Sisters of Mercy - Classic or Dud

Amazing how an article still gets written every time someone puts a song through Paulstretch.

otm

there's a normal speed part in there too, so it's not just Paulstretch

FM&LM&AM: it's wrong but it's not bad either:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzt6DVW5pEM

listened to 'temple of love' three times before breakfast this morning. did we ever sort out whether the 1983 or the 1992 version was best?

I prefer the later version. I'm amazed how many people seem to prefer early Sisters in general but I don't know what the consensus is. If someone had described me both eras I'd think the earlier stuff would be better but after experiencing it all I think from Floodlands onward they are superior in every way. "Under The Gun" is fucking fantastic.

Agree. Album-era Sisters > EP-era Sisters.

Thirded, but I can totally see how early Sisters had more of an impact on the scene.

can't imagine anyone rating Vision Thing THAT highly. But sure, First Last and Floodland are amazing.

I vastly prefer Vision Thing to First Last but Floodlands is their best by miles.

Some Girls comp >>> Vision Thing

Gift by The Sisterhood is great too btw (other singer but most people don't notice)

A Slight Case of Overbombing is my favorite Sisters release tbh.

Vision Thing is awful

INCOMING

Some Girls Wander By Mistake > Floodland >>> FALAA = Vision Thing is how I break it down to an extent

I can't remember what the Sisterhood sounds like tbh

The first SoM I bought was the Temple of Love 1992 CD single when it came out (I was 15 then) and I still love it, unnecessary remix or not.

Funny, mine’s the complete opposite:
FALAA >>Floodland>Vision Thing=Some Girls

Crazy. Colonel Poo OTM

Yeah I'm with the good Col on this one although I'd put at least one arrow between some girls and floodland.

Gift probably between those two, although maybe equal with floodland - less identifiably 'songs' but bangers nonetheless.

Body Electric/Adrenochrome is still the most I've spent on a single record (inflation adjusted, and maybe even not).

vision thing is dumb. has one good song. still wish they'd put out a new album.

I like pre-Album Sisters & Vision Thing better than the first two albums, which is like goth challops in extremis

fwiw the first summer I had a driver's license & car I drove around my stupid town blasting Vision Thing on cassette so

it was a 15 yr old Mazda 626 and the opposite of "Something Fast"

I like FALAA & Vision Thing, just not as much as Floodland & EP era

There were 3 remixed Vision Thing songs on the Temple of Love 1992 EP so I used to listen to those a lot as a teenager. Mostly Vision Thing (the song) iirc.

I remember being so disappointed and embarrassed when Vision Thing came out.

it doesn't sound like the previous 2 albums, so I can get why someone who loved those would be disappointed. Vision Thing definitely had the ... i don't know what to call it but a lot of albums had it in the late 80s aesthetic ... like it's definitely "of its time"

Definitely of its time, but it still *sounds* great. The problem is that the songs are not really there (Doctor Jeep, Detonation Bd) or not as great as Andy seems to think they are (More). Still, Ribbons and I Was Wrong are classics.

EP-era* > Ribbons > Floodland > FALAA > Rest of Vision Thing

Vision Thing reminds me of the Mission frankly, or the Cult. Too rock and roll for me, not enough goth.

Goth bands get worse and worse is a p good rule of thumb.

at least Go Away White wasn't some butt rock album

turning and turning in a widening gyre
the cape dancer cannot hear the drum machine
goth falls apart; the center cannot hold
mere guitar wankery is loosed upon the world
Wayne Hussey is newly sober, touring everywhere
Pulled over in a Subaru in Glendale
The Murph gets a conviction, while the worst
do remixes for Cleopatra Records

"25 whores in the room next door
25 floors and I need more"

Cringe from the very beginning

Shouldn’t there be a new record by now? Eldritch claimed he’d make one if Trump got elected.

