Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Team Sleep [Enhanced] by Team Sleep

Team Sleep are the band that the Deftones' frontman, Chino Moreno, has spent much of the time since White Pony working with, and this marks their debut.  Each of the band members has enjoyed some success elsewhere, but it is undoubtedly the case that Moreno is the driving force, the star, and the main creative influence.

But this is not a Deftones album. Like an author using a nom-de-plume, Moreno made this record as a side project for a reason. There are a couple of tracks that verge into Deftones territory,mainly along the lines of gentler tracks, like Minerva or Passenger, although not quite as powerful.

But this is a wide-ranging piece of work, sometimes leaving metal entirely behind and ranging into electronic-influenced and indie sounds. At one point, I had to check the cover notes, convinced that Moreno was collaborating with Belle and Sebastian (of course, he wasn't). At another, the bass-line and vocals are heavily - and enjoyably - reminiscent of The Cure (whose "If Only Tonight We Could Sleep" was covered so perfectly by the Deftones). Make no mistake, though: influences might be there, but this album is anything but derivative.

A comparison would be between the work of Keenan in Tool and A Perfect Circle, or between McCoy in the Fields of the Nephilim and Nefilim: there is a clear common thread, but the delivery is wider and at times you feel the band are finding their feet in a new medium.

Ataraxia, the opening track, is a brilliantly-chosen opener. It sets mood and expectations, and the listener embarks upon the later tracks wanting to like what they will hear.  I really can't stress how good a song it is.  Like Passenger on White Pony, it is the sort of track that just about justifies the purchase price by itself.  The rest of the album is wide-ranging, and this experimentalism does mean that there will be both more and less satisfying tracks for almost any individual listener.

Approaching this album merely as a piece of left-field metal/indie music, I enjoyed it rather a lot. But a Deftones fan expecting more of the same? The odds are that they would find something they like - I find it hard to believe that anyone can dislike track one - but some tracks will get skipped a lot.

I'll go out on a limb: I honestly can't see Team Sleep developing the way that A Perfect Circle did for Moreno's friend Keenan.  For one thing, the Deftones are still extant, and thus Moreno won't have two years to blow on the next album.  For another, this album doesn't have the rich consistency of Mer de Noms.  But it's a worthwhile experiment.  No, it's a worthwhile series of experiments, on one album.

You'll waken the lazy sunbathers

If you want to see how lazy games writers on the web are in sourcing stories, there was a perfect example this week.

On January 26th, Zonk posted a non-story  on Slashdot about John Smedley, producer at Star Wars Galaxies, releasing an open letter to SWG users on the subject of the NGE update.

The problem is that the letter was posted to the official website in 2005.  November 2005.

But the lazy writers, story-hungry at all the games websites cared not a jot.  They didn't read the post themselves, nor even look at the date of it.  They just cut-and-pasted from Slashdot.  This is something that has been on the increase for a couple of years now, but here we have the absolute worst example I've yet seen.

So we have Eurogamer, Boomtown, Gamasutra, Ve3d aand others all posting the same story, with the same quotes, within 48 hours of the Slashdot original.  The fact checking dip-switch being set to the '0' position.

Shhh.. or you'll waken the lazy sunbathers

Taking The Victim As You Find Them

File this one under "why the Scottish legal system is better than the English one."

In Yorkshire, a group of teenaged girls, of the repugnant bullying variety that end up pregnant by 15 [Edit: it turns out that one of them has done exactly this] and living off us taxpayers for the rest of their miserable and pointless lives, decided that they would physically attack another girl.  This girl, a fifteen year-old called Aimee Wellock, suffered from an undiscovered heart defect, and died as a result of the attack.  Originally convicted of manslaughter, the attackers have just had their convictions quashed, since in English law it was the heart defect and not the actual attacks that lead to death.

Well, in Scotland we know causality when we see it.  Were these barely-bipedal vermin to have committed their crime in Scotland, they would have ended up doing several years for culpable homicide (the Scottish equivalent of manslaughter).  Here, we have a principle, first established in a similar case of attack followed by heart failure, which covers exactly this.  You are said to take the victim as you find them.  England might take a lead on this one.

