This Mortal Coil
Blood

THE REVIEW

Third chapter (and last) of the This Mortal Coil project, a multifaceted entity conceived by the boss of 4AD, Ivo Watts-Russell, that brings together under the same roof the best musicians of his roster, the genuine 4AD, a true label-fetish of a certain dark-wave genre in the mid-'80s.

As with the two previous albums, a large number of cover versions form the backbone of the work, alternating with connecting tracks, mostly instrumental, assembled by Ivo himself and the trusty sound engineer John Fryer.

It is amusing to attempt to trace the numerous threads of the tracks reinterpreted here: but such is the eclecticism that in the end, the effort may prove futile. It ranges from Rodney Crowell's country songwriter "Til I Gain Control Again" to Gene Clark's "With Tomorrow", one of the founders of the Byrds; from the more sophisticated singer-songwriter style ("Late Night" by Syd Barrett or "Several Times" by Pieter Nooten, already with Clan of Xymox, a leading 4AD band) to the Turkish poet Natzim Hikmet who inspires "I Come and Stand at Every Door" on the nuclear Holocaust of Hiroshima, a song recorded by Pete Seeger in 1962 and present, in its most famous version, on the third album by the Byrds.

What actually counts is the stylistic transfiguration these tracks receive within the context of the project: elegant sounds, refined atmospheres and a nocturnal and surreal romanticism constitute the filigree of the uninterrupted 76 minutes of "Blood." The early '80s dark gives way here and there to acoustic guitars, a string quartet, even the garage rock of "I am the Cosmos", but these are episodes, in reality, "Blood" is nothing but the musical transcription of a dilated dream.

With this album, released in 1991 and perhaps slightly inferior to the first two amazing chapters, This Mortal Coil return to the shadow hidden behind the name of the supergroup: a citation from the famous monologue of Hamlet (yes, indeed "To be or not to be") in which Shakespeare evokes "this mortal coil," a metaphor for life.