DOGS BLOOD RISING

This is the kind of music I'm expecting to encounter in hell after I die... Bring it on, that's all I can say. Hell is where all the interesting people go!

'Dogs Blood Rising' is a guitar and bass free album but is very intense from the first notes right until the end. The opener 'Christus Christus (the Shells Have Cracked)' gives birth to something vile where Aleister Crowley tape loops are played at varying speeds and direction creating a kaleidoscopic effect.

'Falling Back in Fields of Rape' is a tune that both 'Current 93' and stable mates 'Death in June' occasionally re-visited, giving it a severe re-working on a number of occasions. This version is certainly the creepiest and peaks with some insane sounding vocals by 'Crass' front-man Steve Ignorant. Rose McDowall of 'Strawberry Switchblade' also contributes a spoken passage about 'falling from a helicopter' and other unlikely ways to die.

David Tibet sounds like the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada throughout with his high pitched shrieking which quite literally sounds like a hallucinatory nightmare. Just one look at him on the inner sleeve is enough to give you the heebie-jeebies.

To cheer myself up I think on little plastercine man 'Morph' from 'Take Hart'. He does, after-all, enormously resemble lead vocalist David Tibet.

This is very different in sound from almost all of their recordings from 1988 onwards. If you have a penchant for the morbid suffering of Christ and almost Satanic Mass-like lyrics, you'd do well to check out 'Dawn' and the well and truly terrifying 'Nature Unveiled' which took this sound as far as the genre could go.

One point is docked for the too live sounding 'Jesus Wept' which overstays its welcome by a good 5 minutes, although the manipulation of vocals through tapes from various sources are very impressive.

Unbelievably there's a cover version of Simon and Garfunkel's 'Scarborough Fair' to see us out. Needless to say, it's the polar opposite in atmosphere of the original.

The best thing about early Current 93 is that David Tibet doesn't yet sound like UK 90's astrologer 'Mystic Meg'. From that point on I went off them very quickly. 'Dog's Blood Rising' is however a fantastic album if you're in a misanthropic mood. If you're not you'll HATE THIS - guaranteed!

Black blood

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.

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.