You keep using that word...

I am a pedant.  And proud of it.  And no, you lot in the burger-eating, sink-estate lynch mob in the corner, pedantry has nothing to do with children.

Today's pedantic outburst, the use of which has been gnawing at me for a couple of years now, is the word "trope".

In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya: "you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

The cause of my rage finally boiling over takes the unlikely, and insubstantial, form of Tycho from Penny Arcade.  He uses the word "trope", in today's posting, in the classic abuse thereof: meaning a frequently-used sequence or theme in comics or cartoons.  An example of this incorrect usage would include its use to describe a character running off a cliff, coming to a halt in mid-air, turning to cameras, gulping, and suddenly plummeting downwards out of shot.  If a hat can be left behind for a second, and a directly-downwards shot can then show a small puff of dust miles below at the base of the cliff, so much the better.

That is not an example of a trope.  A trope is simply the non-literal use of a word or phrase.  In other words, using a word in such a way as to enhance, alter, or even reverse the normal meaning of that word or phrase.  If I was to "dance around the subject" of tropes, that would itself be a trope: metaphors are types of tropes.  If I talked of having to be "cruel to be kind", then that - an oxymoron - would be a trope.  If I said that I found Tycho's writing to be "not unpleasant" then that - as well as being an understatement - would be a trope ( in their litotes guise).

The word is particularly abused by followers of that accursed religion, critical theory.  They use it to sound clever, and the best that we can say is that they are using it as a trope in and of itself: a figurative and non-literal use of the word "trope".  A meta-trope, as it were.  Just between ourselves, I suspect that they'd probably rather like that.

But tropes are nothing gnostic, nor are they the exclusive property of those who abuse the term.  We all use tropes, all the time.  Puns are tropes.  Similes are tropes.  A paradox, properly expressed, is a trope, as is a euphemism.  Irony and hyperbole and even, sometimes, onomatopoeia are all forms of tropes.

I suppose that I should be awfully predictable and finish this off, self-referentially, with a trope.  But I refuse to go gilding any lilies.

Praising Kamm's Indefatigability

Sometimes, you read something that reveals just how subtle and incisive a weapon the English language can be, in the right hands.  This paragraph, from Oliver Kamm's blog, in which he describes debating George Galloway's antics in "Celebrity" Big Brother with John Rees, national Secretary of Galloway's "party", is the sine qua non of damning with faint praise.  It combines hilarious wit with a series of gloriously precise criticisms.

I expressed sympathy for Rees for coming on the programme when his party had previously condemned Big Brother as 'sewer-dredgingly awful', and I said that Galloway's appearance had the merit of not being the least creditable thing or most egregious debasement of public office he had done. After George travelled to Damascus last July to tell the Syrian people, who had had no say in the matter, how fortunate they were to have Bashar al-Assad as their leader, there were few ways open to him to lose his dignity further, and he at least showed imagination in finding one of them.

Tiddles the MP

I am pleased that Tiddles, aka George Galloway M.P. has avoided eviction for another week.  The longer he stays in there, the higher approval for the liberation of Iraq will rise.  But I cannot wait for his return to the House of Commons.  Always a rare event, given his abysmal attendance figures, this one will surely be made extra-special by the chorus of meows by which he will be greeted from both sides of the floor.

Check Dumbledore's Criminal Record

By way of a diverting passtime, the popular press likes, every year or so, to play a game called "work the lower orders into a lynch-mob frenzy over paedophiles."  It's not a difficult game - in fact, they have never yet lost - but it keeps the editorial staff amused.  Thus, we have the usual mobs roaming the worse type of housing estates, daubing paint on the doors of paediatricians and generally making an argument for water cannon and tasers. Now, if the red-top papers are to believed, our schools are currently nothing better than dating agencies for kiddy-fiddlers, with hardly a classroom not occupied by a malicious deviant in a cordouroy jacket with patched elbows scheming to make G.G.Simmons in 2b his personal love-toy.  A bit like Belgium in miniature, then.

