The Sisters of Mercy: Floodland

This was the first Sisters of Mercy album I ever got.  It was 1991 & I’d just started getting into goth music & they had this for $9.99 at Phar-Mor.  I’d mainly been into the more shoegaze & almost metal end of goth & The Sisters were my first experience in the dance & fashion aspect that really would define the genre.  As I went on tours over the next decade I saw & heard a hundred bands inspired by this album & heard the singles at the clubs all the time & the idea of actually listening to this album on my own just didn’t occur to me anymore.
The re-listen was odd.  It kicks in with “Dominion/Mother Russia” which seems like a pretty great song, but it is really melodramatic & long.  When the sax kicks in, the image of that walrus playing a saxophone comes to mind.

To me the songs that are successful are the dance singles.  “Lucretia My Reflection” has a bassline that I end up playing half the time I pick up the bass & “This Corrosion” which clocks in at almost eleven minutes somehow almost works even at that length (though the idea of a pop song being extended to that length is a little off to me) with it’s highly dated & bizarre choir backing vocals.  Strangely the song “Colours” which I probably hated as a kid (“why does this just have four lines over & over for seven minutes?”) is a new favorite for me & the one song on here that I could really see myself doing a version of (though I probably wouldn’t have the guts to make it more than two minutes long).  In the end as a whole this album mainly works for me as nostalgia & the dance music works as dance music, but I don’t understand why this was the album for a whole genre to be built around & I think if I listened to their whole catalog I would see The Sisters as a singles band instead of an album band.  Though I guess I don’t understand the idea of derivative music as a goal.

The Sisters of Mercy: Some Girls Wander By Mistake

I bought this CD in 1993.  Pretty much the peak of my phase of being into the “goth scene” before getting fed up with how much of it was about fashion rather than music.  A part of getting this was that a girl I liked was into the song “Temple of Love.”  I was 18, so girls could still influence the music I listened to at least to a certain degree.  Even back then I remembered thinking this was a bit uneven, probably part of why I haven’t listened to it in about twelve years now.  It kicks off with “Alice” & me thinking, “Why haven’t I listened to this in so long?”  Then the rest of the record starts.  It totally has that production vibe of all the British proto-goth bands (Joy Division, Bauhaus, The Cure, etc.) & the weird swirling stereophonic reverbs remind me of when I used to take LSD & listen to this kind of music.  That probably is the best way to listen to a record like this.  Be 18 & depressed & lonely & intoxicated & trying to crawl into someone else’s brain to figure out how their vision of reality works & if yours is working properly (newsflash: it probably isn’t).  There are songs I like on here (“Alice,” “Heartland,” “Phantom,” “Body Electric,” “Adrenochrome”) & really take me back in time in a pleasant way.  Though it sounds incredibly like 1983 (when most of the songs were recorded), to me it sounds like 1993 & when I master time travel this might be the CD to take me back to that summer.