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Steven Stapleton of NWW had very little to do with the recording and production of the original SWASTIKAS FOR NODDY, but within a couple of years, he orchestrated this reworking of it, cutting out the dead weight, smoothing some of the rough edges, and giving the whole project an overall coherence that is completely missing from the original record. Whether you are a Current 93 fan or not, if you like Nurse With Wound, this record is simply essential. It answers the question of what might happen if Stapleton were to approach Current 93 source material with the same whimsy and creative vision that he approaches his own work - a sort of SYLVIE AND BABS made up of "menstrual minstrels" rather than easy listening nightmares.
Yet, the record is still far more straightforward than most NWW work. Not exactly surreal, the recordings here are still drowning in paganism and the occult, with weird diatribes by Boyd Rice, chanting by Freya Aswynn, and guitar structures by Douglas Pearce, along with usual cohort John Balance as part-time vocalist - all artists with their own counterculture agendae or spiritual pedigrees. Additionally, this is the record that most embraces David Tibet's back-to-childhood phase, where he began infusing his neo-folk leanings with a singy-songy edge (often courtesy the lovely Rose McDowall) as an appeal to our most basic internal concepts of fear and psychological horror. These are "evil nursery rhymes," indeed, but extraordinarily effective when placed in the trippy, psychedelic constructs here by Mr. Stapleton.
This is not meant as a replacement for the original SWASTIKAS - though much of the material overlaps, some versions are significantly different. "Oh Coal Black Smith" gets cut up and simplified here, and the bells and background vocals of "The Summer of Love" (thank you, Blue Oyster Cult) are stripped away to focus on Tibet's dissonant vocals and that beautiful bassline. "Beausoleil" is the most devolved track here, with some of its percussion and effects missing instead of enhanced, while "Panzer Rune" (aka "Looney Runes") gets the biggest upgrade, turning a quiet but creepy soundpiece with chanting into a psycho-shocking industrial/metal rave-up with Tibet's most manic and shrill vocals ever and tons of cut-ups overlapping the tail end of the song, taken primarily from some of the shorter, unnecessary pieces on SWASTIKAS. All in all, a remarkably strong and pivotal entry in the Current 93 canon, but equally important in the study of Nurse With Wound and the excellent production skills of Steven Stapleton.
As an absolute must-have for fans of either, this record deserves a reissue now that World Serpent has folded. Tibet and Stapleton could do worse than couple this with SWASTIKAS and release it as a 2-disc set; the ability to compare and contrast the two is instrumental to understanding Stapleton's abilities and why this record invited the reworking in the first place.
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