastikas for Noddy had gone for an incredibly sparse, stripped-back production style, perhaps the barest and starkest release the band had put out up to that point. Much of the audio wizardry on previous Current 93 had come from the hand of Stephen Stapledon, the man behind Nurse With Wound, and whose presence was barely felt on Swastikas aside from some cello contributions.

For Crooked Crosses, David Tibet and Stapledon absolutely run riot on Swastikas, remixing parts, reconfiguring others, and outright rerecording some bits. The end results are remarkably transformative. Some of the tracks - typically the more traditional songs - are not changed that much, but gain a very different atmosphere with the textures that Tibet and Stapledon add. (Their cover of Blue Oyster Cult's This Ain't the Summer of Love - retitled The Summer Past here - gains some of the blood and thunder of the BOC original, for instance, and their tribute to Bobby Beausoleil, whilst still repetitive, is a bit less irritating than it was). Other parts, however, are radically transformed; for instance, Tibet seems to distance himself a bit from the rabid Social Darwinism espoused by Boyd Rice in his little speech on Swastikas for Noddy by truncating it greatly and turned it into the distantly-heard snippet "From Boyd's Bunker".

On balance, I think this is an interesting experiment in taking some very bare-bones raw ingredients and cooking something spicier out of them, and I'd give this a solid extra half-star over its predecessor.