1992: Current 93 - Thunder Perfect Mind

The original cover

When I was a young kid in Catholic school, everybody knew if you were ever bored and looking for a good laugh you could always grab your Bible and flip to the back to find the weird-as-shit Book of Revelation. It was pretty entertaining for a young atheist, reading this book that has informed centuries of decisions and beliefs. I’ve gotten older though and really grown to appreciate the mythology found there. Try to put yourself in the time when this stuff was written. It is genuinely frightening, yet beautifully imaginative. They are such aesthetically conflicted stories entrenched in both sides of a spectrum; a sense of horror and rapturous bliss pervade all the characters regardless of whether they are good or evil. God does monstrously horrible things, while Satan is described as the most beautiful of all the angels. It envisions the End Times, the purging of the world, and one of the earliest definitions of catharsis.

That dichotomy is at the heart of what many call David Tibet’s best album. Thunder Perfect Mind sits at the top of Tibet’s catalogue despite, or perhaps because of, that conflicting nature that hearkens all the way back to the Bible. The gorgeous medieval sounding folk melodies always carry a creeping sense of ancient doom. It explains how Tibet can open his album with a song of tremendous beauty and faith even though it focuses primarily on Satan. The depth and complexity of his writing feels authentic and true to Gnostic tradition while countless Christian pop acts sound shallow and redundant in (an admittedly inappropriate) comparison.

Current 93 albums often grow from a seed of inspiration. It’s usually a theme, or even just a phrase, Tibet explained in a 2006 interview with Brandon Sosuy. The title “Thunder Perfect Mind” acts as that seed. A Gnostic poem filled with paradoxical statements that define the ancient Christian spirit at the heart of Tibet’s songwriting. The recitation and heavenly instrumental that make up the two sections of the title track make Tibet’s message clear even long after he’s implied it through the song cycle in the first of two LPs that make up the album.

Steve Stapleton (in addition to creating his own Thunder Perfect Mind the same year under his Nurse with Wound moniker) co-produced the album and added a wonderful assortment of studio touches under Tibet without ever overpowering him. The liner notes credit Stapleton with providing “corrugations,” or folds and ridges, and while that sounds abstract there’s not a better way to describe his contributions; his unsettling industrial touches and electronically manipulated vocals that sound like demonic children, and many of the otherwise traditional moments on the album. The centerpiece of TPM, “The Stars are all Dead Now,” remains one of Current 93’s most ambitious moments. After beginning with a Caretaker-esque intro and a looping foundation singing “Jesus heals with love,” Tibet spends the next nine minutes re-imagining the apocalypse through the spirit of William Blake. His terrifying chanting of “DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD” punctuates everything from Jerusalem to God to himself (the late John Balance ironically is one of the only characters in the song spared), yet he sounds downright ecstatic in his tone. The dirge-like beauty of the song is juxtaposed against Stapleton’s best manipulations of sound on the record. As Tibet shows the world ending the song cracks and breaks apart in a climax the whole record has been leading up to.

Thunder Perfect Mind digs deeper than most Current 93 albums. Though it sounds ancient in many of the sounds and obscure references Tibet makes, the bits of electronic trickery that Stapleton includes make it intensely Modernist. It brings to mind works like Eliot’s “Waste Land” and Ginsbreg’s “Howl” while maintaining Tibet’s mystic doom to create an album that doesn’t lean on its inspirations. I still remember being that kid snickering at the dragons, and 666s, and seas of blood found in the conclusion of the Bible, yet when I heard Thunder Perfect Mind all those years ago it shook me to the core; it still does.

DeLorean

There’s a lot of good music out there, and it’s not all being released this year. With DeLorean, we aim to rediscover overlooked artists and genres, to listen to music historically and contextually, to underscore the fluidity of music. While we will cover reissues here, our focus will be on music that’s not being pushed by a PR firm.

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