It's an easy sell: since most of us have more than a few moral blots on our character, we welcome the chance to throw stones at someone "unarguably" worse than ourselves.  You may beat your wife after a drink, but at least you ain't a nonce.  You might be claiming unemployment benefit from three addresses, or have beaten some bloke unconscious outside the Rat and Parrot at the weekend, or make your living selling pills out back of the Venue, but you ain't no beast.

I am amazed that the British government has, for thirty-odd years, been sensible enough to have a policy where a conviction for sexual offences does not automatically mean a ban for life on teaching.  I mean that: amazed.  It shows a liberality (stop it, Americans, your version of "liberal" is different from everyone else) of mind and a foolish willingness to touch the third rail that might run to bravery if I thought they ever really considered the consequences of making the call on individual cases themselves.  Obviously, no civil servant ever said to them "what a courageous decision, minister."

Clearly, the policy has been a success, too.  If any teachers had gone on to abuse those in their care after such a ministerial decision to allow them to work in schools, then you can bet we'd know about it: the papers will have been hunting through their archives for any sniff of recidivism.

I'm not saying those with convictions for child abuse should be allowed to work in schools. But what about someone who has been convicted for, say, the Gillian Taylforth offence of being caught dispensing favours to her boyfriend in a car.  These days, you'd be on the sex offenders' register.  But is such a woman a danger to kids?   Hardly.  Similarly, a man caught in a public toilets having sex with another man - I gather it is a popular passtime in some areas - may be in less trouble than a decade ago, but he's still going to get a conviction for a sexual offence and go on the register.  Does this mean that his tastes suddenly extend from closeted, middle-aged salesmen called Kevin to little Jennings of the lower third?

And even an offence for having sex with someone under age is not a rock-solid predictor.  When I was fifteen, most of the girls in my class seemed to be going out with seventeen or eighteen year-old blokes.  No wonder, given the maturity of the average fifteen-year-old boy.  Many of those girls had sex, although not as many as would do these days.  That would be enough to get the seventeen-year-olds in question, if caught, hauled off to chokey and landed with - at the very least - a caution for sex with a minor.  End of teaching career?  Even if, as is sometimes the case (and not a million miles away from one of the current tabloid cause celebres), they go on to get married, grow old and have kids together?

Hard cases make bad law.  The irresponsibility of the tabloids is understandable: they are malignant gossip-pimps for stupid people.  But the Conservatives and Liberals should, if the first had principles and the second a sober leader, be standing alongside Ruth Kelly and supporting her on the general principle, if not on specific cases.  But nobody ever won an election by honesty, let alone by taking a complicated position.  In fact, merely suggesting that the issue might not be quite such a manichean one is enough to put a dent in your career.  So the Daily Star- next to the Daily mail, the worst of all the hate-mongering rags - can continue printing condemnations of intelligent discussion of the topic alongside pictures of a fifteen-year-old singer's breasts.

Outage Explanations

Cover Versions Geekery

I was going to call this post "Tedious Music Geek musings" but felt that might not bring the google hits pouring in.

Grandmaster Mark, who irresponsibly doesn't have a blog to link to, sent me the url of this piece in the Daily Telegraph, purporting to be a list of the fifty greatest ever cover versions.

As he knows, I have something of a penchant for the genre myself, and have hundreds of the little devils.  I cannot, therefore, help but offer an opinion.

Of those in the list (and I have a fair chunk of them myself) I have to agree with the Happy Mondays' Step On, The Wedding Present's Come Up and See Me,  Tricky's Black Steel (In the Hour of Chaos) and Siouxsie and the Banshees' Dear Prudence.  The latter in particular has been covered very, very often (cf. Our Lady Peace) , but the Banshees' version (with Robert Smith on guitar and vaguely visible, poncing around in the video) is superb.

