Current 93
Swastikas for Noddy

THE REVIEW

After the years of esoteric and experimental beginnings, David Tibet's Current 93 made a decisive turn in their creative course with "Swastikas for Noddy", a controversial album that formalized the paradigms of the so-called Noddy's Apocalypse Church and steered the project's musicality towards what is known as apocalyptic folk. The genre, incidentally, that from the '90s onwards characterized the galaxy revolving around Tibet and the various colleagues of his entourage, stripping the sound down to the essentials with acoustic guitars, violins, and flutes in ballad form, leaving room for voices to sing long litanies.

In "Swastikas for Noddy", the esoteric element remains mainly in the lyrics and the nursery rhymes that intersperse the album at various moments, often with a tone more mocking than truly philological. References to Crowley and other figures more or less associated with the parallel universe of cults and alchemical movements become pronounced, with a whole series of enigmatic and emblematic evidence that makes it unclear how serious the foundation of the Church of Noddy was.

It moves from the strumming of the dark "Coal Black Smith" and the redundant "Beau Soleil"—with a transversal reference to Bobby Beausoleil, one of the key figures of the Manson cult—to the nihilistic lullaby of "Since Yesterday"—already a pop hit in the '80s by Strawberry Switchblade; and from the experimental laments of "Panzer Rune" to the sarcastic cryptic formulas of short rituals like "Valediction", to the purposely childish folk tunes of "(Hey Ho) The Noddy (Oh)" or "Scarlet Woman", which almost seem like counting games for hide and seek. All with a fluctuating seasoning of artisanal arrangements and bony minimalisms, which were refined in subsequent albums, yet always leaving a sense of artful incompleteness that has become David Tibet's true stylistic hallmark.

Of course, it is in later albums like the esteemed "Thunder Perfect Mind" that this provocation is diluted and assumes more cultured and poetic contours, leaving behind psico-political musings balanced between the serious and the facetious. This "Swastikas" is a turning point album, which has paid a high price to allow its creators to ferry themselves to a new shore: a shore that, after all, has guaranteed them long survival.