Death In June
Wall Of Sacrifice

An enigmatic and elusive album, this "Wall of Sacrifice" by Death in June's Douglas Pearce, the creator and main standard-bearer of apocalyptic folk.

Released in 1989, in my opinion it constitutes a fundamental chapter in the history of the group, although it does not carry the genius and the innovative and overwhelming force of "Nada!", nor the rigor and balance of the previous "Brown Book", nor the formal perfection of the subsequent "But, What Ends When the Symbols Shattered?" and "Rose Clouds of Holocaust". In "Wall of Sacrifice", a testimony to the darkest period of Douglas P., and in my opinion the most intense and profound work produced by Death in June, we rather find the fragility and turmoil of a disintegrating artist.

Precisely because we are talking about an extremely introverted and enigmatic character, often idolized or ghettoized for aspects that have nothing to do with music, it is quite difficult to speak objectively and settle the matter with a description of the mere musical contents. It is known that Death in June's music is simple and does not require many words to be explained (elementary acoustic guitar chords, a steady and deep voice, samples, and noise bursts in the background). It is rather the conceptual aspect that needs to be handled with care. As for me, being one of those who are madly in love with Death in June's music, the task seems even more daunting, because when dealing with music with such a high emotional rate, it is impossible to approach the matter in a completely objective way, which is why the analysis of this work will inevitably be tainted with completely personal considerations. For those not too interested in delving into the matter, let it suffice to know that "Wall of Sacrifice" is a beautiful Death in June album, certainly not the most accessible, but very diverse in content and capable of including among its ranks splendid songs that today represent true classics of the group's repertoire and the genre as a whole. If you like earlier Death in June, you certainly won't be disappointed!

Personally, I tend to associate this work with "Pornography" by the Cure, another wrenching essay on discomfort and the malaise of living. First of all because I consider them both, despite their stylistic differences, two of the most autobiographical, suffered and torn/torturing albums ever produced in rock history, where individual suffering becomes unintentional reflection on the meaning of life. Moreover, both works hold special significance within the careers of the two groups: just as there is a before and after "Pornography" in the Cure's history, similarly, in the history of Death in June there is a pre "Wall of Sacrifice" era and a post "Wall of Sacrifice" era. Finally, a similarity can be found in the two artists and the way they experienced the gestation of these two works: both albums, in fact, represented the culmination of a cycle and at the same time constituted the indispensable premise for a rebirth, both spiritual and artistic, because they testified to that existential void from which there is no choice but to rise (to persevere on the same path would certainly have meant the end, in every sense!): and so, just as in "Pornography" Smith hits rock bottom and at the same time lays the groundwork for a slow recovery, so it happened to Douglas P. with this "Wall of Sacrifice", which in fact really risked being the swan song of Death in June, the ultimate farewell of an artist bogged down in a deep depressive and existential crisis.

Fortunately, we add, that over time our artist found the strength to rethink, regaining the inspiration to write new masterpieces (including the already mentioned "But, What Ends..." and "Rose Clouds..."), brilliant testimonies of a second artistic youth. "Wall of Sacrifice" is therefore an exceptional album born of exceptional circumstances: a blurred and hallucinogenic fresco that carries within itself the disorientation of an artist who seems to have lost clarity and mastery of his expressive vehicles. The typical elements of Death in June's music, in fact, are all present, the industrial-noise component as well as the folk-acoustic one, but here we find them transfigured and exacerbated, as if somehow control had been lost. From this state of extreme vulnerability, in my opinion, the most intense moments of Pearce's poetic life take shape, because the lack of intervention by a moderating force and mediation by reason, ensured that the spontaneity and emotional charge intrinsic to the creative act that inspired this work were not diminished. At the same time, the very absence of a rational filter prevented a rigorous and conscious control of the composed material, thus leaving the wild machine free to birth even terrible monsters and premature fetuses.