I think he's proud enough of the catalog that he wouldn't want to fuck it up by making a new record. He's a smart enough guy to know the only way to make a new SoM record would be to figure out how to express the same sort of mood using more current sounds; to just fire up Doktor Avalanche and put the bass through the Boss chorus etc would sound pretty sad, there are hosts of nostalgic goth acts doing decent enough versions of that sound. But anything but "this sounds just like the Sisters of Mercy" would cause much of the old guard to wail and gnash its teeth. The omen of Chinese Democracy looms large for the geezers

Lasy time I saw them, Eldritch was wearing a white ice hockey jersey, he does not seem to care much what old goths think, and he’s clearly a lot more self-aware of his strengths and weaknesses than Axl.

yeah and half of his setlists is made up of unrecorded "new" material. I think he just feels there's no financial incentive to go and make a record (when the tours apparently are enough to make a living)

I read an interview where he said he was never convinced that a song was completely finished. In the 80s the limitations in resources and tools meant he'd eventually put out something that was just good enough even though he wasn't completely satisfied.

Modern sound production means he can fuck around with new songs forever without releasing them and he intends to do just that.

Lasy time I saw them, Eldritch was wearing a white ice hockey jersey, he does not seem to care much what old goths think, and he’s clearly a lot more self-aware of his strengths and weaknesses than Axl.

true true.

yeah and half of his setlists is made up of unrecorded "new" material. I think he just feels there's no financial incentive to go and make a record (when the tours apparently are enough to make a living)

yeah but your quotes around "new" are otm - I went to setlist.fm and had a look at the '17 tour -- there was "Arms," and "Summer," and "Crash and Burn" - and none of these are really new, some have been kicking around since '97. I'd bet a dollar he's not really writing stuff except maybe as a lark now and again. I do bring my own baggage to the table here because it's difficult for me to understand people who don't wanna finish their stuff, even though I know a couple of people like that, but it's utterly mystifying to me. I mean everybody knows that work is never finished, just abandoned, but still.

I guess it's procrastination yeah - I mean even a fullblown fiasco like Chinese Democracy can't be that much of a deterrent, Guns 'n Roses are still raking it in with their tours, it hasn't damaged their reputation at all.

Agreed. Pretty hard to fathom how one could "give up" like that on the most tangible aspect of an artistic career. But then again I suspect the main reasons are prosaically linked to business issues (eg paranoid distrust of labels, complications on songwriting credits for sacked band members). Shame cuz what I heard of the "new" songs seemed better than the stuff on Vision Thing.
Also a shame that Eldritch, like Robert Smith, the proud luddite that he is, can't see the possibilities of independent digital music distribution.

look, he does: their "upcoming gigs" page is some lyrics, digitally distributed http://www.thesistersofmercy.com/news/livenews.shtml

their t-shirt game is on point, anyway

INCOMING
― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Monday, October 15, 2018 12:30 AM

It's my ambition to post this with the news of a new album before anyone else catches it. I will surely lose this contest.

Floodland> Vision Thing > First Last > Some Girls.

I understand some disappointment but I think Vision Thing is awesome. "Something Fast" is one of their best songs. "Ribbons" is great too but there's not a song I don't like on it.

man that is madness.

Some Girls contains the following songs:

Temple of Love
Alice
Floorshow
Heartland
Body Electric
Lights

culling just my faves from it to assert that neither Floodland, nor Vision Thing, nor FALAA have that many songs of such high quality. Like, FALAA may have 6 real good songs and a couple great ones but six as good as those six? nah man

There are a few great songs on Some Girls but sorry to say I found it a chore sometimes, despite being stylistically closer to things I normally like than the 2nd and 3rd studio albums.

Maybe they should just release a compilation of the newer songs in their live performances but given that Eldritch was afraid of being tied down to definitive versions, those probably would become the definitive versions.

Does blow my mind that much of Floodland was recorded in Stockport.

xxpost OTM

getting into the sisters of mercy at the late age of 33

You'll never catch up with the onslaught of new product.