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.