The Sisters Of Mercy
First And Last And Always

THE REVIEW

“Sisters Of Mercy.” For years, their name and especially that of their leader have evoked thoughts of esoteric cults and occult practices, elevating them to an emblem of what was the murky British Dark Wave.
A band that has managed to explore, concentrate, and make its own the darkest sides of rock, creating often somber, but fatefully compelling, waves of music.

Their first work, “First & Last & Always,” is also the truest and most essential, a quick journey into darkness.
Ten tracks, ten gothic dances. The whole is a sepulchral ceremony, composed of crushing yet light ballads, macabre yet clear, eerie yet with an endless taste for purity.
While the drums mark an obsessive rhythm and the keyboards open up to hypnotic notes, Andrew Eldritch’s voice joins the ethereal choirs: restless, vibrant, deep, evocative, perverse, and almost demonic, an icon of Gothic Rock in itself. From the very beginning, from the first sound, a surreal climate of ruin flows like a black waterfall and the group's passionate charisma is immediately cleansed by “Black Planet.”
“Walk Away” is still a cemetery clearing, with an urgent and funereal rhythm, opening the doors to the subsequent “No Time To Cry,” which, as its title honors, leaves no room for regrets, everything seems lost, and life is submerged by reality, by a truth that leaves nothing behind. The tragic dream continues through the pulses of “A Rock And A Hard Place” and delves into an ever-deeper abyss, finally settling into a dense and cold atmosphere that colors the fundamental track of the album; it is “Marian,” whose barely perceptible lyrics overlap, merge, and get lost, wrapped in the dark melody that always hovers majestically somber.
Memorable are also the shouted phrases torn by fear that tighten “Logic,” imbued with the same mystical and visceral beauty first breathed with “Possession.”
The moment of conclusion arrives, and it couldn't be better than “Some Kind Of Stranger,” a subdued piece, in progressive decline, which like a soft breath of wind extinguishes the hectic cold flame of “First & Last & Always.”

“Can you hear me calling you to save me, save me, save me from the grave…”