47 minutes, 14 seconds

Elijah's Mantle
Angels of Perversity

Elijah's Mantle: Truly brilliant, or just pretentious? I wrote about Mark St. John Ellis and his formidable project a while back, posing this very same question. Years of listening to his music (and his dramatic readings of Romantic poetry over said music) have brought me no closer to an answer, unfortunately. And maybe that speaks well of Elijah's Mantle. I love the ambiguity--as with Laibach, In the Nursery, and other practitioners of all things bombastic, you're not quite sure how seriously to take Elijah's Mantle. The "how" of listening to it is just as important as the pleasure (or pain) you might get from listening to it.

Angels of Perversity was their debut, and it's pretty different from the more recent efforts that focused on poetry. It's more musical, for one thing, and the lyrics are a lot more likely to be in French or even Latin than English. It has a more liturgical feel, although I wouldn't exactly call it worshipful. Like a lot of this sort of music, there's something very threatening lurking just under the surface, something that even comes up for air from time to time, as on the aggressive, rollicking "Es la Perdición," still the loopiest track Elijah's Mantle have ever recorded.

I don't know what to make of Elijah's Mantle, and I appreciate that about them.

Also today:

47:14 IC 434, Weathering Skies
47:12 The Days of the Trumpet Call, Purification
47:11 Xmal Deutschland, Tocsin
47:10 Manic P, God's Tears
47:10 Panzer Division, I Am Sinistar
47:08 Corvus Corax, Viator