Music – Page 11 – Robot Claw

Review: Ceromonies (Fields Of The Nephilim)

July 5, 2012

The new Fields Of The Nephilim album is entitled ‘Ceromonies‘. It’s a double live album, with the songs recorded during gigs live in London back in July 2008. The package also contains a DVD containing some of the songs, but since the format is PAL I am unable to view it (without changing the region on my Mac…)

Each of the two CDs has it’s own name, ‘Ad Motem’ and ‘Ad Vitam’. The arrangement of songs onto each of the two CDs doesn’t seem to follow any specific criteria, and the full track listing covers the entire history of the band (original album the song was from in brackets):
– Trees Come Down, Harmonica Man, Preacher Man (‘Dawnrazor‘)
– Moonchild, Celebrate (‘The Nephilim‘)
– Wail Of Sumer, And There Will Your Heart Be Also, Psychonaut (‘Elizium‘)
– Shine, Penetration, Zoon (Wakeworld) (‘Zoon‘)
– From The Fire (‘Fallen‘)
– Shroud, Straight To The Light, Xiberia, Requiem, Mourning Sun (‘Mourning Sun‘)

Live albums are tricky things. Often released solely to extract a few extra dollars from fans between studio albums, more often than not they are listened to once or twice and shelved. Some bands are exceptions to this – I personally find Rammstein‘s live albums to be magnificent and almost better than the studio work – and the difference seems to be how creatively the band interprets their own music. Furthermore, live performances have a life that is not easily captured in a recording. I can still vividly remember certain things about many of the live performances attended more than I can remember exactly how I felt about the way the band played their songs that night.

Fields Of The Nephilim is one of those bands that, for me, evokes a Pavlovian reaction when I listen to their songs. It’s impossible for me not to think about my last year of high school when I hear Psychonaut, or recollect vividly the days of Newcastle University, The Hanged Man concerts and late nights out with friends when hearing most anything from Earth Inferno. Indeed, were it not for FoTN, I may never have met KLS! This band was the soundtrack for a very important part of my life, and always will be.

So listening to any Nephilim album is, for me, a good thing (well, except perhaps for the ‘official bootleg’ that was Fallen). That said, I’m sad to say Ceromonies may count itself amongst the ‘shelfwarmers’ as far as live albums are concerned.

The performances are great (the above video is from the included DVD), the packaging is great, Carl’s voice is (mostly) great, the recording quality is great and the songs are (of course) great. But the arrangements are where things get a bit iffy, and the selection of material is for me, disappointing.

Even though three years had passed since the release of Mourning Sun, the tour from which this album was recorded was to support the album so it’s not surprising that about a third of the songs are from that album. However, since I prefer the earlier (pre ‘Nefilim’) material, I would have liked more from that era. Song choice aside, the second disappointment of the album is how similar to the studio versions the songs sound. It’s been 20 years (in some cases) since these songs were first released, but some of these performances could almost be the studio versions with a bit of crowd noise added. And where a song differs from the album, it’s the same difference as it was two decades ago. One such example is Trees Come Down, which – will powerful and effective on Ceromonies – is a pale imitation of the version recorded in 1989 and immortalized on the Forever and Ever live bootleg:

And therein lies the biggest problem with Ceromonies. During their lifetime, this band has released almost as much live material as studio albums. So one would imagine another should not be forthcoming unless it offered something new. Ceromonies does not; it’s not as good as the 1991 live album Earth Inferno and not as good as either of the two live DVDs Forever Remain (1988) and Visionary Heads (1991). Yes it has new material, but the songs are too similar to the album tracks and (for me) of lesser quality (the superb ‘Mourning Sun’ excepted) compared to older works. More importantly, Fields Of The Nephilim is a widely bootlegged band, and even their most famous concert from the Town and Country club back in 1989 was bootlegged and released (as the very, very, VERY good live album ‘Forever And Ever’). Ceromonies therefore isn’t even as good as a live bootleg!

That said, I’m glad I got this release. Not only as a collector, but since it inspired me to dig out the old albums and listen to them again for the first time in at least a year. While Ceromonies may have been ultimately disappointing, it’s only because Fields Of The Nephilim as a band is so very, very good. I’m glad this new CD inspired me to once again realize just how good 🙂

Famous Relative

April 11, 2012

This article about my uncle was printed in an Australian magazine. I very much liked it and thought you may as well.

