Current 93
If A City Is Set Upon A Hill

Four years after the excellent The Light Is Leaving Us All, the tireless David Tibet returns with the new album from the legendary Current 93 titled If A City Is Set Upon A Hill. Over time, Tibet's poetic style has remained unchanged. His culture is vast: he is a painter as well as a connoisseur of fantastic literature. Of course, not all the albums from the Current's forty-year career are essential (even in the early phase, there were works not always well-focused like Dawn), and there has always been the impression that Tibet sometimes scraped the bottom of the barrel. However, unlike Death In June, he has always more than once found the winning spark, maintaining his inspiration consistently over time. The themes have always ranged between esotericism, eschatology, and the obsessive search for the sense of eternity found in small things.

If A City Is Set Upon A Hill benefits from the collaboration of musicians such as Alasdair Roberts (guitars and synthesizers), Andrew Liles (guitars and keyboards), Aloma Ruiz Boada (violin), Ossian Brown (hurdy-gurdy), Michael J. York (flutes, duduk), and Reinier van Houdt (piano, guitars). The atmospheres are very melancholic and ethereal: at times, an inescapable cosmic pessimism emerges. The intensity of this work partly reminded me of that of Of Ruine, Or Some Blazing Starre, one of my favorite Current albums. The settings are very simple (the use of the piano may recall the minimalism of Soft Black Stars) and are sometimes flecked with esoteric-industrial inserts, but the music does not bore, and those who love the Current will find plenty to enjoy. One gets the sensation of wandering through melancholic and misty moors where the elusive figure of a ghost appears.

In the end, as Tibet himself said in an old interview, the music of the Current has always remained the same, and starting from the iconic and industrial-esoteric Nature Unveiled, the musical language has only been refined. Obviously warmly recommended to all followers of the immortal cult of the Current.