In a discussion of the enduring bands to rise out of, or find great popularity in, the extremely fertile and diverse musical ground of the 1980s, one would be utterly remiss to not mention The Sisters of Mercy early and often. That said, the band have taken a winding path through the years: founder Andrew Eldritch has remained the sole constant in more than a dozen unique lineups spanning the decades, most of which saw no releases from the band, though not for lack of material. The result is a band whose very oeuvre is as enveloped in a layer of shadow as their sound and stage show are, a collection pieced together from fan to fan throughout the years like a corkboard bearing bits of red string between artifacts – and much of that unreleased collection is on display when the band brings their 2023 tour to American soil for the first time since 2009. The occasion has packed the room in Boston with folks wearing black and paving the floor with the footsteps of countless Doc Martens.
The night’s set is home to a substantial number of songs from the band’s recorded material, including Vision Thing and 1987’s iconic Floodland, though the band begins the night with a new one, the propulsive ‘Don’t Drive on Ice’. The track comes from a group of compositions that started to surface around 2020 and features vocal handoffs between Eldritch’s distinctive low baritone and the higher registers of guitarist Ben Christo, who has been a longstanding collaborator in this current era of the band. Together they cover a wide vocal range, and often Eldritch will walk over to Christo and sing into his microphone at the same time during high-energy passages. The complementary relationship between the two works well and emphasizes the two extremes of the scale.
For most of the set, Eldritch stalks the stage, the space above divided by bright beams of light into angular shapes, changing as each shaft spins and strobes, sometimes radiating light off of the band members, only to cast them in darkness the next second. Eldritch is fond of allowing one hand to rest in one of the rays, giving the impression that it’s manifesting out of nothing. All band members are wearing sunglasses, including guitarist Dylan Smith and “Ravey Davey” Creffield, the latter of whom conjures the rhythm section from a team of interconnected MacBooks that house an entity called “Doktor Avalanche”. That’s the collective name for a legacy of drum machines and other equipment that have accompanied Sisters of Mercy performances, occasionally reincarnating into different forms as the year demands. The good Doktor’s “advice column” is one of many features of the band’s website, a kilobyte-age style thing featuring a broad range of info and musings from the band, from the biographical to music recommendations to, perhaps most relevantly on this tour, lyrics to the crop of newer songs the band has been playing.
Instrumentally, the band seems to be working in the vein of the dark and brooding, both with the charging tracks like ‘Don’t Drive on Ice’ and slower affairs like ‘Eyes of Caligula’ which is backtracked by a distinct piano track from the Doktor and atmospheric, almost shoegaze-y guitars. Six songs in surfaces the night’s first Floodland track, ‘Dominion’ – there’s a vast age range in the audience for the night, and there’s certainly some in attendance who heard the song on the radio around the time of its release, and others (myself included) who might’ve learned of the Sisters by cruising around the fictional Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto IV, whose in-game radio featured the song. That pastiche of American culture was clearly endearing to Eldritch, whose lyrics have often targeted the garish extremes of the American right – the Sisters’ 1990 album Vision Thing harkened back to an infamous quote from George H.W. Bush, and amid these new songs veer into the political as well, including the dystopian precipice described in ‘On the Beach’. Fascinatingly, in an interview with Louder, Eldritch said recently that he offered developer Rockstar Games an entire album of Sisters songs for their next game – I’m not sure which is more astonishing, that they didn’t take him up on the offer, or that this implies the existence of another discrete Sisters of Mercy record that might be ready for deployment.
Irrespective of what the future may hold, it’s clear that Andrew, Christo, and the Doktor have kept tinkering behind the scenes for years on end, and haven’t lost the experimental desire to craft new work; and still kindle the fire of their recorded legacy, ending the night with an encore that features particularly intense renditions of ‘Lucretia My Reflection’, ‘Temple of Love’, and finally ‘This Corrosion’. The crowd answers with excitement in kind, this final stretch is a perfect capstone to an experience a decade and a half in the making.
Review and photos by Collin Heroux
