Siouxie & the Banshees
Juju

THE REVIEW

When you're a young, dreamy kid, it's easy to get disappointed. You look around and find yourself a stranger in the reality that surrounds you. Suffocated in a generation that doesn't match you. Comforted by small things, delicate flowers invisible to the world. Few things, besides ourselves, seem to match us. And so, you start talking to yourself. Mainly you write, and you jealously guard your reality enclosed in the pages of an adolescent diary. Some faithfully recount this metallic and cold world that surrounds us, the coldness that has entered the blood and soul of people. But other dreamers fly further. They describe parallel universes with an exotic and fabled flavor, where fantastic and monstrous creatures move, a dark representation, a metaphor, of life.

Siouxie Sioux, or Susan Janet Dallion, has chosen a horrific and decadent setting. A gloomy and bloody sabbath unfolds around the visionary union of ethnic and electronic music, in the masterpiece of dark punk.

Cursed songs, furious guitars, an obsessive chant. Siouxie is possessed by her inner demons, she surrenders to delirium and heart-wrenching screams.

The delirium of "Spellbound," as with the Euripidean Bacchae, culminates in the orgiastic trance state of "Into the Light." The Middle Eastern taste of "Arabian Knights," an explosive track followed by two less frantic but equally cursed and hypnotic pieces, like "Halloween" and "Monitor," which bring horror into a post-industrial setting. But the gloomy misty lands with a strong gothic flavor return in the cemetery of "Night Shift," and continue to reign in the subsequent "Sin In My Heart" and "Head Cut." The finale is entrusted to "Voodoo Dolly," a piece perhaps not so strong taken individually, but a perfect conclusion to the album with its rarefied air and dilated atmospheres that fill with an obsessive and menacing crescendo, a chilling dream that fades bitterly into Sioux's spectral groan.