For Jolene, I prefer the versions by either Queen Adreena or The Sisters of Mercy to the one cited.  Queen Adreena's version is threatening and seductive.  The Sisters' (which they performed live many times, from their earliest days) is the highest of arch-Camp.  Excepting possibly their version of Abba's Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight).

Cowboy Junkies' cover versions would be better represented by their take on Blue Moon, IMHO, just as Johnny Cash doing Nine Inch Nails' Hurt was far more successful and challenging than the Times' choice of U2's One, which isn't really a huge stretch in style for him.  Hearing Johnny Cash turn a piece of techno-minimalist industrial music into a melodic and haunting love song is touching enough, even without the video, one of the most beautiful I have seen.  His recording of Nick Cave's The Mercy Seat makes that song sound as if it were written specifically for him.

And Rocket Man's definitive cover is by William Shatner.  Who should, in rather more seriousness, be in there with Joe Jackson for theor collaboration on Pulp's Common People.

And in case you're interested, my top 50 would also have to include:

• A Perfect Circle's take on Imagine, which takes Lennon's overplayed, over-familiar and (he admitted) over-orchestrated, original and makes it new and listenable.  Their cover of The Fiddle and the Drum, by Joni Mitchell, was even more stripped down (performed a cappella), and almost tricked me into pacifism for a few seconds.
• Snake River Consipiracy - doing the Cure's Lovesong far better than the original, which was the weak spot on "Disintegration".  Their version of How Soon Is Now is an excellent also-ran.
• I wish I could find what I did with the acoustic cover of F*** da Police that Popbitch linked to.  It is up there.
• The Deftones, for their live cover of If Only Tonight We Could Sleep.  I'll stop including Cure covers at this point, of which I own enough to require a 64-bit int data type for storage.  The Deftones' cover of Duran Duran's The Chauffeur is just played too close to the original, even down to the timbre of the Moreno's voice.
• Alanis Morissette performing Black Hole Sun, although I suspect a song this great would sound good even if covered by the Vengaboys.
• Rolf Harris doing Stairway to Heaven.  And yes, I am serious.  Interestingly, he had never heard the track before he recorded it, asking only for the sheet music to be sent to him.
• Dinosaur Jr.'s cover of Temple of Love.  I would have chosen their take on Just Like Heaven, but for my self-imposed rule re no more Cure covers. They really have fun with Temple of Love, down to their little additional chorusette of:

"Goth goth goth goth goth goth goth goth goth,
"Goth goth goth goth goth goth goth goth goth,
"Black black black black black black black black black,
"Black black black black black black black black black black black black (blacker still)."

• The Beatles' Twist and Shout, from the live Hamburg sessions. They ieave the Isley Brothers' version seeming rather static in comparison.
• Kirsty McColl's version of Billy Bragg's A New England, even though the original still wins by a wide margin.
• Tori Amos and her dark, truly disturbing take on Slayer's Raining Blood
• Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine  - The Impossible Dream.  If ever there was a jarringly different song on an album it was this closer.  Played admirably straight.
• The Revolting Cocks - Do Ya Think I'm Sexy.  Rod Stewart should hide in shame: this cover reveals that what he made into a revolting travesty of the musical form was, in fact,  a potentially great track.  That said, I'm all in favour of Rod Stewart hiding in shame on a more general level.
• Ian Brown, whether for Billie Jean or Thriller.  Again, the cover versions make the originals seem embarassingly poor treatments of the compositions by comparison.  That said, I still want someone to cover one of Brown's other tracks, changing the lyrics to "If dolphins were monkeys|They'd fall out of the trees...".  If dolphins were monkeys, Ian, they'd just be monkeys.  Maybe, at best, bottlenosed monkeys.
• There have been many good covers of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart.  The Cure's was good, but I think The Swans did the best one, back in '88 or so.
• The Lemonheads' cover of Mrs Robinson was fun, light-hearted, if a little too faithful.  I prefer something that puts a new spin on a track. But it is definitely skifflicious.
• Marilyn Manson does some good covers, not least a version of Gloria Jones' Tainted Love that I much prefer to the Soft Cell one (that the Times preferred), and an excellent take on Patti Smith's Rock'n'Roll Ni**er (edited for the sake of making safe for work links), back on the deliberately obscurantist Smells Like Children.  But they deservedly broke through with Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), which is another cover that suddenly reveals something that was there but less prominent about the original: in this case just how menacing the Eurythmics' lyric really was.  An uncompromisingly goth version of Tainted Love, in my anything but humble opinion, was done better by Skinny Puppy.
• Citizen Dick - Touch Me I'm Dick, from the film Singles.  Citizen Dick were, of course, mainly made up of Pearl Jam members, and the song was a pretty straight-faced cover of Mudhoney's classic Touch me I'm Sick.
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' relentlessly dark and repulsively brutal cover of the old standard Stagger Lee.  Better, even, than the Grateful Dead's version, which is saying something.  I just hope he didn't kiss Kylie with that mouth.
• Blue Monday is another track, like Imagine, that I have heard too often to really enjoy, at least when sober.  But Orgy's reworking of it, complete with an alteration to the end of the "I thought I was mistaken" line, transposing it into a major mode by raising the final note by a semitone, is inspired, and changes the feel of the whole song.

