The Sisters Of Mercy
Some Girls Wander By Mistake

THE REVIEW

“Paint my Name in Black and Gold…”

Careful, reader. You will not find any musical judgment here: once formulated, it has now become a superfluous detail that obscures rather than clarifies. Furthermore, I wouldn’t be capable of it.

More than a review, this is an act of unconditional devotion (very personal, of course…), which alone could motivate the writing of these few lines about an album that in some parts is now more than a quarter-century old. Let’s hold it in our hands before opening and putting it on the turntable. Here it is: an object of worship, almost a manifesto.

Starting with the cover: black, on which stands out, in white, the logo—a lobotomized head—of Merciful Release. The title echoes, ironically, the name of the group, playing hide and seek with religious references, and alludes to the anthology nature of the work. The third full length in order of release (after "First and Last and Always" and "Floodland"), "Some Girls Wander By Mistake" is indeed a collection (though not complete) of the until then disordered production of the Sisters comprised between 1980 and 1983 and scattered in numerous singles and 12”. Listening to it means accessing recordings otherwise difficult to find, rediscovering in their purest (and most engaging…) form those original ingredients that made the band from Leeds an icon: an unusual rhythm section, built on the metronomic and relentless beats of Doc Avalanche and the dark and menacing bass of Adams, the sharp and scratching guitars of Marx and Gunn, and above all, like a black priestess constantly in the spotlight, the splendid vocal timbre, enigmatic and gloomy, of Andrew Eldritch, skilled at painting landscapes of inconsolable metropolitan alienation.

And yet the record (and the band) is too narrow to be called “gothic,” the convenient label where all the cows turn out to be black. In reality, it is a rock that is dark and claustrophobic but, insofar as it perfectly interprets the mood of an era, anything but stereotypical and manneristic. The gothic iconography, although present (and certainly the Sisters have undoubtedly contributed to creating it, no matter what Mr. Eldritch might now say from his lazy German exile), is the less striking, more superficial aspect of an aesthetic that above all intensely adheres to life experiences and is therefore a genuine need for expression. As with all new wave, it grafts onto the trunk of punk counterculture, with which the Sisters share the minimalist and liberating approach (and naive pieces and decidedly approximate like Watch or the Home of the Hitmen are there to remind us), Eldritch and company explore, radicalizing it, the nihilistic component unconsciously foreshadowed by the Pistols with the cry “No future.” The result is an original musical language that amalgamates in an exemplary synthesis suggestions from different sources, which cannot be precisely quantified: seventies hard rock, Suicide’s clash rock, disco, the militant and dissonant rock of the Fall...

Here, fear, generational void, the anguished sense of existence are internalized and filtered through a morbid and decadent sensitivity that transforms the squalid banality of everyday life, its contradictory aspects, into epic and visionary images. But it is not a mere process of sublimation. Dreams, delusions, altered states of consciousness (even self-induced. And that the numerous references to drugs are not simply a literary motif is testified by the leader's own biographical experience…) gain an almost physical depth and consistency. On one hand, they are metaphors capable of representing the extreme condition of existence, on the other, they become the very foundation of reality. The word is no longer just a vehicle that leads elsewhere, referring to something else; but lives its own life, crusted with genuinely poetic preciousness, it becomes a horizon of meaning in itself insofar as it denounces the total lack of any Abgrund, any foundation: art, words, and music are the needle and thread with which to keep a torn life sewn together, stretched like a too-tight blanket between the fleetingness of the present and the inscrutability of the future.

It is no coincidence that many pieces reach an almost religious emotional depth and tension; that the layering of symbols and meanings becomes denser and more varied with each listen, almost forming a meticulous syntax of emotions that fills things with new pathos after having emptied them of their more usual, stagnant meanings. The reasons to enjoy this album are as many as the songs that compose it. Incapable of establishing a preference or fully articulating the emotions that each listening continues to evoke, I quote at random: “Alice”, an absolute classic, introduced by the disorienting beat of a drum machine and then launched into a relentless ride through the swirling recesses of the soul; “Body Electric”, the group’s first real single, a testament to the musical temperament that animates it: relentless and breathtaking rhythm, slippery riffs of distorted guitars, and threatening and scratching voice to reel off surreal and hallucinated lyrics; “Lights”, dark and depressed, so suggestively woven with echoes of the Doors yet at the same time wide open to scenarios of hallucinatory introspection. “Heartland”, in its own way one of the most moving testimonies of love, deep, dramatic, with its slow fading on the same expression, repeated infinitely as in a desperate exorcism; “Valentine”, cryptic and bitter meditation on the absurdity of war; “Kiss the Carpet”, slow, majestic, and hypnotic initiation into the arcane mysteries of a faltering psyche; “Burn”, a chilling psalmody from an occult ritual, played on Eldritch’s vocal evolutions, which now seem to roll inexorably down (“Down down down…”) towards bottomless chasms with no exit, now desperately scratch the walls of half-opened crypts; “Floorshow”, a deadly tarantula of danceable, almost epileptic rock that sarcastically updates the alienation of modern life to a disco rhythm.

“Temple of Love”, their ultimate hit, as well as one of the most powerful and compelling tracks that, in my humble opinion, has ever been written in pop music. A small black pearl that everyone should include in their personal catalog, that everyone should at least once be able to appreciate its precious, intense opalescence. A living album, still intense and burning, though of a cold fire that pierces from the depths. Listen to it. And love it. Always.