Current 93 - Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain (2009)

Emerging three years after the much acclaimed ‘Black Ships Ate the Sky’ is ‘Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain,’ the latest full-length album from Current 93. As ever, David Tibet has surrounded himself with a diverse crew of talented musicians ranging from familiar faces like John Contreras, Steven Stapleton, Baby Dee and Andria Degens to new personnel like mainstream rocker Andrew W.K., Rickie Lee Jones, Ossian Brown and yes, even filth porn goddess Sasha Grey found a place on this album (amongst a few others too). I also find it slightly amusing (and kind a gross) that Baby Dee sheds more skin in the albums booklet photo than Miss Grey does, but I carry on.

Musically as always C93 restarts and presents the listener with something completely different. With nearly every song featuring heavy doom metal riffs, chaotic percussion, random bits of stringed instruments, guitar solos, acoustic guitar, piano and David’s wild vocal delivery you can expect quite an interesting listen. The overall mood of the recording is of a very psychedelic and twisted occurrence which frankly doesn’t even come close to sounding like anything I’ve heard from any other band previously. As a point of reference the heavier moments do sound somewhat similar to the C93/Om split from 2006 though much more refined than their previous attempts at this sort of music.

As for the quieter moments they are their own thing and really escape description or genre classification. Strangely unlike most of C93’s work during the past fifteen or so years there’s nothing melancholy about this recording, in fact it more or less stays within the psychedelic and unexplainable territory for the entire fifty three minutes of the album.

In the beginning I was quite confused and generally disappointed with this album but I forced myself to listen to the songs over and over again before things clicked into place (somewhat). I’m still hard pressed to call this a great album especially considering C93’s past recordings, but it’s definitely not terrible as I had thought it to be upon my initial listening of the album.