For anyone who has followed
Current 93 even casually (most who do are obsessive),
Black Ships Ate the Sky is a whole new thing on the one hand, and the culmination of what began in earnest on 1992's
Thunder Perfect Mind on the other.
Thunder Perfect Mind -- a companion album to
Nurse with Wound's release of the same name -- set out wholesale to create intuitive and even gentle melodies for the density of
David Tibet's cosmic thought. It did so beautifully and, for the time, very cohesively.
Tibet and his ever evolving cast of players have built on this theme ever since, with varying degrees of success. It seems to come off best in the band's rare live performances -- check out
Halo, issued in 2004, as only one example.
Black Ships Ate the Sky is a song cycle. Its centerpiece is the shape note hymn "Idumea" (written by
Charles Wesley in 1763), which was also used in the soundtrack of the film Cold Mountain. Idumea is in the country of Seir, inhabited by Edomites, the descendants of Esau; its story is rooted in Genesis and is picked up in Isaiah, where God pronounces great judgment on the "land of Idumea." The track is sung eight times by as many singers. It is central to
Tibet's theme of
Black Ships Ate the Sky, where judgment, redemption, and a the aftereffects of apocalypse are already here, have been here, and are yet to come.