Current 93
Baalstorm, Sing Omega

Tibet is beyond debate.

Never.

In no way.

However, it's also true that even the most ardent fan is not always able to digest the discographic prolifery of our little great minstrel of the apocalypse. And so, a little over a year after the release of the sensational “Aleph at the Hallucinatory Mountain,” the new album “Baalstorm, Sing Omega” is released quietly, almost on tiptoe. A work that certainly lives up to the name, fame, and prestige of the Current 93 brand, but perhaps released too close to its important predecessor to be adequately appreciated.

After all, it is known that David Tibet's art is pure expressive urgency: such is the perceptual sensitivity of our Maestro, that it seems he merely needs to walk down the street and see a pigeon fly to be struck by inspiration and lay the foundations for a new album. I'm not joking: it seems this album was born in the urban traffic of Rome when Tibet saw the sign of a kebab shop (“Alpha and Omega Kebabs”) at the side of the road. And from there, a series of revelations, visions, and inner upheavals that led to the spontaneous creation of the album in question. An album that, in truth, finds its conceptual foundations in a passage from the Egyptian monk Abbot Shenoute, commenting on the words of the spiritual father Pachomius, connecting back to the most typical Tibetan thought (“The Great in the Small”, "The Alpha and the Omega", etc.): the world thus becomes a mirror of the inner richness of the crazy poet, more than ever a victim of his spiritual revolutions, true emotional storms, as the album title suggests.

The entire work evolves through overwhelming accelerations that disrupt phases of genuine mystical stasis: a mystical stasis that does not forget a kind of bucolic-pastoral serenity that has now become the new dimension of Current 93 in the third millennium.

But let's proceed calmly: the electric shock that has animated the latest releases, and in particular the sublime work of last year, fades completely, remaining an exciting parenthesis in the multifaceted path of the Current. In “Baalstorm, Sing Omega,” we will not find distorted guitars and galloping drums: the Current returns to its most congenial form, that of an acoustic folk increasingly indebted to the tradition of the folk singers of the sixties. This is undoubtedly thanks to Tibet's new traveling companions, whose journey now marches in the united step of a team of faithful comrades, as was already the case in the nineties. And so the young twelve-string talent James Blackshaw definitively takes the place of the mythical Michael Cashmore, while the piano and quirky organet runs of Baby Dee replace the romanticism and class of Maya Elliott. The cello of the faithful John Contreras is the best heir to the violin of Joolie Wood, while the veteran Steven Stapleton finds a valid substitute in Andrew Liles on electronic manipulations, which have always played a fundamental finisher role in the albums of the Current, despite the essentially acoustic setting. Completing the picture, we find the awkward and amused voices of the little girls Isabel and Bea Taylor, dazzling incursions that cannot help but recall an album with childlike contours like “All the Pretty Little Horses.”

Indeed, what references can we give to frame this new work marked 2010? It's truly difficult to give precise indications, except to evoke the very last works, obviously purged of the more caustic and experimental component: thus taking, for example, the more relaxed passages of “Aleph at the Hallucinatory Mountain” and the EP that slightly preceded it “Birth Canal Blues.”

It's easier to trace the path of the “band” in the last decade, characterized in its first part by conceptual confusion dictated by Tibet's inner struggles, resulting in the arrival at the all-encompassing and mystical Christianity of “Hypnagogue”; in the following years, we find a new awareness and a true artistic rebirth inaugurated by a fundamental album like “Black Ships Ate the Sky,” which saw the progressive abandonment of the more typically neo-folk stylistic elements and a happy arrival at a more canonical songwriting often contaminated by the lysergic fumes of the most acidic and psychedelic rock (of obvious seventies derivation).

“Baalstorm, Sing Omega” harmoniously reconnects with this vein, although the music of Current 93 remains something unclassifiable and in continuous mutation, and not referable to anything but itself, so much so that, on more than one occasion, there undoubtedly floats a heavy feeling of déjà vu. Yet Tibet is still able to land at least four or five winning blows in this album: an album that sounds strange, incomplete, blurred, and elusive, probably also due to its fairly short duration (just three-quarters of an hour) and thus the contained duration of individual tracks, which never go beyond six minutes (an unusual thing for a Current 93 album). When compared to a monumental work like “Black Ships Ate the Sky” and a revolutionary and innovation-packed piece like “Aleph at the Hallucinatory Mountain,” the impression “Baalstorm, Sing Omega” gives is undoubtedly that of an interlocutory passage, almost akin to a substantial EP (and perhaps, trimming here and there, we could actually have in our hands an EP like many other EPs that have represented similar undefined transitional phases in the tortuous path of the Current).

And yet “Baalstorm, Sing Omega” listens great, it doesn't sound as “important” as its immediate predecessors, yet it pleases, engages, and excites.

Just consider the sublime opener “I Dreamt I Was Aeon”, undoubtedly the most dramatic and pathos-laden episode of the entire platter: opened by Baby Dee's tragic piano, in the first minutes, the track seems to move in an arcane and mysterious dimension. The liturgical organ counterpoints seem to take us back to the most picturesque prog of the seventies. Tibet decides to open his latest work with a tense requiem in which his invocation drags us back in time, an invocation that grows in intensity until the words soften into the stasis of the strings of an uneasy chamber music, soon rejoined by Baby Dee's piano. An episode apart, in truth, from the rest of the album, as already from the next “With Flowers in the Garden of Fire”, animated by sly percussion and Blackshaw's rural plucking guitar, we enter the mood of an album that smells of wheat fields, prairies, and sun-burned earth.

As mentioned at the beginning, the album lives on progressive accelerations, mirroring the emotional turbulence of its deus ex machina Tibet. And so “September 1971”, born amidst the roar of the waves and a blend of guitar and strings that so reminds me of the infamous “Ostia” of Coil, is a visionary and driving folk ballad animated by the hallucinatory poetry of a Tibet in a state of grace. “Baalstorm! Baalstorm!”, carried by Baby Dee's frantic piano, is its natural continuation (and extremization): Tibet launches into psalms worthy of a prophet in the throes of ecstatic visions, soon overwhelmed by the stirring rise of Liles' powerful electronics.

Since after the storm comes the calm, the work continues at the drowsy pace of acoustic ballads that are not exactly memorable but pleasant and consistent with the concept's progression. Among these, the beautiful “The Nudes Lift Shields for War” deserves mention, where the glorious and evocative ballads of the “Thunder Perfect Mind” times seem to be reborn under the banner of epic and solitary songwriting in the late Johnny Cash style (certainly thanks to the solemn xylophone chimes of the essential Blackshaw).

A second part thus more reflective and calm, abruptly interrupted by the craziest track of the lot, aptly called to close the dances: “I Dance Narcoleptic” resumes the stormy moods of the first portion of the album, Baby Dee's drunken organ runs wildly, ideal ground for the hysteria of a fiery Tibet, grim trainer of beastly beasts of an infernal circus, a delirium adorned with the alienating vocal incursions of the two little girls. A track out of this world, that only Tibet and his caravan of the damned could conceive and transpose into music.

At this point, the silence that precedes an ethereal ghost song: “Baalstorm Sing Omega” ends like this, amid the crashing waves against the rocks and a distant and elusive song.

So let's sum up: the latest work of Current 93 certainly doesn't deserve the highest marks, but it undoubtedly earns our full respect. After almost thirty years of honored career, David Tibet seems far, far from his artistic terminus: at this point, it is legitimate to look towards Immortality.

The Great in the Small