Attack of the Hideous Orange Man

In the Ukraine, orange is the colour of the "Orange Revolution"*.  Here in Britain, it is the colour of Gorgeous George Galloway M.P.: narcissist and loony...  Oh, and big fan of Saddam Hussein, to whom he said, in 1994: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability."  It should be noted that he later said he meant courageous, strong and indefatigable in a bad way.

So what is this member of the Mother of Parliaments doing in the Celebrity Big Brother household?!?  Well...  it's actually rather in character.  Listen, gentle reader, while I tell the tale of Jinky George Galloway, terror of the Charity Commission and friend of dictators.

Lately, he has been known as the Honourable Member for Baghdad Central, but he kicked off his career amongst the arabs of Dundee, which in the 1960s and 70s was the Newark or South-Side Chicago of Scotland.  Corruption was rife amongst politicians, police, business.. even the fire service.  I used to listen to the tales of one of the protagonists in awe and wonder.  I am not saying for one moment that the extremely litigious George Galloway was in any way involved in all that stuff: there is every chance, I suppose, that he was the innocent and upstanding Gary Cooper figure amidst the graft.  By complete coincidence, however, I believe that it was during his Dundee period that he became General Secretary of War on Want.  By further coincidence it was bankrupted, doubtless nothing to do with George's tens of thousands of pounds' worth of luxury hotel stays and the Charity Commission's findings that for the last three years of his term the charity was insolvent.

The rest you probably know: the unpopularity with his consitituency parties and the 12th poorest voting and speaking record of any MP in parliament (of those below him, the Speaker and his deputies cannot vote, the five Sinn Fein members refuse to attend, and two others died shortly afterwards).  He was expelled from Labour for urging insurgents to attack British soldiers, and urging the latter to mutiny.  He is a self-confessed Stalinist who supported gay rights only until Islamicist money was on offer, when he executed a prompt volte-face.

And there is the ongoing fandango over just how much money he made, directly or indirectly, from Saddam Hussein and the oil sanctions regime.  Not to mention the shady affair of the Mariam Appeal: another Galloway charity which paid for his flights and hotels, and which never produced accounts and avoided oversight by not registering as a charity.

Oh, I could go on.  but you get the point.  He is popularist, opportunist, as right-wing as he claims to be left-wing, ridiculous, sad, smart, self-obssessed, oratorically gifted, an admirer of dictators and a failure in all he does.  He is today's Oswald Mosley.  He is a narcissist of the worst sort.

And now he is on Celebrity Big Brother, apparently uncertain whether he is more attracted to Jodie Marsh, Faria Alam or Dennis Rodman.  His take of the profits is giong to Interpal, his nominated charity, for whom, of course, he has done work.  He is doing a good job of bringing the democratic institutions that he as a Stalinist loathes into disrepute.  His constituents, who no longer have a representative in Parliament now that he is in the BB house, have been demonstrating. 

