Sisters Of Mercy founder and vocalist Andrew Eldritch has persistently dismissed the ‘goth’ tag for his band, whose sound is rooted in the bleak nihilism of Suicide and the Velvet Underground at their most opiated, combined with Stooges rawness and Doors psychedelic flamboyance. Instead, he sees them as an evolution of pioneering late-60s/early-70s classic rock.
On First And Last And Always, the Cold War-era paranoia of opener Black Planet conjures a desolate post-apocalyptic dystopia, the 60s hippie flower-power utopia now a demilitarised zone littered with destruction – a theme to which Eldritch would later return on the opener of 1987’s Floodland, Dominion/Mother Russia: ‘Run around in the radiation/Tune in, turn on, burn out in the acid rain'. The artillery of Oberheim DMX drum machine Doktor Avalanche announces Walk Away, one of guitarist Wayne Hussey’s compositional highlights, along with his sombre Marian, featuring Eldritch’s sinister Teutonic tones.
