| |
|
Swastikas for Noddy's certainly a classic, and is very good indeed (especially for Tibet singing Strawberry Switchblade's Since Yesterday with Rose on guitar) but if you're a fan of his lyrics, it's not so hot as quite a lot of it is (bloody good) arrangements of traditional songs. The track The Final Church, though, is for me one of his best uses of Maldoror in a song, being mostly a large chunk of the text tweaked a bit to fit the music.
Thunder Perfect Mind is also fab; but I'd say All The Pretty Little Horses is better, while being in a similar vein (and has a guest appearance from Nick Cave, too).
More recently (well, relatively recently) Soft Black Stars is fab- very minimal, largely just Tibet and a piano; and Sleep Has His House is gorgeous- hormonium-based for the most part, and really quite lovely.
If you want the spooky soundscapes, you could do a lot worse than his Thomas Ligotti collaborations, In A Foreign Land, In A Foreign Town (which comes with four Ligotti stories) or the just plain scariness of I Have A Special Plan For This World, in which he reads a Ligotti text over some quite fucked, but very minimal, electronics.
And somewhere in between is the C93/NWW album Bright Yellow Moon, which manages to combine the best of 93's sound with some of (to my mind) Stapleton's best fucking with sound on record. It deals with his (GM-like) near-death "religious" experience, and is all the more affecting for that.
For completists only is The Great In The Small, which is basically everything C93 have ever recorded all played simultaneously, mixed together by Stapleton.
And the live album Cats Drunk On Copper is probably my most-listened to C93 thing, containing as it does the vast majority of my favourite stuff, including an extended section from Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre, possibly my favourite 93 album ever, as well as a wicked rendition of Horse.
Be warned, though- if you want to try to get hold of originals (which I would recommend- the sleeve artwork is never less than beautiful) you may have a job- the recent collapse of World Serpent has left the majority of C93, NWW, Coil etc stuff in the position of "increasingly hard to find". |
|
|