I am too depressed to go on.  In wouldn't happen in the US, surely?  No Senator - surely not even a Congressman - would submit himself to this sort of ongoing public ridicule.  Even the French have retained a bit of gravitas amidst the anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism of their political culture.

His constituents need not bother themselves to demonstrate too loudly: he is up for eviction already, and surely his time is short, even when up against Ms Marsh.  I only hope that, before he goes, he salutes Dennis Rodman for his courage, his strength, his indefatigability...

------

*OK, in the western Ukraine.  Rather less popular in the ethnically Russian bits.

Defending the Horde

To tide us over the Christmas period, Edward Castranova posted a proclamation of damnatio memoriae upon those of us who play Horde characters in World of Warcraft, claiming - the provocative little tinker - that it is a morally loaded choice, which is revealing of the "personal integrity" of those who chose it.  As was no doubt intended, the comments poured in as they haven't done since Timothy Burke's Order 66 SWG post.

Anyhow, his arguments seem to amount to the following:

• Orcs, trolls and undead are traditionally evil.  Blizzard cannot change their meaning
• Orcs value warfare and power; humans (in-game) have children and charitable giving.
• His three-year-old son was afraid of his undead character and the Undercity.  He makes clear that this was purely on the basis of appearances and imagery.  No children were exposed to cannibalism in the making of this post.
• The MMO-uninitiated will tend to read into the avatar choices of public figures approval of the racially-defined activities of their avatars.

Re the last point, I agree.  Good point.  But that just means that people finding themselves in the quandary Castranova describes should "present" as nice Alliance types, and preferably not as naughty night-elf females.

Now, I am 100% behind Castranova when he talks about the reality and importance of ethical choices in the pursuit of research.  No positivist I!  It is refreshing - although not as uncommon as a decade ago - to find a professional academic brave enough to post on the possibility of objectively evil acts.  I think that he is quite right that moral choices can be made within a gamespace, whether that be in WoW or in Risk (both his own examples).

But I cannot help but think that Ted has chosen the wrong battlefield on which to fight.  In particular, I disagree with the idea that an author cannot divorce the moral framework in which his creations act from the traditional prejudices of others towards that group (I am deliberately not describing orcs or others as races in this case... that would be a cheap debating trick).  If Blizzard want to make Orcs into graphical shorthands for late dark-age anglosaxons, with the warrior-outlook of thegns, then that is their choice.  And the jarring effect of using the term orc, used almost as an explicit anthimeria, is a useful dramatic tool.  Without an author's ability to surprise us with unconventional representations, we would not have Drizzt Do'Urden, Worf, most vampires or a variety of other, equally horrible genre-fiction characters.  Tony Soprano: there's a better example.  Of course, it's a lazy tool, at times, and over-used.  You cannot watch a 1940s western or 1930s Tarzan movie without the "noble savage" character making an appearance.  But the fact is that authorial intent is king.  Damn you, Levi-Strauss!

As a geekish aside, I should also note that in the pen-and-paper D&D campaign I've run since the late 80's, orcs are no more evil than Visigoths or Suevi, and play much the same role.  And if any player wants to justify hacking whole villages of them to pieces because they were wicked little sprites in Tolkien, he'll be risking direct and immediate divine intervention.

Castranova charges that orcs value warfare and power; while humans have children and charitable giving.  We can ignore the fact that the Alliance's dwarves also value the former and lack the latter.  We can also ignore the fact that orcs, in fact, feature both offspring (in Orgrimmar's (presumably charitable) orphanage) and, in various missions, charitable acts.  Basically, what is suggested is that, in a dark-age (-ish) setting, having a group react to constant warfare and repeated invasion by elevating a warrior class to a position of honour and leadership is an evil act.  Looking at history, I see it rather as an inevitable and necessary survival trait.

As regards the cited evidence of Ted's kid being scared: I have my doubts as to the bearing this has on the case in point.  Wisdom may, indeed, spring forth from the mouths of babes and sucklings, but children find many things scary that are not in themselves evil.

