Death In June - The Dark Ballads of a Decorated Loser

Foreword

Writing a monograph on Death In June is a rather difficult task. There are several factors that make even a straightforward, systematic analysis of the work carried out by Douglas Pearce - the main figure who for years has been the personification of the group, aided by friends and collaborators - a tricky proposition. First of all, the discography is almost endless: alongside the albums of original material that mark the main milestones of Death In June's musical journey, there's a sprawling array of reissues, live albums, compilations, split albums, and reworkings of their own or other artists' songs with other groups, all of this sticking strictly to official releases.

Fortunately, the band's official website has organised every release from their beginnings to today with admirable clarity and accessibility, allowing even newcomers to find their way through the various releases song by song.

Another issue concerns the ethical, stylistic and cultural background in which Death In June operate. The importance and the aura of legend surrounding Death In June belong to very few other groups, partly thanks to the ambiguous haze with which Douglas Pearce has shrouded every single breath; one of the most overused lines artists use to defend their own work is the refusal to offer any explanation, and Douglas is no exception, with a stubbornness borne out in countless interviews. This is all the more justifiable in the case of this group: the dangerous territory skirted in many songs, the fearsome paramilitary - if not outright Nazi - aesthetic (just think of the band's symbol, the totenkopf that adorned SS uniforms), a misanthropy and a "historical" pessimism in the Leopardian sense, individualism understood as the total assumption of responsibility for one's choices - these are all factors present in massive doses and easily misread at a fleeting glance.

In reality, Death In June's output is a goldmine of symbolism and cultural references, inextricably intertwined with the personal visions and life experience of its author, who inevitably intends to keep as much as he can under wraps about his compositional processes, these being an unceasing blend of the most varied influences. Only recently has it been possible to find any detail about the lyrics and how they come about, thanks to the spread via the web of the most disparate sources, not least the protagonist's own direct testimony.

For all these reasons, what follows is only an introduction to the group's world, with the analysis limited to the main albums, and with a series of interpretations that are the result of cross-referenced research and often contradictory statements from those involved - interpretations that necessarily offer just one of the possible ways into this group's music. It will then be up to each listener, depending on their own interests, their own view of things, in short their own sensibility, to find their own path through the murky depths - shot through with flashes of the purest beauty - of the Death In June discography.

Prelude to Death in June

The story of Death in June is the story of a band, and at the same time the story of a movement that sprang up in the English musical underground of the early Eighties. It is also, and above all, the story of a man who turned his personal obsessions into a proud and controversial path, sowing ideas and inspiring hosts of imitators and enthusiastic followers. A genuine cult that has grown over the years, whose musical trajectory has proven to be a goldmine of gems of profound and terrible beauty.

The original nucleus of Death in June took shape in the late Seventies: two young men seduced by the punk revolution joined forces in a band that, after various upheavals, settled under the name Crisis. They were called Douglas Pearce, born in 1956, and Tony Wakeford. Crisis didn't last long: under this name they released a couple of singles and EPs, and a mini-LP in 1980. What they offered was fairly rudimentary punk-rock, with tracks that were often pure sonic outbursts and lyrics revealing a clearly defined political stance: the two, backed by other musicians, came from circles close to the radical left.

The band soon imploded and split up; not long after, the two musicians reunited for another project that would follow a very different path, taking the name Death In June. By then Patrick Leagas had joined them, and would go on to adopt the name Patrick O'Kill. The most varied theories have been put forward about the genesis of the band's name: it now seems certain that it stemmed from a phrase uttered by Patrick during rehearsals and misheard by Douglas Pearce. Be that as it may, in the end the moniker proved perfect for presenting this new musical proposition. Further meanings later emerged: from Douglas Pearce's "well-hidden personal reasons" to what seems to be the explanation that best frames the project. The reference is to the grimly infamous Night of the Long Knives, which took place on 29-30 June 1934, when the entire leadership of the SA - the original stormtroopers of the National Socialist party - was tragically purged in one fell swoop to make way for the far more fearsome SS. The fact that there were homosexuals within the SA, something deemed impious by Hitler and his entourage, helps explain the importance of this event for Douglas Pearce, an openly gay man, and gives a sense of the profound contradictions and ambiguities that are a fundamental part of the group.

