Music is the medium of irrationalism, emotion and the spirit. Nothing else can so perfectly encompass all that incoherent bubbling stuff that lives just outside conscious naming. Music lets you be crazily and sensibly demented in a way that nothing approaches.
So it’s a bit spooky when someone puts that idea into a set of neatly typed lyrics and sings them rather seriously through some pleasant but essentially prosaic music.
My idea of mysteriously ritualised music would move towards SUNBURNED HAND OF THE MAN, or JOHN TAVERNER or HENRYK GORECKI. These New Wave ("Darkwave?") pieces on PETER ULRIC'S ambitious album sound much more formal, and much safer, like mediaeval church music or zen temple music.
Opening with Spanish guitar in a lutish Henry VIII sort of mode, we are quickly introduced to PETER ULRIC's rather ponderous intoning voice. There are other real voices and instruments – plus a lot of very familiar MIDI Oohs and Ahhs and other synth intrusions. As the album proceeds there is a diversity of colour and texture– principally with a medieval or exotic feel – recorders, tambours, zithers and so on. A bit twee, to be honest. And it could almost be a Monty Python piss take at times. The Knights Who say Nee are never far away, and even the Moorish and Japanese tones that come and go seem to be carefully assimilated rather than surrendered to.
Track 3 "Shewstone" has some nice dissonant pipes, "Nothing But the Way" has some impressively heavy drum noises. But it is very tamed and very disciplined. It does sound as though it was put together with a computer doing a lot of organising. The wildness and abandon that is implied is consistently denied. The sacrifice, the superstition, the pilgrimage and the walking on coals are mild frissons for suburbanites, no more.
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Gongs, wooden blocks, flutes .. the range of instruments grows as the album proceeds.. But always in the same tightly structured pieces with the same passionless words and colourless poetry. And I can’t help thinking of film scores for not very serious things – if not Python, then maybe Indiana Jones. I want to get lost in it, but I get the giggles.
I think you would have to be a very self absorbed and seriously worried young goth to immerse yourself in these shallow pools. The major world religions (just pick one) all have better poetry, better music and more convincing theology than this home crafted crystals and pentagram stuff. But I'm in no doubt that it will seem like a profound starting point for some listeners. I'm just guessing that they don't read Whisperin and Hollerin, because I wouldn’t want to put them off.
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