Beauty Reaps The Blood Of Solitude

Obscure and difficult to find, Nature & Organisation's Beauty Reaps the Blood of Solitude is likely to be filed in the experimental category of independent record stores. Though by no means accessible, the album is actually quite easy to listen to. With this project, multi-instrumentalist Michael Cashmore recruited David Tibet and Steve Stapleton to create a textured, somber record that evokes chamber music gone mad and the medieval, much like Tibet's band Current 93. With violins, cellos, flutes, and bassoons driving the melodies, the album can seem subtle, even relaxing, and Strawberry Switchblade's Rose McDowell's vocals on songs like "Wicker Man Song" surprisingly could fit in at the Lilith Fair. But the real otherworldly strength comes from Tibet's voice, with which he applies as much venom and wonder as in his Current 93 work, to visions, "idiotic faces and swollen hearts," crows, wolves, horsemen, green fields, zodiac signs -- all things displaced from the Dark Ages. Tibet always seems mysterious, an alchemist, a little frightening and cryptic. On "Bloodstreamruns" he sings, "God walked the earth in those days/Now still in my Hearts, He walks still." With vocals by the similar though less dark Douglas P., "My Black Diary" seems triumphant. But Beauty Reaps the Blood of Solitude is a strange album. It's timeless and perhaps unlike anything else but Current 93. ~ Charles Spano