Anyway, evil is not defined by the racial inevitabilities of culture and genetic predisposition.  The fact is that only thoughts and actions define the morality of the actor.  And there is absolutely no difference, frustratingly, between a tauren and an elf as regards their missions.  Nor between orcs and dwarves, or even the undead and humans.  The bulk of each involves killing vast numbers of the enemy, and if the undead smell a bit and sometimes eat their victims (post mortem) then that is not a moral decision: simply a matter of taste.

More XBox 360 impressions

Fields of the Nephilim - Mourning Sun

Back in about 1985 or so, when I was at school, I was given a couple of mix cassettes by a girl in my year.  I was an innocent soul at the time, and read no more into this gesture than an evangelical zeal on her part regarding the sharing of her musical tastes with another.  That may, very well, have been the extent of it.  Certainly, as far as goths in a remote, north-eastern farming town go, she constituted an army of one in our school.  But only until I heard side one, track one: "Preacherman" by the Fields of the Nephilim.  A twisted, speed-fuelled, post-apocalyptic, raw-edged, spaghetti-western goth-rock stomp, it marked a rapid and radical revision of my musical tastes, discarding Big Country and AC/DC and embracing Joy Division, Gaye Bikers on Acid, the Nephilim, the Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and all the goodness that John Peel let slip from his fingers.

Anyway, twenty long years on, the Fields of the Nephilim have - against all my expectations - finally released a fourth studio album.  I would have put good money on this never happening.  Carl McCoy's relationship with the rest of the band seems to have developed into the same drama-fest as so many other indie and goth bands with a charismatic and recognisable frontman, from Morrisey and the Smiths to Andrew Eldritch and the Sisters.  Indeed, this latter is probably the best comparison, since McCoy seems to have moved to Eldritch's "I am the band, I employ musicians" model.  Try finding the names of the band in the album sleeve notes...

And let's not beat about the bush, here: McCoy is as mad as two badgers fighting in a sack.  His wonderfully, gloriously pompous lyrics, delivered in a deep rasp, are like those of a Norwegian death metal band on barbituates: slow, grandiose and almost invariably dealing with one or more of Cthulhu, Manicheanism, Crowley, Rosicrucians, Sumeria, gnosticism or hermeticism.  Brilliant stuff, in a kind of pencils-up-your-nostrils-and-saying-"wibble" sort of way.  I mean, it takes real persistence to come up with any sort of reference to the Manichean heresy in popular music.  Kudos.

But it works.  It really does.  The sound is deliciously complex and almost over-produced.  It is a beautifully layered cake of guitar-band and electronica that sounds like it should have a string section popping into the studio at any point.  It is dreamy, self-indulgent and wonderfully trancey.  It demands a lot of adjectives.

This is so obviously the record that McCoy has been trying to create for 15 years, since the release of the gorgeous Elizium in 1991.  It takes the second side of that album (an album has "side a", kids?), grafts onto it the ambient-goth formlessness of his Nefilim project's Zoon from the mid-90's, chucks in the high dance-goth bassline of Psychonaut at various times - rapid, flowing, stepwise and ornamented - and cooks for an average of over eight minutes a track.  I love long, indulgent songs - a product of my prog-rock-pushing uncle's influence, no doubt - and you won't find three-minute floor-fillers here.

Sadly, however, Carl has lost his knack for song titles.  Requiem XIII-33 is all very well, but we were raised to expect names like At The Gates Of Silent Memory (Paradise Regained) and Dead But Dreaming.  While, perusing the track list, I found myself hoping in vain that New Gold Dawn was going to be an affectionate tribute to Glasgow's Simple Minds, it seems that McCoy has a sense of humour after all: the final track on the limited edition cd is a cover of Zager and Evans' classic In the Year 2525, performed in a straight-faced, late 80's goth-rock style.  I refuse to believe that this is anything other than deliberate - and well-done - high camp.

In an arbitrary, base-seven rating scale I'd give this one six.  Which Carl would no doubt use numerology to prove was a sign of the return of Zarathustra.