The early years (1981-1985)

Death In June's first single came out in 1981, titled "Heaven Street". The cover art (as important as it would be for all the group's future releases: the graphic side of things is always meticulously handled) is both emblematic and unsettling: it shows the image of a half-destroyed anti-aircraft position, framed in white, with only the band's name. "Heaven Street" is effectively a manifesto for the whole Death In June universe: the band's name refers to the path taken by concentration camp inmates on their way to the gas chambers. The morbid fascination the band's members harbour for the events of World War II, and in particular for the role of National Socialism, is the focal point, the most obvious stylistic signature; a bold and questionable choice, one that would earn them ostracism from the mainstream press while simultaneously laying the groundwork for a subgenre of gothic music, tied both to an interest in military aesthetics and Europe's cultural decadence, and to the recovery of Northern European musical and non-musical traditions, which would come to be known as apocalyptic folk or neo-folk.

Musically, the title track is a measured dark-punk piece with the drums heavily to the fore, while the lyrics offer a cynical yet mournful description of the souls lost along that journey towards death.

Death In June wrote more material, and in 1983 their first long-form release came out. In truth, The Guilty Have No Pride is a mini-album, since it doesn't even reach half an hour in length; the seven tracks included are still somewhat raw, but some interesting distinctive traits are already taking shape. The music is funereal, indebted to the most anguished post-punk à la Joy Division, with an added rhythm that veers towards the martial thanks also to the deep tones of the drums, and the trio keeps the staging essential: besides guitar, bass and drums, a few distorted keyboard notes or a trumpet occasionally surface, as in "State Laughter". It's certainly an interesting album, though quite far removed from the sound the band would later settle into; some tracks, however, are genuine classics, such as the searing "All Alone In Her Nirvana", with its screams run through a synthesizer, or the leaden "The Guilty Have No Pride", a track that pairs the title phrase murmured in the background with a heavy guitar riff and some evocative keyboard notes. "Heaven Street" has already been mentioned: here it appears in a different version, slower and with the guitar more prominent.

In early 2006 the album was reissued with a series of additions that make it a must-have: alongside four extra tracks, three from the first single and one from the "State Laughter" 7", there's a DVD showing one of the band's first, extremely rare concerts in their original line-up. Eight tracks make up the setlist, captured in amateur footage, but it's moving to see the legend at its very beginning, in a document that also offers a glimpse of the underground music scene of the time. All of the band's releases came out on their own label, Ner (New European Recordings), which would later also host releases by kindred acts.

Shortly after the release of The Guilty..., Tony Wakeford left the group. There are two versions of why: according to the first, the burly bassist was ousted over his membership in the National Party, a far-right political organisation, thereby breaking the group's rule forbidding any openly declared political affiliation among its members. Considering the dangerous territory the band's music, attitudes and lyrics tread into, it's an understandable stance; Wakeford himself would later explain that it was in fact his own choice to step away, so that he could delve deeper into his studies of runes and esotericism. Wakeford would go on to found his own project, Sol Invictus, of fundamental importance to the then-emerging neo-folk movement.

This is a crucial moment for the band: around the same period, Death In June meet another key figure at a concert he had played in London with his own group. His name is David Michael Bunting (Malaysia, 1960): already active in post-industrial outfits such as ex-Throbbing Gristle member Genesis P-Orridge's Psychic TV and 23 Skidoo, he had formed his own group called Current 93. David, for his part, would soon become known by various other names, including Current 777, Tibet 777, and above all David Tibet.

David Tibet is perhaps the most important figure among all those mentioned: a kind of imp, more mischievous than malicious, deeply immersed in the study of religion and magic. Current 93 is in fact named after a theory put forward by Aleister Crowley, a sort of Western magus active in the early twentieth century, author of a series of books on sex magic and an extremely controversial figure; he described himself as "the wickedest man in the world". Current 93's early work consists of long pieces built from loops and reversed tapes, with crucial input from Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound; harrowing industrial-esoteric suites that apparently renounce the Christian religion, while actually revealing themselves to be studies in a negative spirituality, profound and genuinely unsettling. The collaboration between David Tibet and Death In June would go on for a long time, mutually shaping both artists' musical and personal paths; David Tibet's apocalyptic worldview (in the literal sense too), his spirituality and his musical background would merge with Douglas's folk research and sensibility to extraordinary results.

After the transitional album Burial, half composed in the studio and half recorded live (though it does contain one of the band's best-loved songs, the programmatic "Death Of The West"), the duo's collaboration with Tibet culminated in the album Nada (1985). It's an extremely important work: not only because it marks the start of open collaborations between the Death In June entity and various guests, but above all because its relative success would later allow Douglas to focus exclusively on his own music, channelling into it his entire, complex worldview.

