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Rating: "All the Pretty Little Horses (TheInmostLight)" is the second chapter of a trilogy that began with "Where the Long Shadows Fall (BeforeTheInmostLight)" and will continue with "The Starres Are Marching Sadly Home (TheInmostLightThirdAndFinal)".
It is "The Inmost Light", a monumental testimony of a new (yet another!) stage in David Tibet's troubled spiritual journey.
And it is symbolically dedicated to a death (Dolly Collins, sister of friend Shirley) and a birth (the newborn Seth, daughter of friend Geoff Cox-Dorée), suspended between Life and Death, pervaded by childish moods and transition atmospheres. A dreamlike dimension that seems to evoke the contradictory sensations of a child about to fall asleep in the twilight of his room, suspended between the warmth of a lullaby and the threats hidden beyond the dark mantle of night. A parallel, perhaps, between the innocence, candor, fears, and hopes of an infant and the human condition in the face of the enigmas of Life, Death, and the Afterlife.
Where the other two volumes (considerable as EPs, given their short duration) are two dark monoliths of somber catacombal ambient, "All the Pretty Little Horses", from 1996, is undoubtedly the most varied and engaging chapter of the trilogy, a work that will certainly delight those who appreciated works like "Thunder Perfect Mind" and "Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre". A work where folk-song and experimental episodes coexist peacefully, evoking the moods of the band's early works. The ensemble sees the whole of the great family and, in addition, a delightful surprise that I do not want to reveal immediately. Besides the ever-present Michael Cashmore (acoustic guitar, bass, and piano) and Steven Stapleton (electronic manipulations), we find the violin of Joolie Woods and the voice of John Balance (Coil). Accompanying them: a group of children lending their shouts, laughter, and cries.
The album opens as the previous one closed: foggy drones, blurred snapshots of a dimension full of fear and torment. And the funereal "Why can't we all just walk away?" by Balance. However, the shadows are immediately dissolved by a pure guitar arpeggio: it is the beautiful title track, a sweet lullaby just barely touched by Tibet's whisper. In the moods of the song: all the hopes, expectations, and quivers of a child struggling to fall asleep in the spasmodic and unbearable wait for the morning of the next day. It is the distant call of promised toys, the friendly tinkling of small pretty little horses with which to intimate joy, the awakening in the light of a New Dawn. But first: the Night.
Thus warmth and cold, light and shadows, golden dreams, and terrible nightmares alternate, between melancholic ballads (the two parts of "Calling for Vanished Faces"), impetuous folk gallops ("The Carnival is Dead and Gone") and glimpses of hallucinated sadness (the detuned piano and the haunted voice of Tibet in "The Inmost Night"). Noteworthy is the touching "The Bloodbells Chime", one of the most poignant tracks ever written by Tibet: sweetness and fragility return to reign in the house of Current through the velvety voice of Cashmore's guitar and piano, Woods' autumnal violin, Tibet's cracked singing, that, like a little crystal animal, seems ready to break with the slightest disturbance.
After a first part of great emotions, the album takes a different turn, plunging into a series of decidedly more challenging episodes, but certainly no less fascinating. After all, listening to Current 93 has never been easy, and perhaps it will never be: the conceptual aspect has always been deeply intertwined with the formal one, often prevailing over the music itself. And if it is true that there is no Current album without a Calvary to climb at some point, it is even more true that there is no album of theirs without a rich emotional reward.
Long and exhausting folk ballads, between children's shouts, nursery rhymes, and metaphysical barks ("What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue", is the phrase by Edmund Burke that will often return to chill any outburst of enthusiasm) alternate with terrible droning nightmares. How can we not mention, in this regard, the eight minutes of "Twilight Twilight Nihil Nihil": a dark ritual in which Balance's desolate narration ("Who will deliver me from this body of death?") once again overlaps with Tibet's hallucinations.
