The Sisterhood
Gift

During the period when the disagreements between Andrew Eldritch and Wayne Hussey became palpable to the point that the Sisters of Mercy were forced to interrupt their glorious path - in the mid-glorious '80s - the dark vocalist with the thick sideburns decided not to sit idly by and to create an immediate counterbalance to the Mission, which his former partner was bringing to prominence.

The name Sisters of Mercy, due to inevitable legal disputes, remained frozen and unusable, so Eldritch devised The Sisterhood: meaning "the sisterhood," just to maintain the project's core concept. Without straying too far from the iconography of the original band's style on the track of the most straightforward British dark - but electronically reworking the sound - he dedicated himself to producing a single album embodying everything that would represent a sort of transition between the old and the new course. Guitars almost abolished, lots of synths, ominous and obsessive refrains, the usual drum-machine named Dr. Avalanche (actually a Drumulator by Emu System) and above all a slew of more or less credited guests that at the time suggested something sensational. Alan Vega from Suicide and Patricia Morrison from Gun Club above all.

It should be noted, incidentally, that Vega, in truth and according to him, had a very marginal role in the recordings and it was instead Morrison who made the more substantial contribution; naturally becoming a permanent member in the continuation of Eldritch's productions, when the name Sisters of Mercy was finally reclaimed.

The Sisterhood seemed to many like a personal and filler operation, so to speak... to not stay inactive. Eldritch's sparse writing gave the impression that a handful of good ideas were diluted and fragmented into those five tracks that were certainly too long (some exceeding 8 minutes); and that the repetitive formula of lyrics suspended between the prophetic and the cryptic was nothing more than a pretext to use his voice. The opening track "Jihad" indeed stretches an Arabic melody to the extreme loaded with reverb that unfolds among cabalistic numbers and electronic chants on a sequencer carpet, recalling other lesser-known names from the scene back then. Only after a good ten minutes or so does the tension dissolve into the apocalyptic depths of "Colors", a certainly more accomplished and effective piece that would implant itself in the band's future taste: not by chance, it was released a year later as a b-side of the 12" of "This Corrosion" and in some editions of the album "Floodland."

The pinnacle of the album "Gift" is nonetheless the emotionally melancholy synthetic ballad "Giving Ground", which with organ sounds and less aggressive arrangements packages what I believe was Eldritch's project idea at that moment; namely a less new wave evolution of the Sisters of Mercy, turned to the techno-industrial taste that was beginning to be in the air, but with a decadent poetic vein.

To close, the tedious and obsessive "Finland Red Egypt White", which recovers something of Kraftwerk in a minimalist and unappealing way; and then the biblical "Rain From Heaven", which, though in an obsessive key, manages to return a highly intense dreamlike image of eldritchian visions, germinating on that ground that would generate "Floodland" a year later. Torrential rains, floods, black fatalism, nihilism, and disillusion climax in a sermon that grows slowly and concludes chorally to recite as follows: as the water flows over the bridge, as we walk on the floodland, as we walk on the water, we forget we forget, rain from heaven.

Generally considered a minor and irrelevant work even in the history of the Sisters of Mercy, in my opinion, "Gift" remains a rock-solid testimony - albeit little known - of the uncertainties and fragilities that many bands of the time had to face. An era when genres still had a rather marked identity, but in the face of immediate successes linked to the zenith of the dark and new wave phenomenon burnt ideas and names at a dizzying pace. So much so that Hussey's own Mission had a short life and the original Sisters of Eldritch managed to release one album in '87, one in '90, and two collections, thus reaching today with 18 years of promises never kept again.

To me, Eldritch has always been likeable: a maddeningly coherent and iconographic artist, he enjoys a cultural level above average and has always known how to embody the figure of the perfect dark crooner, halfway between western esotericism and urban and post-atomic love damnations.