DOGS BLOOD RISING

David Tibet followed up the epochal Nature Unveiled with this attempt to craft the early Current 93 sound into things resembling songs. A quirky range of influences is unveiled, with T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land being one of them (little voices interject here and there with bits of the poem or other similar-sounding phrases, much like the poem itself is written to suggest a babble of different voices speaking) and from a more unexpected direction, Simon & Garfunkel. (Specifically, "St. Peters Keys All Bloody" is an avant-industrial cover of "Sound of Silence".)

The centrepiece of the album is Falling Back In Fields of Rape, a prose-poem set to a dark industrial backing first recited by Steve Ignorant of anarcho-punk band Crass before we hear it recited by a child. A catalogue of horrors inflicted during wartime and dictatorship of all flavours ("fields of rape" being a double meaning for the rape-seed crop and... well. you've probably guessed the other meaning), the composition is a major thematic keystone of David Tibet's work, with snippets of the text appearing elsewhere in his work frequently. A portion of the lyrics became the words to a very different rendition from Death In June on the Nada! album, for instance, and the repeated refrain "In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land" (which far from distancing us from the atrocities makes us question whether they are really that foreign) would lend its name to a collaboration with famed horror author Thomas Ligotti over a decade later.

Whilst not quite the unflinchingly uncompromising vision that Nature Unveiled was, Dogs Blood Rising is still very dark territory indeed, but one which needs to be explored by those who wish to really unpick what was going on with David Tibet in the early 1980s.