The impression is that opposing and clashing forces, raw and incandescent material that the artist necessarily had to put out have been concentrated in the same container and that he was not able to convey with full awareness, it was so difficult to handle the matter. Making this work even more enigmatic there is, in my opinion, a perennial tension between the artist's urgent need to reveal himself and at the same time hide himself: on one hand, the necessity to grasp and bring out the ghost that haunts him, on the other hand, the defense mechanisms that tend to prevent the psyche from accessing traumatic truths. Hence the coexistence of moments of extreme fragility and transparency next to infinite noise excursions, within the framework of a general air of incommunicability that can be felt throughout the platter. But perhaps the charm of this work lies precisely in this, in its inconsistencies, its intemperances, and its general neglect and lack of calculation, aspects that testify to the total spontaneity and the utmost involvement that inspired the work itself. An important signal, just when it was reasonable to fear that the group, having reached its fifth full-length and being able to boast a certain following and an undisputed influence on the entire scene, would rest on its clichés and produce a redundant and mannered album. But evidently, and fortunately, Death in June is not a money-making machine. We were indeed talking about monsters and intemperances, and in this sense, it must be said that the album opens under the banner of the most total incommunicability.

"Wall of Sacrifice", the title track, is truly a wall, a barrier that Douglas seems to want to build around himself, as if he wanted to put distance between himself and the listener, and discourage them from continuing to listen (as if the intent was precisely to scare away all those who would not be able to understand). And certainly, it involves a sacrifice, since it is really arduous to get to the end of its 16 minutes of uncompromising noise. A delirious journey in which, under the obsessive theme of a basic piano loop, the elements that have always distinguished Pearce's poetics are chaotically entangled: military echoes, martial tolls, military chants, all rendered even more claustrophobic and obsessive by bell reverberations, nursery rhymes, and the confusion of sampled voices. The motto "Heilige Tod", repeated continuously, makes explicit the voice of the Death drive that incessantly emerges from the magma of the unconscious and will constitute the true leitmotif of the album (the theme of Death's attraction-repulsion, sought and at the same time fiercely fled, is after all typical of the artist's poetics). An excursion of this kind is certainly no novelty in the house of Death in June, and inevitably these sounds can only bring to mind the colossal "Death of a Man" (from "The World that Summer"), but at least then there had been the good heart to place it among the last tracks. And anyway, in it, one could discern a poetic and artistic connection, while here we are overwhelmed by such a zeal and such dreamlike irrationality that it is difficult not to come out exhausted: it is in fact like witnessing the staging of a nightmare in which the elements of the real lose consistency and logical concatenation, as if to signify the confusing state of the artist's inner life, who looks at his existence, present and past, as a real nightmare.

We were also talking about inconsistencies, and in fact, after such a tour de force, it is a real relief for our ears to hear the acoustic guitar of the next track, "Giddy Giddy Carousel", a carefree ballad in which Douglas revisits the classic theme of dear old Europe in decline: a song that sounds almost cheerful (by the group's standards), enlivened by the drum machine and the ethereal backing vocals of Rose McDowall, also present in many works of cousins Current 93. The same type of contrast (and many others will be encountered throughout the listen) is present at the end of the album, in a perfectly symmetrical way: I am talking about the pairing "Hullo Angel" and "Death is a Drummer". The first is another short acoustic track, a sweet lullaby written together with friend David Tibet of Current 93, already present in "Swastikas for Goddy" by Current themselves. The second, however, is another long noise excursion (9 minutes!), in which the same martial atmospheres of the title track are proposed, in a more minimal and dark form: an uneasy simmering only occasionally mitigated by female choruses. The greater coherence perhaps testifies to a taming of the confusing element, but certainly, the increased gloominess of the atmospheres is not an encouraging sign, as if to signify that at the end of the journey nothing has changed, nothing has been resolved.

