Mid-Week Miscellany: Acheron, The Cure, The Sisters of Mercy & More

Lamb of God seems unavoidable this week. They're seemingly every other song on Liquid Metal and, while I have nothing against the band, I've never felt compelled to buy an album and nothing I've heard so far convinces me to do so now. A few random tweets last week between myself and James Fiend led me to dig out some old Cure albums and this week has largely been a detour from the heavy stuff of late and instead has been a descent into Goth rock moodiness (but still punctuated by some good old Satanic metal, of course).

The Cure was a band I followed very fervently at the height of Disintegration-era mania at the end of the 80s. I cannot pretend to have been on the bandwagon much earlier and jumped off again after Wish and its shiny, happy "Friday I'm in Love" landed just as grunge exploded. In that brief interim, though, I grabbed much of the backcatalogue and two of the band's early records, Seventeen Seconds (1980) and Faith (1981), stuck with me for a long while through many a shift in listening habits. Seventeen Seconds always struck me with its spare and hollow sounds (and a killer single in "The Forest") and Faith fed the gloomy melancholy that latched me (and probably every other kid in the 80s) onto this music in the first place. I know the next step of Pornography stands as the culmination of the momentum started here and I won't deny its status as the first real classic in the band's oeuvre but I always felt as if these others were somehow mine and, rediscovering them this last week, it still feels that way.

And while I was pulling the Cure off the shelf, I also grabbed some Sisters of Mercy. Floodland, to be specific. Another I grabbed late in the game, this one became a staple of my rotation circa 1992 as I tried my damnedest to woo any freshman co-ed with excess eyeliner using a copy of Peter Murphy's then-new Holy Smoke and any chemicals that could be had. While the hazy listening sessions didn't usually end as I desired, someone along the way left a copy of Floodland in my room. I transferred schools and never returned the CD. Good old pre-internet days left this band and Andrew Eldritch's colorful history a mystery to me and, what's more, I had no idea that the Mission, whose Children I had been toting around for a few years at this point, were ever in any way connected with the Sisters. At the time I quickly fell for the more metallic Vision Thing but, over the years, Floodland has shifted back to favorite status. "This Corrosion" may well be what I request to be played at my funeral (I love the idea of a lush, Jim Steinman-produced 11-minute goth hymn/synthpop to keep folks shifting in their seats).

I have not, though, completely lost my focus this week as the long range forecast seems to show that travel will be just fine to drive to Columbus and The Shrunken Head for their Metal Massacre 2012 this Saturday evening. A showcase of Ohio-based metal, the event features a few bands new to me; Beneath the Sea, The Conquering and Prosanctus Inferi, as well as the incredible Dismemberment and Satanic metallers, Acheron. I knew Acheron only by name and reputation (they're not fooling around with this shit) and decided to brush up with a purchase of their most recent record, 2009's The Final Conflict - Last Days of God. It's a heavy concept, an apocalyptic "Cerberus War" waged between the three major religions, fueled by the Satanic "Wolfen Society." It's a powerful, crisply-produced, mid-tempo churning record and rocks fairly well. The subject matter doesn't offend my sensibilities though I do get a bit turned off when bands take themselves this seriously. On the upside, though, bands of this ilk often have spectacular t-shirts...