Fan Boy

April 6, 2012

Did you ever join a fan club?

Remember those things? In the pre-Internet days you could often send off some money to become a member of a ‘fan club’ for a movie, or TV show, or band or sports team. They were quite common and, I imagine, quite popular. Of course they’ve all turned into facebook pages now, but I was recently thinking of how much quainter and special it seemed to be to actually get something in the mail from (someone probably only tangentially associated with) the band or brand you were a fan of.

Thinking back to my youngest days, I don’t recall actually sending off to join a fan club. I remember seeing the solicitations, in magazines or comics or even on TV. I’m sure there were some I wanted to join but for various reasons (probably the fact they were all in the UK or the USA) I never actually sent off for any.

Until 1991 that is! That was during my second year of college. I’d somehow established myself as the editor/updater of one of the most complete and extensive Depeche Mode discographies in the world, and was maniacal about getting my hands on as big a collection of DM (vinyl) records as possible. Somewhat irked that I’d missed out on a certain promo record available to UK fan club members several years before, I knew I just had to joint the US fan club in 1991 since the next issue of their magazine came with a free Flexi of a (then) unreleased song. So I sent off the money – in the form of international reply coupons – and within a few weeks was the happy recipient of the magazine and the flexidisc.

I still have both, somewhere. The above photo (which I found online) shows the pair, which these days is worth a pretty penny (over US$100, according to online auctions). As it turns out, membership in the US DM fan club was a loose term, since the magazines were sold issue-by-issue and there wasn’t much else that the club could offer to non-Americans (or non-Californians, to be precise). So I never sent them money again.

Anyway this emboldened me, and very shortly afterwards I sent off to join the brand new Fields Of The Nephilim fan club after seeing an advert in Melody Maker. In time a brown envelope arrived in the mail from the UK (this was in ’92) containing a very pretentious but nicely assembled fanzine that contained some awful hippy-ish material written by proto-goth’s but very little actual news about the band. And a solicitation to send more money!

Unbeknownst to me at the time, KLS was also a member of this fan club. In fact we would both remain members throughout it’s entire existence (about 3 years), during which time I would move to the USA and the club’s offerings would become increasingly apologetic since the band had broken up and nothing new was forthcoming and – oh by the way – here’s some lovely glossy photos of the band in their prime!

I still have every issue (2 copies of each in fact) and all the assorted paraphernalia that was sent with them. Here’s a photo I just took:

Fans of FoTN will recognize the script on the left page there, since it was used extensively on their later albums. Amusingly, some of the letters sent to us by the fan club were written in this script, including one hand-written missing letting me know they were unable to accept my cheque since it was not drawn in sterling. I wonder if that was the same person that did the script for the album sleeves?

In 1996 KLS and I joined the ‘official’ X-Files fan club. I have no recollection as to how we found out about it, but membership came with (amongst other things) personalized FBI badges, a magazine, glossy photos and a booklet of merchandise for sale. I still have it all somewhere, although my fruitless attempts to find it for this blog suggest it’s packed away somewhere in the attic. I seem to recall this club was – once again – something that promised far more than it delivered, and was troubled by long delays and lack or any information about the show. We never extended our membership, such that it was, and I don’t even remember what seemed so compelling about the club that caused us to join in the first place.

The last club I joined – and it was probably about the same time as the above – was the official Star Wars fan club. I joined this mostly to get Star Wars Insider magazine, which at that time (mid ’90s) was not yet available on newsstands. So it was basically a magazine subscription with bonuses masquerading as a fan club. That said, it was absolutely worth it at the time, since every issue came in a big envelope packed with all sorts of bonus items including posters, stickers, a cloth patch and other things I don’t recall. I was a member for a few years, until the prequels started up and the magazine went to the newsstands (and even then I continued to buy it for a long time).

And that was that. A brief, perhaps 5 year flirtation with fanclubs is all that this lifelong fanboy can claim. If even I didn’t join every club I could, then who did? Were they ever truly successful? Did they ever truly deliver? And more importantly, were they ever better – from a fan’s point of view – than just writing to the artist directly?

Because I did the latter. Twice actually. And my results were astonishing. But I’ll save that for another entry 😉