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REVIEWS
ATTN
MAGAZINE
Honeysuckle
Æons immediately sets itself
apart from Current 93’s recent
trilogy of revelatory works (Black
Ships Ate The Sky, Aleph At Hallucinatory
Mountain, Baalstorm; Sing Omega),
abandoning the ambitious and heavily
collaborative towers of sound and
shutting itself away in a quieter,
more introspective space. Sonically,
the focus of this new album is melody
and the minimal timbral vessels
that carry it – instead of
passing his initial composition
fragments around a wealth of different
personnel and building upon them,
David Tibet has left them comparatively
pure and untouched, placing his
streams of lyricism in the sparse
melodic company of piano, guitar
and organ.
It’s
a very strong start. “Moon”
is a haunting piano piece, encircled
by phantom Theremins that wail in
a mournful vibrato. Tibet traces
the melody to begin with, but his
voice trails off into a torrent
of his own thoughts, a bleak and
heartfelt voice granted its own
desolate space in which to reverberate.
“Persimmon” is more
measured and pensive in its delivery
but retains the piano core, and
Honeysuckle Æons seems to
be set upon a theme at this point,
coming across like a ghoulish, Theremin-laced
re-visitation of Soft Black Stars.
But
from here on in, the album states
its intent to explore elsewhere
– “Cuckoo” taps
into the ritual percussion and middle-eastern
oud found on Baalstorm; Sing Omega,
“Jasmine” sets out a
simple duet between Tibet and a
catchy organ loop, “Honeysuckle”
chirps like a deathly fairground
ride. Experimenting with different
sounds and moods is still high on
the C93 agenda, even if this occurs
within a less elaborate palette.
However,
Honeysuckle Æons starts to
struggle when some of Tibet’s
melody loops crumple under the harsh
light of intense focus, and this
seems to occur more frequently as
the album progresses into the second
half. “Sunflower” and
“Lily” spring to mind
in this respect, and while Tibet’s
vocal delivery strives to galvanise
these pieces with purpose, they’re
simply devoid of the strength to
withstand the relentless repetition
they’re placed under. This
is an inevitable danger when moving
from a saturated sonic landscape
and back into a “bare bones”
approach – these compositions
no longer have towering forts of
sound in which to hide and be strengthened.
But
on the whole, the album is refreshingly
concise – wiping away the
grand layers of sound and placing
Tibet’s words and melodies
squarely at the forefront again.
Lyrically, the imagery seems to
surge in thicker and faster than
before, rich in an impenetrable
ambiguity that tugs the mind in
several directions at once. It’s
nice to be quietly and unexplainably
stirred by Current 93’s music
in this manner. It doesn’t
knock you back with the direct velocity
of Aleph, or the panoramic scale
of Black Ships At The Sky, but,
like those ghoulish Theremins that
creep into view on many of these
tracks, Honeysuckle Æons haunts
you, beckoning you back with its
rich and unfathomable sense of intrigue.
BRAINWASHED
Considering this new album
has arrived so soon after David
Tibet had finished his Aleph trilogy,
it is not a shock to find that it
essentially continues from where
Baalstorm, Sing Omega left off.
However, where Baalstorm, Sing Omega
was vibrant and colorful like a
decadent religious feast bathed
in sunlight, Honeysuckle Æons
is a night album; the yawn of a
night sky speckled with stars and
celestial bodies. The rock excess
has dissipated and in its place
Tibet returns to the introspective
poet last encountered on Soft Black
Stars and Sleep Has His House.
This
introspection is not restricted
to Tibet, the sprawling cast that
was Current 93 of recent years has
been reduced to a handful of players.
Baby Dee returns to the piano stool,
her playing poised somewhere between
her usual music hall style and Maja
Elliott’s raven-like playing
on Soft Black Stars. As well as
piano, Dee also plays some terrific
organ on "Jasmine" and,
on "Honeysuckle," she
picks up on the carnival organ theme
explored briefly on the last album
(although with far less violence
this time). Dee’s piano is
paired with a mournful theremin,
Armen Ra operating the ghostly synth
with a control that is so often
absent from the instrument. The
theremin adds to the nocturnal atmosphere,
there is something pitch black about
its tone; it sounds like a gap between
the stars.
Baalstorm’s African and Middle
Eastern flavors are also reprised
as Eliot Bates makes a return appearance,
playing both melodies on the oud
and percussion on the bendir and
erbane. His gorgeous contributions
are enhanced by the inclusion of
the kalimba (played by Lisa Pizzighella).
There is a split running through
the songs on Honeysuckle Æons,
roughly half of the songs based
on the piano or organ and the rest
centered on the oud. At first, it
made Honeysuckle Æons feel
fractured, like two different albums
half made and half finished. Yet,
as I listen to it again and again
(and especially after dark), I realize
it all works together perfectly.
The organ and the traditional instruments
link together like the different
aspects of the faith explored by
Tibet in his lyrics; the more modern
rituals of Christianity linked back
to the original ideas seeded in
the Coptic texts that Tibet has
taken such inspiration from. This
linkage is helped by Andrew Liles'
treatments of the music and words
(subtle but there) and his job mixing
the album; as disparate as the piano
and oud-based songs could be, he
makes them feel like different sides
of the same instrument.
Looking more closely at the lyrics,
Tibet has taken the same ideas that
ran through the Aleph trilogy but
condenses them into an even more
apocryphal and apocalyptic tale.
Yet where there was drama and excitement
in the Aleph trilogy, here he brings
it back down to a personal and spiritual
oblivion ("Stripped back to
the real me"). His singing
reflects the music’s gentle
but insistent push; the screaming
and the shouting have given way
to realization and acceptance. That
is not to say that the eschatological
leaning of Tibet’s words is
gone, the album is peppered with
these references (everything from
the "Bloodface" of Black
Ships Ate the Sky to allusions to
Milton’s Paradise Lost). Now
these references seem to be almost
psychological, not the actual Armageddon
of this world but of Tibet’s
world.
This more sedate and solemn version
of Current 93 makes sense in the
context of the year that was for
Tibet. Change in the form of death,
both Sebastian Horsley and Peter
Christopherson’s passing left
their mark on Tibet, and in the
form of a new beginning as he embarks
on a new phase of his academic career
in Coptic studies. Events like these
make you take account of your life
in their own way and Tibet has put
these feelings into Honeysuckle
Æons rather than a diary.
Like Sleep Has His House was a requiem
for his father, Honeysuckle Æons
is a goodbye to lost friends and
a hello to the future. John Kealy
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