Nada shows some significant differences compared to the first album: first of all, many tracks carry a markedly electronic imprint, which transforms the dark dark-punk into a kind of danceable techno-pop for damned souls ("The Calling"), or into open-ended, exhausting rants for electronic drums and voice alone ("The Foretold"). The acoustic guitar can also be heard underpinning many of the compositions, becoming especially evident on evocative, essential tracks like "Fields Of Rape" and "She Said Destroy", created together with David Tibet, credited here as Tibet 777. The electronic turn can be traced back to Patrick Leagas, and it would remain a one-off in the band's output; starting with the very next album, in fact, the band's musical evolution would take a different direction, leaning more towards folk reworkings and industrial-derived sounds.

Listened to today, Nada shows a few cracks due to its dated electronic choices, its very heavy rhythms and a certain naivety in the lyrics, quite different from the deep, complex narratives later penned by its demiurge; it is nonetheless a very important album in the band's history, a document of the sounds of its time and one of the records most cherished by Death In June fans. The same year saw the second and final change to the band's lineup, with the departure of Patrick Leagas: during a European tour, the band played a show in Bologna; there, the musicians, performing in SS uniforms, were confronted by a girl who screamed in their faces, "I hope your mothers hate you for this". Deeply shaken by that accusation, Patrick left at the end of the tour, leaving everything in the hands of Douglas Pearce alone. We would later find Patrick Leagas-O'Kill in Sixth Comm-Mother Destruction, two line-ups merged into one, devoted to a trance-ritualistic electronic sound with clear references to paganism and the male-female duality.

The trilogy of solitude

The 1986 album The World That Summer is the first Death In June project directed by Douglas Pearce alone, assisted by David Tibet, Rose McDowall (singer of the schizo-pop group Strawberry Switchblade), and others. The difference between this and Nada is undeniable: while the previous album was so distinctly "80s", this one brings into sharper focus what would become the band's recurring themes and distinctive traits. The tracks here are highly varied: there are dark-folk ballads of great power, such as the graceful "Come Before Christ And Murder Love", exemplary in its melodic structure and trumpet-and-keyboard counterpoints, or a heavily cadenced "Break The Black Ice" with the vocals fully unleashed. "Rule Again", on the other hand, is commanding and propulsive (with a double Pearce-Tibet vocal), and "Blood Victory" is harder and more martial; the opening "Blood Of Winter" combines Spanish-tinged lines of trumpet and guitar with dry drumming and a background sense of tanks on the move.

The album closes with the long and apocalyptic "Death Of A Man", a kind of chaos mass in honour of Yukio Mishima, introduced by a gong, which also contains a reprise of the anthem of the great and controversial writer's personal guard. Yukio Mishima, alongside Jean Genet, is Douglas Pearce's (or rather Douglas P., as he now prefers to be called) principal literary touchstone; Mishima in particular shares with Douglas the ability to be delicate and utterly uncompromising at once, his graceful prose clashing so sharply with an image of absolute intransigence and a commitment to staying faithful to one's own values even unto death; and then there's the symbolic weight of the mask, which would become a trademark of the band's live shows, performed with the members' faces masked, and the hagakure ethic honoured in the Japanese-sung track "Hidden Among The Leaves". As for the scandalous Genet, one need only mention his magnificent obsession with the symbolism of the rose and his deliberate choice to remain on the margins. And, of course, all three are gay.

Douglas Pearce continues his personal descent into hell with the following album, Brown Book (1987). This is one of the most important albums released in the 1980s, and not only within the narrow confines of the gothic scene. In this work, all the obsessions weighing on Douglas P. at the time flow together into a single mood, obsessions that can be extended to the entire neo-folk movement: Europe's lost greatness, which brings with it a nostalgic rediscovery of its musical and non-musical traditions, humanity's estrangement from its own spiritual dimension, the archetypal language of runes, the burden of suffering tied to National Socialism and the Second World War... For Douglas, the latter is the true watershed of recent history: what happened then forced a radical rethinking of what can even be called human. Douglas embraces all of this in every sense, without forgetting the voluptuous homoerotic tensions that often hover over his art, and drowns every shred of hope in Brown Book: within an aesthetic framework tied more than ever to the folk ballad, he creates genuine hymns of sorrow built from layers of keyboards and martial-industrial loops, over which his persuasive, inspired voice intones words dripping with tears. Take, for example, "Runes And Men", a song that opens with a fanfare and proceeds by piling up meaning and anguish with a wartime speech (the voice heard is the official voice of the Third Reich), aeroplanes passing overhead ready to bomb, crisp drums and crystalline acoustic guitar; over it all, Douglas's sweet, deep voice with Rose McDowall's angelic harmonies. The track, which fuses the evocation of a lost Golden Age with the poisonous torments of love, is a genuine manifesto of the Death In June aesthetic, as well as a truly gorgeous song.

