Musical Style and Image
Andrew Eldritch didn't consider The Sisters of Mercy to be a gothic rock band and rejected this categorisation vehemently. He saw the band as a modern continuation of the 1960s classic rock music: „We come from 1969, we are the children of Altamont. We don't know who the fuck Alien Sex Fiend are and we don't want to know. Throughout our career we've had to fight against the preconception that most of the public has of us as being something that sprang out of post-punk. We regard ourselves as having sprung from pre-1970s rock music, as the inheritors of that tradition and the only people with any chance of propagating it further.“ „I think the title track is gloomy, but not the others. They may not be tremendously optimistic ... Gloomy and doomy suggest an air of apathetic resignation, which I don't think we're prone to.“
The band's co-founder Gary Marx was of the same opinion, but later said that Hussey joining the band had shifted the focus: „It was my version of The Sisters and Wayne's version of The Sisters. This is my version, which means more basic rock, American rock, whilst Wayne's version was more Banshees.“
Wayne Hussey said his songwriting had led to a change in the musical direction of the band: „I think my coming into the band has instilled a high level of awareness of song arrangements and things like that, embellishments and textures, rather than having one guitar line that's put through a fuzzbox. They were great songs but they were never fully realised.“
In the same interview Eldritch admitted that working in a hi-tech recording studio had influenced the approach to the songs: „A lot of people didn't realise that once we'd found the ability to do it we'd be quite happy to make records where you could hear all the instruments and all the words, and it would sound OK on the radio. A lot of people get pissed off when you make records like that, they figure you've changed somehow.“
Both Eldritch and Marx later criticised Dave Allen's work, with Eldritch speaking of „iffy production“ and Gary Marx of „production weaknesses“. Eldritch in 2011: „That would have been a great album if it had been produced better. We decided after that album to produce ourselves.“
In 2012, a retrospective by the Sonic Seducer magazine called the album a "pillar of the goth culture" and included it in a list of "10 key albums for the gothic scene".
Read more about this topic: First And Last And Always
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