Admittedly, something about them always seemed just that slight bit off. Never mind the flour incident, hilarious though that was -- I'm talking about lyrics like "The flowers in the kitchen weeeeeeeeep for you" and, from this album, "waiting at the Sunday park," which makes all the other talk about unearthly spirits and the Alestair Crowley samples and so forth seem less like portentous doom and more like the ramblings of the Dungeons and Dragons player who has to clean up around the house the next day. But nobody said trawling the psychic animadversions of the higher planes would be easy.
So maybe the humor of the Fields was unintentional in the end, and comparatively speaking Michael Gira works this particular lyrical strain with greater power and less flowery extravagance sliding into silliness. So why is Elizium, the final studio album from the guys (barring a semi-upcoming reunion -- the one fan site at http://www.nephilim.co.uk seems to be keeping track of it), such a great listen?
Carl McCoy's various vocal rumblings aside, it's all about the music, of course. And the whole thing really is just one shadow-ridden, epic-in-scope piece with a variety of movements, in a way -- call it prog if you like, but there aren't any Rick Wakeman twenty-minute solos here, thank heavens. The various influences they initially worked from -- the post-Sisters goth attack, the Ennio Morricone guitar licks, the pushing up of all production pedals into heavy duty doom levels -- come together here pretty well.
I still can't figure out if the artwork is a joke or not -- mixing runic symbols on the disc with cross-hatched Roman alphabet letters doesn't quite make the Rosetta Stone -- but all the ritualistic imagery and pagan sacrifices and so forth in the songs get played up by that thick layer of angst sound as commands from the tribal undermind, and darn if it doesn't work. I still like "Sumerland (What Dreams May Come)" the best, with a snaky start and a damn good sense of world-shattering stature, at least in a way, not to mention a neat line in chanting background voices. But maybe "Wail of Sumer" does the better job in the end -- the title may be to laugh, but the restrained float of the song and McCoy's wasted wrack of a voice suddenly makes everything a little more concrete, a weird afterecho of some catastrophic event rather than simply yet another rewrite of R'yleh rising from the waves.
They also covered Roxy Music's "In Every Dream Home a Heartache" around this time. I still haven't figured that one out either.