The Sisters of Mercy
Floodland

THE REVIEW

Eldricht was left alone.

Then he met Patricia Morrison, and nobody ever really knew if the pair got along for real.

Then it was Jim Steinman's turn in production and Doktor Avalanche in the control room, a dusty mist emerging as if from a Fritz Lang movie among old Casio keyboards, shoulder sequencers, keytars, dark-oriented but confused landscapes, and sometimes even People from Ibiza.

Floodland was born in 1987 and although the noblest feeling might seem the impetuous bass line of Lucretia My Reflection, both the videoclips and the music are a whirlwind of sound ranging from British gothic rock to the most teased-up darkwave. A whirlwind intertwined with Steinman's baroque aesthetics and those choruses, sometimes so monumental and synthetic, yes, like This Corrosion, the architecture of a new universal gothic sound that knows how to shake up dark souls but also the round curves of some lovely suburban goth girl.

Dominion Mother Russia, a sonic architecture of a dark and universal imaginary. The invocation of Mother Russia, both mother and threat, the prophecy of the danger of lust for power over the West, ( Anthem of the website too? ), makeshift geopolitics in conference with the Apocalypse, Edward Luttwac meet Red Ronnie, Eldricht's mental confusion between the Cold War, the loneliness of dark numbers and Morrison's curves, instrumental minimalism vs. choral monumentality, all of this in a random and chaotic form contributes to the creation of one of the most representative tracks by the Sisters.

The lyrics, black rivers flowing among apocalyptic images and almost biblical visions, Eldritch sings of submerged cities and dark powers, images of Power that evoke the great allegories of authority and decay of Dostoevsky and the menacing landscapes of Poe. In Lucretia My Reflection the female figure is both mirror and ruin, a symbol of decadence and strength, like the gothic heroines of Mary Shelley or the femmes fatales of Baudelaire, an inseparable reflection of the world’s beauty and its inevitable decay.

And then those choruses, so monumental, flashing from a symphonic orchestra, a barbaric arena or a celestial ark in This Corrosion, ritual of destruction and inevitable rebirth. That video, that night, that pouring rain, the purifying water that submerges everything. Corruption becomes almost a philosophical concept, close to the visions of decay of Joris-Karl Huysmans or the cathedrals of ruin by Coleridge; Flood I and Flood II like two chapters from a dark gospel, the water that invades and purifies but also erases, water becoming an ambivalent symbol like in the biblical Flood or the dark waters of The Fall of the House of Usher.

I don`t need no one to understand

Kill the king, when love is the law
And then we`ll turn round
Gimme dream child
And do you hear at all?

Eldritch uses images of dancing with ghosts, of reflections and shadows to transform loneliness and fear into poetry, and the reflections recall Wilde’s mirror obsessions and the dark fairy tales of the German Romantics; there aren’t only political references but also personal ones: the sense of isolation after breaking up with the other band members becomes a metaphor for a collapsing world. The album was born from this solitude and the collaboration with Patricia Morrison and Jim Steinman, who amplified the epic tone. But the real magic is that every lyric seems written like a spell, words that don’t describe but evoke, that don’t tell stories but open doors into visions, and if we don’t find direct explanations, we can read Floodland as an apocalyptic diary, a book of prophecies where Eldritch turns the end of civilization into a gothic dance, a shadow theater that continues to resonate as if it had not been recorded in the ’80s but in a suspended time, and in this suspended time coexist the Bible, Poe, Shelley, Baudelaire, and Wilde, all reflected in the black mirror Eldritch hands us.

And in all its shamelessness, it’s one of my favorites by the Band.

Hey now, hey now now, sing This Corrosion to me
Hey now, hey now now, sing This Corrosion to me
Hey now, hey now now, sing This Corrosion to me
Hey now, hey now now