My Review: Current93 - Halo

 Current 93 - Halo

Live at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

"Even Death is better than this useless life".

An evening at the theatre, where the stage, dimly lit as the show progresses, seems to sink into the bowels of a planet too suffering to be able to support different feelings that have not a rope around the neck.

Because there is no doubt that with Current 93 you always go to the theatre.

For this concert they chose a real one and the setlist confirmed that the 16 acts were full of intensity, where the plot was perfectly carried out, ending up cluttering your thoughts, exciting your nerves, shaking your muscles even if not stimulated by dances.

The fog of civilisation surrounds our fears as we listen to these songs, petroleum-stained feathers are sticking more and more during this esoteric torrent in which no light appears except the beauty of the authenticity that Monsignor Tibet and his musician disciples distribute in this tragedy.

A concert that becomes the artistic journey of a band that has always had little consideration, but has always been able to maintain the balance of its coffers.

Songs like prayers, with needles and thorns in a bloody envelope where lumps are a blessing and not a curse.  

Musical notes like continuous shrieks with a tail made of tremors able to frighten. As if theatre taught horror films how to create endless fears.

Listening to this gig, you might wonder how the boundaries of time are, how we have come to lose essential energy. You really do enter the temple of pain, not the crumpled up sheet metal one of Christian Death, but a more refined and subtle one.

The whole neurotic row of the darkest feelings sticks to the songs, with the dominant feeling that restlessness is the real queen of the stage, creaking even though there are atoms of sweetness and enchantment.

Decadence, medieval battles, sounds swollen with soft vibrations, the light held in the throat of an increasingly tired and opaque candle: this and much ferments in the barrel in which the songs make room for us.

David Tibet organises everything as if it were the last performance: we feel his tension and, for the way some songs are modified compared to the versions on the albums and his recitative and scratchy interpretation, we can only thank him for having offered us a show that exalts and goes beyond expectations.

With him, of course, you don't waste time hoping for some songs over others: everything is a ritual, defined and ending with our fragility in the depths of the night...

Everything becomes sulphurous, almost diabolical, with the feeling that a camouflaged storm is hitting us, a deception that from the bowels grabs our ankles.

The Gregorian chants, John Contreras's amazing cello swell our bellies with astonishment and the sensation of a godless mass of sounds, more severe than the universal judgement which makes us lost, becomes more and more real.

In all this 4 Hypnagogue 4 is the summa, the whole thing that settles like incense in our eyes, the drama of words that make room for the introduction of a piano with a smile, then the guitar to support it comes and later David: the stage turns into a devastated parvis among pains, sins and the darkness that awaits us. And the chest that remembers, in a fire of time. 

With, for example, the moving Sleep Has His House, dedicated to his father, David and the piano are the breath of intense thoughts that scratch Monsignor's uvula ending up turning us into witnesses of a black-nailed mood.

Simply devastating.

And it is this atmosphere that crosses our soul and leads it to surrender which makes us not only witnesses but accomplices of those mental territories from which we often want to escape.

The sumptuous The Death of the Corn, with its razor-sharp opening, its adherence to the primordial protocol of Industrial music, only to become a classic neo-folk ballad, is an experience to be done, without brakes.

But I don't want to give the idea that listening to this album could become traumatic (it wouldn't be a tragedy given the quality of the considerations and emotions that spring out like mushrooms), because there is a positive plan, a beauty dressed in white that manages to find its space and become the smiling princess who walks between the notes with a black coat and the collar lifted up: where there are connections between extremes there is in any case a hope that plants its flag.

Even if it is in our lungs.

We only have to listen to this show because, when quality triumphs, from the theatre you go home with a heart that has found a way to expand its emotional potential.

And that final voice of a little girl in "God is love", in the nervous Locust, shows that everything can continue with a glimmer of hope...

There are bees that are indefatigable....

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld 

Salford

16th February 2022