| This grand quality is foregrounded most explicitly on the middle sequence of the record, where the screaming chaos quietens. Here, an uneasy kind of beauty emerges. 'Plastic Princess' sets a suburban market for sex dolls against the brackish beauty of the landscapes of Kent, composed in tribute to Derek Jarman. 'Wound Nurse' speaks of "the beauty of the wound" as patient addresses nurse, the insistent repetitious phrasings suggesting the loving monotony of care. On 'The Swollen Promise', the eight members rise and fall as one over a repeated crescendo of impossible momentum. This is the hard fight for a new kind of beauty, the search for something liberated from the dirtied abstractions of the North Atlantic, the billboard for a kind of scrapheap utopia. It is this enterprise more than anything else which forms the continuity into the slow yaw at the centre of this record and out the other side. Closing the album out, that familiar pummelling rage is reasserted, the twin engine driving toward this heavy peace. |
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