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Rating: “The Starres are Marching Sadly Home (Theinmostlightthirdandfinal)” is the third installment of the trilogy “The Inmost Light”. Released in 1996, a few months after “All the Pretty Little Horses”, it resumes the sounds explored with the first volume of the trilogy “Where the Long Shadows Fall”.
Like the first act, “The Starres are Marching Sadly Home” is a short work, a single ambient track in which the tense and dramatic tones found in “All the Pretty Little Horses” fade away. The elements of continuity are therefore evident, not only in the chosen expressive medium (a dark and claustrophobic dark-ambient, an ideal backdrop for Tibet's apocalyptic poetry), but also in certain references to previous episodes: the singing of Alessandro Moreschi is always present (which, sampled and obsessively repeated, constituted the backbone of the first act, and here is instead revisited and subjected to a work of sonic rarefaction, becoming a disturbing, sinuous and slowed soundscape, as if the song of the “last castrato” had become the distant hiss of a homeless ghost); the closure of the work, on the other hand, is entrusted to folk-singer Shirlie Collins (her performance is masterful), whose solitary song echoes in the void that follows the Apocalypse: it is yet another reinterpretation of the traditional song “All the Pretty Little Horses”, already performed in the previous work by Tibet himself and an exceptional guest like Nick Cave.
The album thus has a limited duration (just over twenty minutes), and is composed of a single track that has the honor and burden of closing that fantastic journey named “The Inmost Light.” The first verses are delirious, Tibet intones a frenzied nursery rhyme that opens a path that becomes even darker than at first, a path haunted by eerie ghostly voices and creaks of rusty winches of caves leading who knows where. The ambient sponsored by Steven Stapleton this time is not illuminated by Michael Cashmore's flair, but only by the (imperceptible) guitar of David Kenny and the vocal incursions of Roxanne Stapleton (Stapleton's daughter) and Andria Deggens, Tibet's wife, to whom the work is lovingly dedicated.
Overall, “The Starres are Marching Sadly Home” has the same significance as “Where the Long Shadows Fall,” representing a fragment that can only be judged in light of the entire trilogy. However, it seems slightly better than its twin part, more detailed, less repetitive, closer, for the synergy created between the meticulous soundscapes and Tibet's interpretation, to the collaborations between the band and writer Thomas Ligotti.
Therefore, the musical layout serves as a simple sonic backdrop to Tibet's desolate narratives, who, imbued with an anguished sense of unresolved existential fragility, weaves the epilogue of an important phase in the evolution of his spiritual journey: the closing of the circle under the sign of darkness does not at all constitute a simple return to the terminal, as meanwhile David Tibet's spiritual journey has laid premises that become propedeutic for a new beginning. As often happens in Current 93's albums, akin to milestones accomplished by the tormented mind of its dark singer, the apocalyptic tones once again infest the moods of the final farewell, as if the wanderer, condemned by an unhealable original sin, must nonetheless serve his sentence. But never more than in this triad of works, the apocalypse also assumes a sort of cathartic power, as if it were a grand and terrible rite of purification in which the wanderer can finally free and redeem himself from Evil, intrinsically linked to his condition as a human being.
And so, salvation requires the supreme sacrifice, while in Tibet's restless path, a little Sisyphus intent on pushing his stone to the top of the mountain only to see it unavoidably slip down the slope, a new awareness is reached: a partial awareness ready to be cracked and then broken by new doubts and new insoluble questions.
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