But it's the whole album that operates at this level, starting with the obsessive intro "Heilige Tod" - the words "Holy Death" repeated like a nursery rhyme - which flows into the powerful march of "Touch Defiles". The delicate tone of the voice and the strong melodic sensibility counterbalance the pitch-black lyrics, the occasionally grating sounds and the martial loops, which blend perfectly into a grand, majestic and decadent fresco. After the mesmerizing "Punishment Initiation", where priest David Tibet officiates a dark and solemn rite, comes "Brown Book", the album's destination and its spiritual nadir: a slow version for voice alone (Ian Read of Fire+Ice), with background noise from the "Horst Wessel Lied", the anthem of the SS soldiers. This is a striking experience, in which the concept behind what you're hearing overshadows the song itself: a genuine gravestone in memory (as a memento) of one of the most hellish and painful periods in history... Or is it an apology for it? There's no single answer, really: Douglas Pearce works with scorching material, and only its artistic value can elevate it into a work worth listening to. A telling clue might be a fine line placed as a seal on one of his later albums: "This is not a reminder, this is a memory".

In 1989 The Wall of Sacrifice closed out the first trilogy of works by Douglas, sole author of the Death In June name, and it did so in a somewhat subdued fashion. The deep personal crisis the man was going through at the time reverberates, as noted elsewhere, throughout this resigned work, which opens and closes with two long tracks that are, truth be told, rather heavy and repetitive. The first is the title track, built on a very simple keyboard refrain, proceeding with the usual overlapping of voices, loops and noise, topped by a sort of nursery rhyme sung by a child's voice. Closing out the album's original sequence is "Death Of A Drummer", which essentially repeats the same approach without better results. In between, six tracks, among which the fine ballads "Fall Apart", "Hullo Angel" and "In Sacrilege" stand out, the latter featuring David Tibet's unsettling spoken-word delivery. This album also features American Boyd Rice, a prime mover of industrial music since the late '70s with his project NoN, as well as an extremely controversial figure: an expert on B-movies, a follower of Anton LaVey's Church of Satan (as were Tibet and Pearce at various points too), sexist-homophobic-Nazi-misanthropic-"Hitler meets Bambi"... This and more is said about him. He would go on to become a close friend of Douglas P., and the two would collaborate together many times.

In the same period (1988), a Current 93 album came out, "Swastikkas For Noddy", which became an essential reference point for the neofolk movement. Under David Tibet's direction, all the genre's most important artists (from Douglas P. to Tony Wakeford, Rose McDowall, Boyd Rice and so on) contributed not only their collaboration but also tracks from their own output, which together formed a veritable dictionary of apocalyptic folk: Death In June contributed a "Hullo Angel" that became "Angel", stripped down to just voice and guitar but perhaps even more beautiful in its wonderful melancholy. "Swastikkas For Noddy" thus became a true manifesto record, not necessarily the finest ever made by either Current 93 or Death In June, but important precisely for its role as a comprehensive showcase of the movement.

Neofolk for ancient splendors

The period following Wall Of Sacrifice is perhaps the lowest point in Douglas Pearce's personal history: he considered retiring, and seemed so close to a point of no return that it prompted his friend Tibet to dedicate the touching "Song For Douglas After He's Dead" to him, later included on Current 93's "Thunder Perfect Mind". With his main project on hold, Douglas collaborated with Boyd Rice on the album Music, Martinis & Misanthropy, released in 1990.

Then, in 1992, a new Death in June record came out, almost unexpectedly. The title is a long one, But, What Ends When The Symbols Shatter?, alluding to the deep crisis he'd been through. As in a rite of initiation, rather than succumbing to despair, Pearce used it to reach a new level of perception. Structured as a simple collection of songs, But What Ends... comes across as a hymn to Beauty, the true cornerstone of the band's poetics. Now the music is definitively anchored in folk form, with flavorful touches of trumpet and percussion, and keyboards that swell into an orchestra. Among the finest tracks are "Little Black Angel", with its compelling momentum and a lyrical voice reaching imaginative heights, the superb "Daedalus Rising", where David Tibet's fervor marries magnificently with the orchestration, and "Giddy Edge Of Light", an ecstatic flight through winter woods and dazzling visions. But these are just a few examples: the whole album radiates great inspiration, a strong determination in the pursuit of the perfect ballad. Guitar, occasional trumpets, the ambient openings sketched by keyboards and light percussion: nothing more is needed to reveal this man's new face, together with his shattered dreams and his yearning for lost glory.

