Ten Songs For Another World

About

(World of) Skin was a side project of Swan, a vehicle for exploring other facets of Gira & Jarboe's vision. This extraordinary album appeared in 1990 between Swans' über-folk masterpiece The Burning World of 1989 and the two 1991 albums dominated by blazing rock songs: Love of Life and White Light from the Mouth of Infinity. The image of Cerberus on the cover is a warning to those who would enter the other world. These ten songs enchant, terrify and disturb in turn. But step inside anyway ... ... through Please Remember Me, a mournful mid-tempo track with Michael Gira on lead vocal. Next comes the stirring Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes; the poem To Celia by Ben Jonson (1573-1637). Sung like a hymn by Jarboe, it concludes with a recitation of The Lord's Prayer over a collage of ominous shortwave noises and edgy found sound. The theme seems to be romantic love but there are ambiguities and the melody is pure old English devotional. Interestingly, The Lord's Prayer was a punk/goth favorite from the start, appearing in medley form on Join Hand, the 2nd album by Siouxsie & The Banshee, with elements of O Claire de la Lune and the chilling Tomorrow Belongs To Me from the movie Cabaret amongst other song snippet. On the elegiac Everything For Maria, Jarboe relates the death of the opera legend Maria Callas in macabre scenes of greed and plunder as "they" burst into her chambers for jewels and tapestrie. The impact of the striking imagery is amplified by the device of juxtaposing Maria's most triumphant moments -- the huge bouquets & the adulation - first with the vultures' frenzied looting, and then with her ashes upon the Aegean. Michael sings on The Child's Right, a desolate ballad about death and decay with obliquely spiritual imagery and I'll Go There, Take Me Home, a mighty rock song which pales in comparison to the terror that follow, a blood-curdling cover of Nick Drake's Black Eyed Dog in Jarboe's howling vocal, some eerie breathing and disembodied electronic barking. One's hair stands on end for the duration of the album; this is the sound of the Edvard Munch painting The Scream. After Michael's harsh reflections on A Parasite and Other Storie, Jarboe returns like an angel of morphia, luring the listener into the kingdom of the fading apparition on the melodious Dream Dream. Uncompromising to the end, Michael departs with the relentlessly pessimistic You'll Never Forget, while Jarboe's gently lilting Mystery Of Faith brings to mind a song like Nico's Sunday Morning on the first Velvet Underground album. About three quarters through, a German male vocal becomes audible, gradually rising in the mix and completing the recital after the music has ended. This narration by Hans J Blatter describes an eternal cycle of death and rebirth consisting of remembering, forgetting, reproducing, killing, imagining, rejecting one's identity and shedding self-consciousness in order to attain the absolute freedom of being a simultaneously superfluous & essential part of the universe. Or something like that. There's a sinister undertone to the melancholic renunciation whilst the profusion of front rounded vowels has a resonant, hypnotic effect. .

via Last.fm

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