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Monday, January 08, 2007

Crisis of Faith

In a book I wrote, I pointed out what a seismic crisis of faith it would be to arrive for Sunday morning services only to find the church doors bolted from the inside.

Sometime previous to writing said book, I had a friend who pointed out that referencing my own stuff was "like, arrogance cubed." Then Law & Order came back on and she lost interest in me, anyway.

A couple of months ago, a colleague told me that the Sisters of Mercy were about to release a new album. While this did not excite the sort of frothing mania that it would have, say, twenty years ago, it still piqued my interest. Muscle memory, I suppose.

I loved the Sisters of Mercy. I have everything they ever recorded and plenty of stuff they didn't. They spoke to me, although I am still unsure what they were saying half the time.

The Sisters released their first 7" single in 1980, then released five more singles and EP's on vinyl before finally releasing their first full-length album in 1985. Then they broke up. And went to court. Then the lead singer (Andrew Eldritch) put the band back together without anybody else and released a record in 1987. They broke up again (however that worked - but there was improbably a lawsuit that time, too). So Eldritch put the band back together with a bunch of guys who hated him and released an album in 1990. In 1993, they managed a single, which was a single song backed with a re-recording of 1982's "Alice."

And that's it.

This would not be a particularly unusual story - it could easily be A Flock of Seagulls, for instance - except that the Sisters of Mercy still exist in a fairly big way. They still headline big European festivals, they still sell bunches of tickets touring the US, they still write songs...but no records. After 16 years, I should be over this storyline, but when my colleague fed me the bait I promptly lost the game of chicken that I began with Andrew Eldritch in 1996.

That was the last time he updated his f*&%ing website.

So when my colleague says the Sisters are releasing a new album and I should check the website, I get all excited like Carrie on prom night and go home and guppy up to the website and...realize that this particular colleague has simply never seen the site before. Moron.

It looks all promising. It's this brilliant orange that puts you in mind of something entirely separate from the Sisters' music, despite Eldritch's constant snarky English guy claims that it's all very funny and you just don't get the joke (which some of you may recognize as Robert Smith's line, but everything's derivative, right?). It has last summer's tour dates, a touch commonly referred to as a "red herring." It starts with the line "Made glorious summer..." and really, who doesn't feel a false sense of superiority with a little Bard to light their way?

It spins a very believeable story about how they finally got out of their bad record contract and will be releasing a single any day and are working on an album but have not decided what to do with it in the record label sense. And it has said that same thing since 1996.

So that's the locked church door, to bring the point around. It's the will o' the wisp leading unwary travelers to their naive doom.

When I was younger and brasher, I challenged God to a fist fight. I'm sure it seemed edgy, but the irony was sadly unintended. Anyway, now that I'm older and wiser, I challenge Andrew Eldritch to a fist fight. If he wins, he can keep his weak-ass website the way it is, but when I pound his scrawny, pale, chemically-dependent ass into the ground, he has to either release an album or put a date on his "news."

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