Album Review: The Mission, "Carved in Sand"

WAYNE'S WORLD

I’ve always lumped THE MISSION in with THE CULT. Both have religious overtones, both have a hard-rocking, mystical, goth-tinged sound, and when you have a Mission song title identical to a Cult lyric “Who would break a butterfly on a Wheel?” ("Soul Asylum"), this can only reinforce the impression. But there’s a world of difference, and most of that is down to Wayne Hussey.

While Astbury comes across as a relatively straight-ahead rocker, albeit with a shamen-fetish, Hussey has a serpentine fluidity that infuses the Mission with a feeling of flesh – sensual and suffering. Yup, there’s a little bit of Jesus in Wayne. And while that one’s sinking in, there’s a lot of poetic irony in the man as well, further reflecting the Christian paradox of death and resurrection.

“Butterfly on a Wheel” demonstrates this most clearly: love both breaks and heals the wings; the flower crushed under the snow will rise again in the Spring, etc. The plaintive vocals, with their undertone of gradual hope, and the sweeping grandeur of the music, evoke revolving Suns and changing seasons, underpinning the resurrection motif.

The irony of “Amelia,” the opening track, is of a more direct and brutal nature. “Daddy can love you more than Mummy can,” screams Wayne in the guise of an incestuous father. The impassioned vocals, full of evil, desire, pain, and guilt, with a driving beat, belt out the irony of lust masquerading as paternal love.

Not quite matching those peaks is the “Grapes of Wrath,” a powerful Mike Peterish vocal, bursting with the same kind of naive angst and idealism THE ALARM are famous for, impressive by its sheer sincerity.

“Sea of Love” attempts BEATLESque, sitar–flavoured psychedelic rock, but works better as a kind of meditation aid -- a quaint and intricate aural objet d’art.

The simpler songs sound the most Cultish: “Into the Blue” with its driving chord changes and the powerful, soaring ‘Deliverance’ screaming at you through a web of Celtic imagery.

This is a varied and at times erratic album. "Belief" starts off like a piece of over–produced pomp rock, then throws dark, potent images at us: “Masquerade as Jesus Christ and suffer the crucifixion.” Yeh, quite! When the guitars kick in, scimitars seem to be flying.

Carved in Sand is an album full of intriguing contrasts, from the album cover with its drifting dunes and rigid fossils to “Lovely” the last song, a gentle and simple coda that contrasts with the richness and raucousness of the preceding songs.

Grade A-

Colin Liddell
Revenge of Riff Raff
12th February, 2024 (based on notes written in 1990)

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!