Current 93, like all the bands in the World Serpent roster, are very much an acquired taste. David Tibet's tremulous voice, his obsession with obscure literature and apocalyptic religion, and the wild mood swings of the music itself, can all be somewhat off-putting. Furthermore, the immense size of the back catalogue and the high price of the many import albums can be intimidating for someone who doesn't know where to start.
What's worse, World Serpent's sudden bankruptcy in 2004 caused many of Current 93's albums to become even harder to find than they originally were (and it's not like you could ever count on being able to dig up CD's of theirs at the local shopping mall anyway). However, there is some hope. Durtro/Jnana, the band's new Canadian distributor, is reissuing a lot of old albums at better prices than World Serpent charged. Over the next few years, it should become easier to get a hold of Current 93's music. And if you become a fan, believe me, you'll want it all.
Current 93's sound has changed significantly since the band's inception in 1983, and even the albums themselves can be very diverse from song to song. I find it easiest to categorize their music into "periods."
"That Was The Way, Those Were The Horrors": The Early Years
The first few Current 93 albums are very discordant, ritualistic, and noisy. Many of the tracks on these albums run twenty minutes or longer, with tape loops of breaking glass, monks chanting, grinding machinery, and Tibet hollering drug-induced lyrics about Maldoror and Crowley and death.
The main albums from this period are:
In 2003, Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound remixed In Menstrual Night and released it under the title A Little Menstrual Night Music. The remix album is much spacier and less aggressive than the original.
"Just As Easy To Die On A Bright Sunny Day": Transitions
The next few albums begin to suggest a shift in C93's direction, with more "songlike" structures and the use of actual instruments. However, all these albums are really bipolar, shifting without warning from howled gibberish on one track to something charming and folksy on the next.
Imperium is a brilliant record, and a lot of C93 fans consider it their favourite. It was recorded at a time when Tibet was very ill and thought he was dying, and it is very emotionally naked. I therefore find it hard to listen to.
The story goes that the estate of Enid Blyton (the creator of the cartoon character Noddy) was putting some legal pressure on Current 93 after the band abused Noddy's name on Swastikas for Noddy, which inspired them to change the title of the album for the second pressing. I don't own Swastikas for Goddy, but I am given to understand that musically it's identical to the earlier release with some slight changes in the liner notes. There is also Crooked Crosses for the Nodding God, which is a radically remixed and much more "industrial" version of Swastikas for Noddy.
Horsey is the name for the CD reissue of Horse, which originally came out in an extremely limited vinyl version and is beyond impossible to find.
If you're thinking of experimenting with one of these albums, try Imperium, Swastikas, or Earth Covers Earth. But if I were you, I'd go to the next phase first:
"So: This Empire Is Nothing": The Birth of Apocalyptic Folk
In the '90s, Current 93 begins to use a lot of acoustic guitar, traditional song structures, and elaborately poetic lyrics. This is the period when the guitarist Michael Cashmore becomes a regular member of the band, and his contributions are particularly rich and beautiful.
The phrase Apocalyptic Folk turned up in a World-Serpent-themed comic book that was released in 1995, and the name became convenient shorthand for the sound of World Serpent bands like Current 93, Sol Invictus, Death in June, Backworld, and others.
Thunder Perfect Mind is probably the album most beloved by C93's fans. I often recommend it as a place to start for someone just getting into them, though Of Ruine... is excellent for that too.
As The World Disappears... is lovely, but it's recorded live and the sound quality is very poor. Island happens to be one of my favourite C93 records, but it's not quite like anything else they've recorded -- it's got a sort of synthesizery, new-agey feel that I personally adore but which made a lot of C93 fans accuse the band of selling out. Bit of trivia: Björk does brief backing vocals on one track.
"To Look, and Look, and Look, and Look, and find... Nihil": The Inmost Light
The so-called Inmost Light trilogy is similar in tone to the albums that preceded it, but they make a self-contained unit that is worth putting into a category of its own.
Until very recently, I thought this was the pinnacle of C93's career. Not only is All The Pretty Little Horses musically, lyrically, and conceptually magnificent, it has a guest appearance by none other than Nick Cave, to boot!
Note that Where the Long Shadows Fall and The Starres are Marching... are not full-length albums -- I believe they're each only about 20 minutes long, and if you're trying to keep to a budget you may not want to spend twelve bucks on each of them. However, they are both mindblowingly intense, and they serve as a fantastic frame for the central album.
"If I Could Have One Wish, as in the Fairytales...": New Directions
Since the Inmost Light, Current 93's career has been a bit uneven. They've released a couple of dodgy records, such as The Great in the Small (2001), which combined bits of every single one of their releases into a big glom of noise. Faust (2000) was also poorly received. Bright Yellow Moon (2001), a collaboration with Nurse With Wound, is good but not as good as it should be, and I would never recommend it as a place to start.
Current 93 also released a lengthy series of live albums in quick succession: All Dolled Up Like Christ (1999), Cats Drunk On Copper (2001), Some Soft Black Stars Seen Over London (2001), Halo (2004), and How I Devoured Apocalypse Balloon (2005). This made some of their fans wonder if they were starting to tread water. To be fair, Current 93 puts on a remarkable live show, and they are always creating new and powerful arrangements of older tracks (Each live version of "Alone," from Imperium, sounds better than the last). Moreover, these live albums are recorded using good equipment and they all sound much better than As The World Disappears from a decade ago. I listen to the live records frequently. However, it felt for a while like there was not much new Current 93 material being released, making a lot of the fans antsy.
All that having been said, the most important releases since The Inmost Light have been:
These albums move away from strings in favour of Maja Elliott's soft piano. They are very pretty, but at the same time their sound is a lot more stark and bare than what that came before. "A Gothic Love Song" was released as a single (!), and became something of an anti-hit.
Most of Sleep Has His House is taken up with the title track, which is a half-hour-long dirge in memory of Tibet's father. It is probably the only thing in their catalogue that's more emotionally raw than Imperium.
"It's the Time of the Last Persecution": What Next?
Though David Tibet was always an eschatological thinker, and though his lyrics have always been obsessed with Revelation in every sense of the word, a new urgency and ferocity have entered his writing recently. The new songs that the band have performed live at recent concerts, along with the tantalizing tracks released on a few short EP's, suggest that the upcoming record is going to be an emotional and spiritual powerhouse.
So, uh, what should I buy?
If you think you might want to get into this band, consider picking up one of their retrospective compilations so that you can get a taste of different eras in Current 93's career without having to buy it all. There are a few such compilations. The most recent is called Judas as Black Moth. It was just released this year and its tracks were chosen by David Tibet's fans (including such luminaries as Antony, Bill Fay, Marc Almond, Ben Chasny, and Hymenaeus Beta). I think it's an excellent collection, and it contains a similar tracklist to the one you might experience at a post-2000 live show.
Another good compilation is Calling for Vanished Faces from 1999, which has a broader range than Judas as Black Moth -- it includes more of the noisy, early material. I do not recommend Emblems, which was released far too early to include the very best Current 93 work, and which, in my opinion, doesn't hang together particularly well as a coherent listen.
More Information
SKot Kirkwood used to maintain a very detailed Current 93 discography on the Brainwashed web site, but it has not been updated in a couple of years. Still, there is a lot of good information there.
The official Current 93 web site is at http://www.durtro.com.