The Sisters Of Mercy ----- First and Last and Always

cocteau · 發表於 2025-3-11 22:14:47

The Sisters Of Mercy ----- First and Last and Always

"First and Last and Always" turns 40 on today !

On March 11, 1985, The Sisters of Mercy released their Gothic Rock masterpiece "First and Last and Always".

“By the time the Sisters of Mercy released their debut masterpiece First and Last and Always (1985), the early goth scene had already reached a crescendo,” wrote Valerie Steele in her excellent book ‘Gothic: Dark Glamour’.

“The Batcave saw its heyday, The Cult decided to excise "death" from their name, and the original blueprint for gothic rock had mutated significantly.

Doom and gloom was no longer confined to its characteristic atmospherics, but as the Sisters demonstrated, it could really rock. “

Influenced by a host of artists from Leonard Cohen and The Velvet Underground, to The Birthday Party and Suicide, The Sisters of Mercy added a drum machine and took Gothic into a new, harder rocking realm.

Andrew Eldritch did not consider the sisters as gothic rock band, and instead wanted them to be classified as a continuation of 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."

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".