ALL THE PRETTY LITTLE HORSES

Imbuing nursery rhymes with sinister musical, vocal and lyrical overtones, CURRENT 93's "All the Pretty Horses" is about as viscerally disturbing as broadly defined folk music can get. It's as if SPIROGYRA and THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND were stripped of their tenuous sanity layer by layer. I understand this band goes back to the early 1980s but leader David Tibet, a pioneer of industrial pop at the time, only turned to twisted folk after meeting early English pioneer SHIRLEY COLLINS in the 1990s. The result was nothing like her work, yet could never have existed without her influence.

Against all odds, some of this is shimmering in its beauty, even as you over clutch the edge of your seat until the stuffing extrudes. In particular, the short pieces that comprise the bulk of the tracks combine hypnotic and minimalist melodies with heavily enunciated barely sung words and sonorous acoustic guitar. Apart from the lullabye "All the Pretty Horses", "The Bloodbells Chime" is almost pure acoustic bliss with innocent if creepy cliches, while "The Inmost Light" begins to insert dissonant voices that add to the growing sense of foreboding. "The Frolic" is a much longer track that is in the vein of the brief experiments, just successfully elasticized, and with a macabre closing. Then again, "The Inmost Night" might be where Tibet could ease off the throttle. It's all well and good to be privy to the ruminations of a disturbed mind, but dementia?

The two climactic "epics" veer sharply towards post rock, particularly "Twilight Twilight", which fails to engage for more than a third of its considerable duration, while "The Inmost Light Itself" represents a continuation of "Inmost Light" but with considerably more overt vitriol. The album ends with a reprise of the title track and the ambient "Patripassian".

Just like the music herein, the album deliberately lacks balance. It's one that invites, nay, demands, at least rudimentary pangs of interpretation. Regardless, it erodes prior set points for progressive folk. I won't get on my high horse here but I'm pretty sure this intriguing if mildly flawed effort deserves a roundup.

After a transitional phase following his artistic parting of the ways with Doug Pearce, David Tibet led Current 93 to another storming success on this album. Having already taken the group's neofolk style in a more gentle direction on the previous album (Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre), Tibet and his musical collaborators (including guest vocalist Nick Cave and horror writer Thomas Ligotti) work in more variation, ranging from childhood lullabies to aspects of the drone and ambient styles of Current 93's pre-neofolk days. The end result is one of the group's richest musical concoctions yet, with even Tibet's lyrics taking in a more diverse range of moods and styles than before.

The only full-length album in the Inmost Light Trilogy, ALL THE PRETTY LITTLE HORSES was released in 1996 between the two EPs, "Where The Long Shadows Fall (Beforetheinmostlight)" and "The Starres Are Marching Sadly Home (TheInMostLight ThirdAndFinal)." The most diverse soundscapes of the trilogy are found on this 14-track release that adds up to about 55 1/2 minutes. One again David Tibet is joined by Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton on percussion and strings as well as sitting in as producer and mixing engineer with John Balance returning for vocals on three tracks and CURRENT 93 counterpart Michael Cashmore plays guitar, bass, glockenspiel and piano. The album features many other guests including Nick Cave making a cameo on a couple tracks.

Revolving around an adhesive label on the original packaging referring to the album as a Hallucinatory Patripassianist's Philosophy which apparently in Christian theology is an Eastern concept of modalism that God The Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are three different modes or emanations of one monadic God. A lyrical rotisserie of various themes of pain and death along with the overcoming of such through the light or inner soul is the primary theme of this esoteric and heady excursion through an apocalyptic folk based soundscape steeped with varying vocal narrations with a post-industrial mood setting. The album focuses on the usual neofolk acoustic guitar strumming of this chapter of CURRENT 93 but also heavy on droning, electronic experimentalism.

Graced with the same Shirley Collins inspired folk intimacy of previous releases only set to the world of eschatological esotericism and the mysticism of poets like William Blake, ALL THE PRETTY HORSES goes for the jugular with its bizarre post-industrial bleakness that seems to come into full fruition with the collaborative forces of Steve Stapleton and John Balance by his side. The album features lush lullaby type folk as heard on the traditional title track (which makes an augmented reprise at the end) as well as offering piano-based bleakness with TIbet's most sinister vocal narrations on "The Inmost Night." While mostly narrating his poetic prose in a most exaggerated spoken manner, on tracks like "This Carnival Is Dead And Gone" Tibet almost succeeds in a full-singing effect but offers his utterly distinct methodology of always sounding like he's speaking even when technically hitting the notes that would indeed qualify him as a singer!

The album's greatest strength is the varying soundscapes at hand with alternating folky passages mixing with bleaker electronic-based industrial bits that evoke an earlier age of CURRENT 93. Many tracks are nothing more than short little ditties whereas others such as "Twilight Twilight Nihil Nihil" capture a full apocalyptic industrial soundscape approach and eke out a sense of impending disaster for over eight minutes thus making the album feel like a seesaw ride of uplifting little folk pieces of innocence to full on climactic nightmares in musical form. Followed by the 9 1/2 "The Inmost Light Itself" which offers a continuation of the bleak detached and depressive subject matter only reverting back to the apocalyptic folk with not only Tibet's particularly whispered vocals but by a scattering of sound samples of children in the background. The album ends with Nick Cave offering vocal performances, first on the reprise of the short but sweet title track and followed by the closing "Patripassian" which finds cave in spoken word narration reading text from the Pensées of Blaise Pascal over a loop of English 16th century choral music.

Considered a fan favorite many are unaware that this album sits smack dab in the middle of a conceptual trilogy which is not surprising due to the fact Tibet's esoteric connections are more conceptual than on a musical footing that makes it all easy to connect. There is really no reason why any of t these three chapters cannot exist on their own and the listener will not diminish the experience one little bit if any of the EPs are simply glossed over. Overall a great apocalyptic dirge through the many musical forms of depression and bleakness that Tibet sought out with great fanfare. I absolutely adore these intersecting creative forces where the masterminds of CURRENT 93, Coil and Nurse With Wound bring the best of their worlds to one work table. A triumphant display of dark ambient and apocalyptic folk at its finest.