Some band or other already copped ‘Funeral’ as the title for their own record the year before last, which is a shame. It sure would have fitted snug like a grave digger’s glove here. ‘The Spell’ is adequate enough though, if we’re talking black magic; darkness, cobwebs, potions, druid beats, the sudden onset of dense fog. That sort of thing. The pace is decidedly funereal, wrapped by the creeping inertia of chugging minor chords, and we’re not talking any old last-rite-of-passage ceremonial, more a cinematic nightmare vision thereof, as filtered through the wiry directorial hands of Tim Burton in a room with no windows and too much carbon dioxide. They’ve been mastering this kind of potent theatrical paranoia over a number of years and successive albums now, and little differs here. Only with their fifth album they’ve possibly never sounded as ritualistic.
It returns, song after song, to the same rough, distorted staccato template (in ‘Tangled’, ‘The Spell’, ‘The Replacement’ and ‘GPS’ particularly), an aural pendulum as pivot, which is hypnotic in its repetition and authoritative in its hypnotism. It ties the album in place like a heavy iron ball and chain around the ankle of every tune, which is binding, regulating and of course repetitive. But it does make ultimate sense when considering the whole picture and holds proceedings in a tight focus, like an incarcerated inmate swinging a mallet against a rock-face for hours on end with a near mechanical steadiness.
Add to this brooding proficiency some trepid sounding Hammond organ, commanding piano, mournful heavily-strung strings and Pall Jenkins’ wretched, strained vocal pleadings and what you have is a black marriage between Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds and a mesmeric Ozzy Osborne, performed by Afghan Whigs’ fromtman Greg Dulli, sealed with a goblet of blood and a large silver platter of melodrama. Which is dramatic if nothing else. ‘The Letter’ is one of the most sublime tracks on offer here, separate from the imposing chains of the aforementioned central pivot, floating on gusty air like the Tindersticks reinterpreting a mid-period PJ Harvey ballad. ‘GPS’ is one of the most harrowing, like a System Of A Down riff stolen by Clinic. And everything else fits conveniently between those two marker posts. Unforgiving.