DOGS BLOOD RISING

Sounding unlike anything else in Current 93's discography, Dogs Blood Rising throws the listener into a nightmarish jagged edge soundtrack. I've heard a lot of people talking about evil music - albums that are supposed to be frightening, and most of the time what you encounter are melancholic droopy atmospheres which are as horrifying as a pack of black poodles. Woof!

This debut though will have you reaching for the light-switch in no time. I know, I've had several nightmares due to it. I often use music in the mornings to pull me out of bed - setting the timer on my stereo, and then slowly and comfortably awake to the soothing gentle touch of patterned sound. Having forgot about the cd changer in my old stereo system, this particular album sometimes acted as substitute for an alarm clock, although I wouldn't in a million years consciously dream of using it as such. No way in hell! The music had a ninja like way of sneaking into my dreams - terrorising and haunting me like an evil shadow you can't escape. Each time, I woke up completely soaked in sweat with flashing black dots in front of my eyes - desperately trying to remind myself about reality, life and sunshine.

The music itself is void of bass and guitars, which does conjure up a distinctive high pitched atmosphere, that evokes images of ancient bottomless Gothic churches with huge black holes in them that stretch all the way down to the place where demons and darkness dwell. Instead the sound spectrum is filled with strange embryonic tape loops, crashing cymbals, whispering witches on the wind and most importantly David Tibet's demonic vocals.

It's strange to think that this album just might be the most religion saturated one inside an enormous discography, yet at the same time fulfilling the role of being the single most devilish, evil and frightening of the lot. David Tibet sounds like a man who's personally spent a couple of weeks dangling on a cross with rusty nails through his wrists before laying down the vocal tracks. Imagine an absurd mix of Prodigy's Keith Flint and the utmost vile and rusty black metal screeching cobbled together into one bone-chilling affair - and you're not that far off. Somewhere between incantations and mad unchecked warnings from a religious hermit - you'll find this startling man. With a lyrical content that puts forth the horror and madness of the biblical texts, he illustrates what man has become in order to contain the animal side of him - though always lurking in the back of our minds like burning white embers.

Whether you choose to look at the cold and lifeless ambiance of the music, that more than anything resembles a soldier's march through fields of death and mud - or you face towards the raging vocals of Tibet - the counter-pointing effect of religion and fear, God and hell, man and animal, -is always there. Drawn like a fly to a wound, the feel of this record is the omnipresent soulless and bottomless pit. It's frightening yes - dissonant at times also, but aside from all of these less than sympathetic characteristics of Dogs Blood Rising, you have to give the band some respect for putting such a record out in the midst of the 80s. There was literally nothing out there that sounded remotely like this, and even today I struggle to find any other album that frightens me the way this one does. It is that scary. Feels like a long strange kiss from Vlad the Impaler, while sniffing in the smell of burning wild flowers.

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