Current 93
All The Pretty Little Horses

THE REVIEW

"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."