Current 93
Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain

The Creation is tinged with Apocalypse; Evil lies at the Origin, as does Good, after all: the Bible reinterpreted and revised by David Tibet.

Or rather: the electric album of Current 93.

After the clamor of "Black Ships Ate the Sky," which relaunched the Current into the third millennium and earned it unexpected popularity among the educated circles of contemporary alternative music, "Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain" could have been the shamelessly crowd-pleasing album: two electric guitars to excite three fools passionate about stoner, acid rock, and psychedelia, which are always found in the world. And it could have been the exaggerated album, the album that lives on the contribution of a bandwagon of talented youngsters called to support a crafty Tibet in absolute yield phase.

But instead, "Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain" screams in the ears and heart: Yes, Tibet is here!, damn it if he is!, and "Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain" is a beautiful album, indeed extraordinary, three times extraordinary.

Extraordinary for the current musical landscape, which until now had not known such a work. Extraordinary for the band, which manages to change its skin once again, giving us one of the most shocking albums in its history. Extraordinary, finally, in testifying to the health of an incredibly long-lived artist who carries twenty-five years of career as if it were nothing.

And do not expect an album by Electric Wizard or one by Sunn O))): "Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain" is "simply" an album by Current 93, fresh, original, even though it looks to the past, reflecting the contemporary.

No one will shout miracle, but there will be those who cry.

The contained duration (fifty-three minutes) benefits the overall design because "Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain," despite the electric guitars and drums, remains a challenging album, certainly more approachable than many other works by the band, but still far from rock. A degree of frustration remains, but there's much enjoyment, not so much on the first listen, which remains stunning overall, but on subsequent ones if you have the patience to listen, assimilate, become passionate, forgive, and not ask what cannot be received from a Current 93 album.

Stunning for the novelties, for the boldness, for the number of suggestions, different, clashing, ungraspable at first glance. Eight tracks moving between hallucinogenic rock, surreal folk, southern suggestions, and avant-garde, but deeply imbued with the apocalyptic nature that has always been the band's trademark: a band that knows how to play, without being dominated, with sacred monsters like Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, and many others.

The spirit of the Current prevails, and we are reminded, in random order, of works like "Lucifer over London," "Horsey," "Of Ruine or some Blazing Starre," "Black Ships Ate the Sky," which however remain glimpses, flashes, fleeting calls that punctuate a painful and challenging ascent (both physically and spiritually) up the high mountain: an uphill journey that finally softens into the restrained and "caveian" tones of the concluding and purifying "As Real as Rainbows". A piano, an organ, subdued female voices.

But first, you'll have to pass through the treacherous bends of the Hallucinatory Mountain, starting from the imposing opener "Invocation of Almost", the electric baptism of the work, a stunning propitiatory rite erected on acid guitar lashes and the ciaff of 70s platters: a sort of "Careful with the Axe, Eugene" luciferian, with sulfur edges and animated by incandescent sparks. Distant and undefined sounds, "Costellations Warped" recites the trembling voice, and the guitar cuts our ears like never before in a Current 93 album. Dust in the eyes and wind burning the skin, the World originates from Chaos, the Beginning is shaped in the molds of the End amidst the vapors of Creation, yet everything sounds familiar, albeit astonishing, as if it could not be otherwise.

Even more than in "Black Ships Ate the Sky," which was a choral album, "Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain" is the album that sees Tibet as the true protagonist (guitarist and mixer, as well as a rancid vocalist): a Tibet that, given the context, could have been exuberant, but instead does not renounce the singer-songwriter nature developed in recent works, preferring to settle on a colorful recitation, inevitably dense with pathos and feeling, albeit not lacking in those proverbial hysterical flickers that have always characterized the artist's hallucinated poetics.

Without detracting, of course, from the painstaking commitment of his companions (old and new friends, relatives, children, the wife, and even a porn star: a crowd of characters not worth listing, because otherwise, it would seem like making a shopping list rather than writing a review), who certainly inject vital energy, but whose role appears as one of embellishing with nuances the guitar magma that pervades the entire work.

Credit to the providential electronics of trusty Stapleton (who has been alongside Tibet for twenty-five years!), called to thicken the sound where the rhythmic guitar embroiders its exploits in a somewhat predictable manner, while the substance of the album lies in the layering of sounds, distant choirs, individual ideas that emerge only after several listens.

Well, the guitars may be raw, and simpler eardrums would have certainly preferred more powerful distortions and jarring feedback legacies, but the Current does not cater to simple eardrums' needs: can you imagine the eight minutes of "On Docetic Mountain", rough guitars embedded in tearful cellos, played by Neurosis? Or the ten minutes of "Not Because the Fox Barks" played by true masters of stoner? Yet "Not Because the Fox Barks", which indeed represents the boldest rock direction the Current 93 have ever achieved, is simply hallucinatory, alienating, illogical, carried by bare guitars and Tibet's ungraceful voice, a rachitic apocalyptic Ozzy. And forgive me if I become the sterile analytic akin to the worst Dream Theater fan, but who today gives you two minutes like those two minutes following the eighth minute and fifth second of "Not Because the Fox Barks"? The Tibet that remains alone with the piano after eight minutes of guitar frenzy and bizarre vocal mantras is, despite everything, goosebumps! And this alone justifies the purchase of the album, if not, in a broader sense, our existence in this world ("The cripple and the corn...the cripple and the corn!").

The rest is magic, jagged rocks dyed orange at sunset, the acoustic delights found in "Poppyskins" and "UrShadow", supported by the preciousness of a desertic, ascetic, spiritual guitar. Or the sublime apocalyptic blues of "26 April 2007" (probably the most sensational track), scarred by twilight guitars as never heard before in a Current 93 album, and illuminated by Tibet's dark recitation (sublime as well).

The only interlocutory piece remains the oblique and vaguely slint-ish (!!!) "Aleph is the Butterfly Net", yet still functional to a concept that acts as a glue to a work that, despite its "sonic swings," proves to be as compact as the most important works of the Current have been, never so much as in this case a fluctuating current of emotions, colors, sensations, spirit, and energy.

Little to add at this point: "Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain" is a beautiful album, the umpteenth masterpiece labeled Current 93, whose four stars (undeserved, folks, undeserved!) are assigned only because the work must necessarily be related to a powerful history that saw the invention of a genre first (esoteric industrial) and then the perfection of another (apocalyptic folk). But how far we are from the (deserved after all) resting on laurels! Because "Aleph at the Hallucinatory Mountain," taken in its and your solitude, is as beautiful and intense as you might encounter in this year 2009: an album that, after two weeks of intensive listening, survives and continues relentlessly to grow, without showing the slightest intention of stopping!

The climb is long and leads to Infinity...

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