Personal interpretations aside, there is an objective fact to highlight: in the economy of the 42 minutes of the album's duration, the total 25 of sonic intransigence of the title track and this track are not few at all, constituting well over half of the work. It certainly cannot be said to be the most melodic album of Death in June! But there is another troubling piece of news: Douglas' voice features in only three songs, among the shortest, so the singer's vocal contribution is ultimately limited to 7-8 minutes in total, a drop in the sea of cacophony. An element that confers an additional sense of disorientation to the work. In "Bring in the Night", amid the slow and menacing martial beat of the percussion and the whistling of a distorted guitar, the spoken vocals of friend Boyd Rice of Non prevail (who feeds us his usual thesis on the sense of History seen from the perspective of an extreme social neo-Darwinism, where the ruthless natural selection sees the strongest prevail, destined to crush the weak, who in turn is condemned to succumb). The piece concludes with a lullaby sung by McDowall, while Douglas's voice, here subdued, is a distant echo struggling to be heard. "In Sacrilege" is a dramatic song about solitude written by Douglas and masterfully interpreted by Tibet (equally beautiful is the version sung by Douglas himself present in the ultimately negligible "Abandon Tracks!", a collection of b-sides, unreleased tracks, and rarities released last year). The splendid combination of acoustic phrasings and electric glimpses, while a graceful Tibet is the protagonist of a performance of rare intensity, venting the contrasting feelings of struggle and resignation (typical of Pearce's poetics) that the song aims to inspire.

The task of binding these fragments (different both in form and in the sensations they intend to arouse) together falls to the pair of mirrored "Heilige Leben" and "Heilige Tod", two short nursery rhymes (both sung by McDowall) that echo the theme that served as an introduction to "Brown Book". Placed the first among the initial tracks and the second to conclude the work, they explicitly state the album's dialectic scheme, which replicates the eternal clash between Life and Death. The very fact of having placed "Heilige Tod" at the end of the journey makes the entire album resemble a real epitaph, carrying the bitter taste of a definitive choice, from which there is no turning back and in which Death seems to be the only winner. The aesthetic cult of Death and Douglas's self-destructive impulses reach their peak here. Amidst this chaos, we find "Fall Apart" (literally: fall to pieces) which emphatically returns to the theme of disintegration. It is, in my opinion, the true emotional pinnacle of the work (and perhaps of Pearce's entire career): a fleeting moment of clarity in which the artist finally reveals himself and shows us his soul, stripped of the armor of machines, the ideological screen, the mediation of others who act as his spokesperson. Him alone and his guitar. Finally. A song of sadness, solitude, and resignation that in its disarming simplicity (an elementary guitar chord for not even two and a half minutes of duration) not only constitutes the pulsating heart of the work (and through which the work itself becomes finally intelligible and comes to acquire unity and coherence), but also is able to articulate, in the most complete and absolute manner, the sense and essence of Douglas P.'s relentless and pessimistic poetics: his condition of a perpetual exile, his incurable laceration, his approach towards the end.

Precisely for this sensation of dismay, of disappointment, and at the same time of complete resignation in the face of the imminent end, Death in June's music is, in my opinion, truly apocalyptic: the sense of man's abandonment to his Fate, the struggle to change it, the pride, the firmness, and the inevitable defeat. But it is not a matter here of understanding the apocalypse in the same sense that groups like Current 93 and Sol Invictus have of such a concept; here it is about the "Apocalypse of the Self", of outlining, through symbols and impactful iconography but with dense emotional content, the personal hell of the artist himself. Douglas's dimension of pain is, in fact, a strictly private dimension, difficult to export and that does not wish to ascend in any way to a universal model: the death of a man ("The Death of a Man") is indeed the death of Man, but only because here subject and object coincide (the apotheosis of individualism!), in a conception in which each is a world unto themselves. Rather shareable is the pain, so deep and pure, which can only be recognized and understood by anyone else with the slightest conception of what it is. All of this is in "Fall Apart", impossible to explain in words: either you feel it or you don't, a matter of sensitivity. For this reason, in my opinion, the song constitutes the most valid test for understanding if at the end of the show, amidst the clamor of exalted supporters and the profound disdain of detractors, one has truly understood Death in June's music.

All the rest (the camouflages, the runes, the Totenkopf) are nonsense, nothing more than ornamental trappings and masks that conceal and at the same time symbolize the discomfort, the solitude, the torment of this unique and misunderstood artist.

"And if I fall from Dreams All my Prayers are Silenced To love is to lose And to lose is to Die... And why did you say That things shall fall And fall and fall and fall And fall apart?"