Even the most casual Current 93 fan knows David Tibet's career has tended toward rue and malice: cracked spiels, sunken solemnity, opiate apocalypses. Of course, this has been going on since the early 1980s, but his past few albums have depicted an ever-expanding arena of anxiety and resignation. Tibet's recent output has been one decade-long spiritual crescendo, pitting atheists and junkie academics against blind blues oracles and Rapture-rousing dispensationalists. On 2004's Halo and this year's Sleep Has His House, the loosely organized outfit had maximized all of its most intriguing elements-- musical asceticism, mind-wrecked mysticism, intellectualism-- without lapsing into total self-parody. Black Ships Ate the Sky continues the trend with an extraordinary conceptual breadth (a formal song cycle based on a Methodist hymn) and some of Tibet's best songwriting in a decade.
Structurally, * Ships* is anchored by eight versions of Charles Wesley's "Idumea", a 1763 paean to doom and uncertainty: "A land of deepest shade/ Unpierced by human thought/ The dreary regions of the dead/ Where all things are forgot." Eighteenth-century hymns are not known for their entertainment value, and Tibet hedges his bets by enlisting a cadre of young sycophants (including Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Antony, and Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny). Each performance is unique, and yet the cumulative effect is cyclical: One Armageddon precedes another. Marc Almond's rendition situates an echoing Appalachian falsetto in the place where "flaming skies" break asunder. Bonnie's serrated rasp cuts through banjo drones. Baby Dee bristles with stormless rage and cool regret. The two irrefutable stars are Antony, whose doubled vibrato sounds like a shelf of glassware, and Shirley Collins, who slowly turns her honeyed voice into gravel.
Tibet mentions that the album's conceptual scheme comes from "a dream I had that Black Ships had entered our skies in preparation for the arising of the final Caesar and for the Second Coming of Christ." Regardless of one's disposition toward sin and redemption, that idea is certainly enough to warrant a full album, and Tibet is nearly unrivaled as a ranting doomsayer. He observes that "flying moons scare children," proclaims that he is "the king of the Eucharist," and obliges listeners to "kill Caesar like black ships eat skies." That solid advice is administered with weaving violins and a guitar that howls from the galley. Even in an era of freak-folk minstrelsy, Tibet makes nonsense sound genuinely harrowing. As always, you can accept his imagery as a profound allegory of warfare and disaster, or you could just read it as a sophisticated treatise on lunacy. A sentimental favorite is "The Autistic Imperium Is Nihil Reich", a funerary waltz at which Tibet delivers the eulogy: "I want to make love with the umbrella ladies who inhabit the stealing time." He is backed by dust storms, creaky floorboards, and streaking violas. The songs are incendiary and cosmic: solar flares and vibratory crackles on "The Dissolution of the Boat", steel-plated screams on "Black Ships Seen Last Year of Heaven", the slow contractions of a melodica on Clodagh Simonds' "Idumea". As a further development of the apocalyptic narrative, the album becomes less reliant on acoustic austerity and folk balladry. "Black Ships Were Sinking" drums up lashing typhoons of metal filaments, gibbering cellos, and cybernetic locust. "Black Ships Ate the Sky" is probably Tibet's most savage song since the early 1990s, a disconcerting concentration of hemorrhaging drums and lo-fi thrash. But these brash interludes hardly detract from the general sensation of suspension and cessation. In fact, Tibet's finest achievement is compiling mournful songs into an album with obvious momentum and tension. Like all Current 93 projects, Ships is bloated, but this is more of an inevitability than an accident. Despite patches of plodding esoterica, Black Ships builds elegy and aggression into hell-fire incantations. It's a mesmeric album made for midnight crackpots, acid-addled prophets, and nebbish posers.