But as happened at the beginning of the album, the arpeggio of the title track once again dissolves the shadows, closing the circular structure of the album and serving us on a silver platter the cameo of a truly luxurious special guest: none other than His Majesty Nick Cave, called with his warm and crepuscular tone to duet with Tibet's distant whisper. What else to say except that we are facing one of the happiest collaborations ever produced by the human race? Cave's voice returns to blend into the sacred fumes of church choirs in the concluding "Patripassian", an evocative reading of a passage by Blaise Pascal, a fitting epilogue to a work that once again confirms how the label of apocalyptic folk is reductive when applied to a spiritual, poetic music rich in nuances, meanings, and conceptual layers as that of Current 93.
Good night and sweet dreams.
"Hush-a-bye, don't you cry, go to sleepy little baby, go to sleepy little baby,
When you wake, you shall have, all the pretty little horsies, all the pretty little horsies."
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
06 The Bloodbells Chime (03:00)
Sell all you have give it to the kittens
And pour the milk on Louis' grave
And Catland sometimes called Pussydom
Opens for you instantly it's the inmost light!
It's the inmost light
Somewhere over the rainbow
On the goodship lollipop
There oh there
Goodnight
The inmost light
The happy children rise all from their pools
Eyes still sealed
Sleeptight
With mud and night
It's their inmost night
Goodnight
And yet still I which i could dream as when young
Sleeptight
As she came to me so young and honest
Goodbye
Yet the bloodbells chime
I do not notice them i shall not notice them
Yet the bloodbells chime
Tommy Katkins still send his regards
Frozen for ever on some animal somme
The last thing on his mind is marriage
But the call of home and heart
Yet the bloobells chime
Yet the bloobells chime
Yet the bloobells chime
07 Calling for Vanished Faces II (04:12)
If only I could take all of you at once
I would take you for ever and ever and only so
Lose myself in you
And so I smile and skip green god like there
The picture of allrage all lust and wanton
The inmost night
And lay waste to the playgrounds
The concrete covers all
The grass sleeps and waits to rise again
It listens for the final trumpet of
The inmost light
And I clench my left hand
Then I open it
The Gods I loved
Are all dead pages metal signs all gone
Edward Alexander in some sadhome falls alone
And sees clearly now the inmost light
The sadness of the inmost light
The growl the grip an final sigh
Paint by numbers of the inmost light
The plastic form illusion
We just have time to swallow
Before the doorknock of the inmost light
He waits at the door he waits at the door
And if you see me try to grin and then I hide
Myself behind a ball
A sign I wish to play and run hideandseek
The sound is gay and full of joy
It masks the binding of our eyes
The scourge of all the bone fire burns
We hop and skip and trick and treat
Just watch your heart and soul and all
And watch your back
It's waiting there and smiling there
The inmost light
Unforgiving there the inmost night
So broken there the inmost light
Howling
The inmost light
Bad bad bad bad inmost night
08 The Frolic (08:13)
I take your hand
We walk towards where the roses once grew
I lie back in the grass and dream of how it once was
The rubbishstrewn streets
Riperising smell of gutters and rain
The children abandoned
Mother recalls child in pool
What is that that lies? deadchilddead
I have such nightmares and you're all in all of them
It's worse than you or i can ever know
On the edge of the clouds we crouch
We smile and spit
The pool of saliva carrascates below our feet
It shifts
Children with knives begin to rise from it
They laugh and blow kisses at the moon
We think it's the rain
I see a bird move onto the table in my garden
Its beak scoops up the seeds
The green of the grass and the blue of the sky
Are immense and terrifying
Everything seems so close
so very very close
Should a storm come
Should a storm break and halo all around us
As some savage and blind god
Jerking his hands out to us
The birds drop all around us
I walk into the altar room
All the buddhas are smashed there
Avalokitesvara's hundred faces lie shattered
I have done this
I walk to the makeshift red brick altar a hundred years ago
there is a small brass image there
I have built this
The red and black ants mill around
Unknown journeys
I take my lighter and torch them
I take my lighter and torch them
I weep i weep
The ants scatter or writhe
I take my lighter and torch them torch them
I have done this
I am surrounded by butterflies
The child's legs lay smashed
Please pray for him she says to me
Too late
Alas oh so too late
