Band Lineup
Sisters of Mercy, Switchblade Symphony, Heavy Water Factory, Tapping the Vein

Sisters of Mercy
Electric Factory, Philadelphia, PA

On June 28, the Sisters of Mercy headlined a four band concert at Philadelphia's Electric Factory, the first US appearance for Eldritch and Co. since 1991, and the only appearance in the states for the band this year.

Now the concert did collect a share of negative press due to problems regarding the concert line-up, but this appears to have come about due to a conflict of interest between the local promoter and Eldritch. Eldritch had specifically stated this was not to be a Goth festival, to which everybody was verbally in agreement. The promoter then promptly put together, guess what, a Goth festival, which Eldritch nixed. This realistically should have been a surprise to no one, but the abrupt timing of this decision did leave everyone scrambling at the last minute for appropriate replacements.

I arrived halfway through the opening act, and found myself awash in an ocean of black lingerie, black lipstick, black wedding dresses, and black mascara. Whereas I clearly enjoyed the first element, the remaining three aspects of the crowd quickly stamped this sector of the audience as being, fashionably and tragically hip. The sort of thing that Eldritch himself was complaining about. However, since I recall the time when everybody wore tie-dyed tee-shirts and uniformly patched jeans all in an attempt to claim they were different, I was in no position to lay judgement upon a crowd of teens and twenty-something's who were clearly having the time of their lives.

The first band were relative unknowns, a local talent by the name of Tapping the Vein. They were a basic hard rock, semi-Goth band with a female vocalist, who actually put on a pretty decent performance despite their anonymity.

The second band was Detroit's Heavy Water Factory. HWF have recorded a couple of ethereal industrial CDs, so people were expecting the same in concert. Surprisingly, Factory in concert come across more as a rock band, with virtually no similarity to their recordings. They featured two keyboards and a guitar, with recorded drums, although I found the guitar came across as the dominant instrument. Once I got over the initial shock that this was not going to be what I expected, I was able to appreciate that these guys were really doing a good job of giving the audience the energy they wanted: hard rock with synthesizers, not too far removed from the bands that followed, yet far enough from the beaten path to not alienate fans of their CDs.

Switchblade Symphony put on a make or break type of a concert. I had seen the band a few weeks earlier, and although I enjoyed them musically, I was frankly ready to strangle vocalist Tina Root for her inane giggling and tittering between songs (the effect was of Barbie fronting a Goth band). Presumably her Ecstasy supply had been cut off for this concert, and her between song bubbling was considerably toned down, allowing fans to concentrate on the band's first-rate heavily driven Goth-styled rock. The performance was of a calibre to virtually ensure sales of the upcoming CD to everyone in the sold-out venue.

Which leads us to the Sisters. In a nutshell, this was the best performance I had seen since 1983 when Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music came to town on "The High Road/Avalon" tour. In fact, Eldritch himself, dressed in an unseasonable long sleeved black jacket (cloth, my friends, not leather) and yellow shirt (matching his now short-cropped and dyed-blonde hair), very much reminded me of a more masculine version of Ferry: elegant, every move calculated for impact, and very continental. Most of the concert was spent with a lit but unsmoked cigarette dangling loosely from his left hand - all for effect.

Musically, the sound was every bit as good as his later recordings: brimming with energy, heavily laden with guitar and smoothed over with synthetics, with Doc Avalanche alive and well and forcibly moving the crowd along. He started off with one of his stronger pieces - "Vision Thing", and then began picking off songs from every one of his releases (with the exception of Sisterhood's "The Gift", which remained unsampled). Highlights of his primary set included "Dominion", "Alice", and the set-concluding "Temple of Love". He played two encores, for a total of 1-3/4 hours on stage. His final encore was clearly the best, beginning with a superb (and supremely faithful) rendition of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb", which he segued into "Something Like a Stranger" (from the "First and Last and Always" CD), and concluded with "This Corrosion". This final song prompted all 3500 (plus) voices into action, and during the choruses of the song, the singing of the audience completely drowned out the band (and I was on the balcony right by the stage).

The ramifications of this concert are numerous. First, the concert was essentially put on by Metropolis Records, who put up the vast majority of the money required to put on the show. This is important to me because guess who I work for, and I love anything that shows our label's dedication to this musical scene. The second aspect of this concert is that it was in Philadelphia. Too many bands regard Philadelphia as a "rehearsal" town, a joint you play en route to New York City where you can work the bugs out of your show. Yet here we have a major concert played by a major band not just in Philadelphia, but in Philadelphia and nowhere else. In essence, Philadelphia got respect.

Finally, people came to this concert from all over the country. I spoke with people at the show who had flown in from Texas, Detroit, and Denver. On the telephone at my job, I fielded calls from people who were flying in from Florida and California, wanting to know where the Electric Factory was and what were good places to stay. This type of interest and devotion to a genre of music bodes well for the future of the Gothic and industrial scene (despite Eldritch's reluctance to admit his place in the genre). It made me feel good that people were willing to support their bands enough to spend hundreds of dollars to come for just one night. That type of dedication reaffirmed my confidence that this scene will be around for a very long time.