The Banshees are joined by John McGeoch on guitar, formerly of Magazine, and he adds a scratchy, broken glass sound reminiscent of Jah Wobble’s work with Public Image Ltd. It adds greatly to the moody atmospheric horror theme that pervades this album, and Sioux’s vocals are more melodic than before – the whole ensemble feels like it really comes together to give something solid that is both like and unlike anything that has come before.
A lot of the underlying tracks are complex beats that are composed of smaller phrases that combine to a greater whole – this is most noticeable on the excellent track Into The Light. Their darkest track is the brooding Night Shift, a masterpiece about necrophilia, as disturbing as it should be and almost operatic in scope. Head Cut is similarly disturbed – the narrator sees a wooden mask in a museum but moves on to collecting severed heads. That the band manage to tackle such gruesome subjects without the over-the-top histrionics of metal bands is impressive, but also makes them that much more disturbing. It’s the difference between implied shadow and psychological horror versus gouts of bright red theatrical blood (Alice Cooper, for example, who also had a song about necrophilia).
The band also blend in social commentary with the horror, sometimes mixing the two. In some ways Night Shift is about coercive control, but this is built upon with the album-ender Voodoo Dolly, yet another track that brings to mind The End by The Doors. Budgie on drums pounds out voodoo beats and Steven Severin burns up the bass fretboard while Sioux chants out a song about a living doll that drains blood that could also be about a narcissistic girlfriend -
“Now this little voodoo dolly
Has made you very lazy
You're anaemic from her sucking
And when you're dead she'll find another”
but with the added darkness that perhaps the “victim” is paranoid and liable to violence -
“Better break that little dolly
And sling her in the corner
Now she's a sorry little dolly
Such a sorry little dolly”
They even get political with Arabian Knights, complaining of the oil industry “A monstrous oil tanker / Its wound bleeding in seas” and the subjugation of women in Arabic society "Veiled behind screens/ Kept as your baby machine”. Where they’re at their best, however, is when the commentary is couched within Gothic horror. This is an important step into the Goth genre.
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