I see the twinkling stars
I drop a photograph
I bend to pick it up
My heart leaps as i see your face
Stare up at me from the paper
As if still alive on this earth
When i return my eyes to the stars
They gathered
They pucker
And are blind
And are blind
So lost are we
Oh what have i become
I have become that i hate
I have become that i shall say no
The bird is dead now alas
A voice whispers to me
And says nothing nothing
There is nothing
I look to my right and see her face again
And again the world disappears
And all fall down
All fall down
All fall down i all fall down
All fall down i all fall down
We all fall down
We all fall down
11 The Inmost Light Itself (09:31)
And when I saw the little children sing
Their mouths were red and sad
Their lipsticksealed smiles
And in their minds they hold and hope some sign
Some hope
The gaudy sequinned dragging banner of the inmost light
Around my eyes the sewers spew and laugh
The fallen flower gazes at me reaped
The crippled cuckoo falls brokenwing
And turns around to me and brokenbeak grins
From its head
Thus so no fear thus so it has arrived
The inmost light
And if I turn my head for shame
And see my lovers' rivers burst and folding there
I'll cross my eyes and close my heart
And whisper to her womb
Greatbloodgreatsilencemymotherthemysteryofall
Nothingmaygrasptheenoonemaygraspthee
Letmeholdtheenowohcomeohcomeatlast
The inmost light
Oh God I trail my hands up to my eyes
Up to my eyes up to my eyes up to my eyes
And say if only then my light and if only if only if
I had not despised
The inmost light
And so I kneel at bluegate blackmouthdeath
And offer as my feeble explanation
I thought so much was left and so much
Time to praise and call the inmost light
And I suppose full half and more of these are dreams
Some broken code of morals rising after I had touched
Her very pith and marrow oh her inmost light
If I could scatter children
If I could scatter children
And while I gaze and count my coins
After your godgoldglow they're dead
The head is dead and lead
I see and feel the hiding glow blaze behind you
The inmost light
And if your lips are taut
Don't move your teeth to speak
The lines will start to fall
And pull the structure of your world
Then all apart
And thus you'll see you'll call the inmost night
It wispered to me and laughed and said you
Lied and shamed the inmost light
And if you recall I bent yewlike and roared
You did not see the cloudburst wind dead towards you
Of the inmost light
Our hands tumble towards the skies
The block visions of the inmost light
And if I pointless arch
And spit white nothings at the sky
Oh bigboys check it out too fucking late
The children move through town
And skip tornskirted and roll the hoop into the arms
Of the inmost light
Sheer char shrift and sharp
Christ is risen you may creep to the cross too late
But it's much too late to welcome the inmost light
Branch sallow willow yew and tree
Not so gay no more
So falling faster and faster we fall
Nearer cataclysm
Or salvation
Or nothing how terrible
I we are snuffed out with just the momentary mark of smoke
To array our passing
So we stand milky in moonlight
Is this all there is?
Is this all there is?
Is this all there is?
Our eyes so fixed
That the darkness surrounds us
Unnoticed
And we are drowned by the loss of light
Unnoticed
Is this all there is my friends?
Is this all there is?
Goodnight goodnight the inmost light
Westron wynde when wyll thow blow?
The smalle rayne downe can rayne can rayne
Cryst yf my love were in my armys
And I yn my bed a gayne
Will you wait for me there by the dead clock?
No more dying
One red bird
Will You meet me there?
Before I sputter out?
Dragonflies and mayflies
Hovering candles
As alabaster guardians for me
If you open that door
All hell floods out
But quietly drably
The colour of
The smell of
The texture of
Dust
13 Patripassian (05:50)
The rivers of Babylon flow
And fall
And carry away
Jesus is alone on earth
Not merely with no one to feel and share His agony
But with no one even to know of it
Heaven and he are the only ones to know
Jesus is in a garden
Not of delight
Like the first Adam
Who there fell and took with him all mankind
But of agony
Where He has saved Himself and all mankind
He suffers this anguish and abandonment in the horror of the night
Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world
There must be no resting in the meantime
To Eden with me you will not leave
To live in my cottage of crazy crooked Eves
In your own heavy home
Take care of this night
When you let your little cat in
Turn on the light
Something scurries behind
And finds a cozy place to stare
Something sent to you from paradise
Paradisicallysomewhere
Tongues flouring
They leap out laughing
Lapping
Disappear
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