Meanwhile, Douglas Pearce - he, the bard of old European grandeur - decided to move to another continent, settling in Australia. The choice of location might seem at odds with the man's spirit, but it's actually in the New World that Douglas could indulge his need for solitude, without thereby abandoning his inner turmoil and torments.

Rose Cloud Of Holocaust (1995), the following work, conceived in Iceland, moves along the same lines as its predecessor. It's an album of subdued, crepuscular tones, where the singer-songwriter direction is felt even more strongly; by now the ballad form has reached stratospheric levels in its treatment of sound, crystalline and punctuated by trumpet and keyboard flourishes, with increasingly airy and refined melodies. Here too there are vocal contributions from David Tibet, which, while not quite matching the excellence of the previous record, are still noteworthy, on "Jerusalem The Black" and "Books Of Life". Among the finest songs worth mentioning is "God's Golden Sperm", which recalls "Touch Defiles" from Brown Book, the subsequent "Omen Filled Season" and "Symbols Of The Sun", so ethereal and melodic, as well as "Accidental Protégé", hazy and graceful. Rather than tied to the gothic universe, Douglas P. increasingly comes across as a dark but high-pedigree singer-songwriter, like his beloved Scott Walker, who that very year released his own personal vision of songwriting with the abyssal Tilt. After all, such a distinctive figure wouldn't be who he is if tied to a single set of imagery; beyond the themes and influences that made him famous, Douglas P. has over time listed a wildly varied range of personal preferences, from the cult TV show "The Prisoner", to pop artist Andy Warhol, to fellow musicians Pet Shop Boys and composers like Ennio Morricone.

From this period also worth noting are the 1993 live album Something Is Coming, recorded in Croatia in the midst of a war zone, whose proceeds went to fund a Croatian hospital, and two fine side projects from 1996: Kapo, together with Strength Through Joy singer Richard Leviathan, and "Heaven Sent", credited to Scorpion Wind (Boyd Rice, the same Leviathan, and others).

Kameradschaft between new and old friends

Just when it seems the musical output has definitively settled into a kind of golden routine, along comes a swerve: in 1996, during some concerts held in Austria, Douglas met a musician who writes and performs in two bands from the apocalyptic-medieval scene: The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath A Cloud and, above all, Der Blutharsch; his name is Albin Julius. The two hit it off right away, and during a trip the Austrian made to Australia, a highly productive and rewarding collaboration was born for both: for Douglas, who could now draw on Albin's genius as an extraordinary assembler of sounds and melodies blending military fanfares, folk music and symphonic echoes of ancient resonance; for the Austrian, who got to work alongside one of his most important points of reference.

In 1998 the first product of this new alliance came out: titled Take Care And Control, it presented a new musical guise for Death In June. Gone is the acoustic guitar that formed the backbone of the folk ballads, relegated to the sole track "Kameradschaft"; what you hear instead is a dark, decadent magma (though here and there it pushes into the excessive and the grotesque, with effects that are presumably intentional), with noises and loops infiltrating the majestic orchestral scaffolding and Douglas P.'s timbre - at times menacing, at times caressing - never more the master of ceremonies than here. It ranges from symphonic pastiches ("Power Has A Fragrance", "Despair") to inarticulate, shadowy soliloquies ("The November Men"), all the way to menacing cacophonous openings, such as the closing "Wolf Wind". The work is at times excessively uniform, but overall it effectively renews the project's sonic guise, and the whole fits perfectly with the sound Death In June had accustomed listeners to.

And what became of David Tibet? Vanished, as if he'd never existed. What happened was that in 1997-1998 (though warning signs had already appeared) a dispute began between Douglas and World Serpent, the label that had distributed his work for years, which he accused of denying him a good portion of the earnings from his record sales. The matter grew increasingly tense and unpleasant, until Douglas P., together with other musicians recording for World Serpent (Albin Julius included), decided to sever all ties. The result was a lengthy legal dispute that would last for years, pitting against each other people who had seemed like true friends, and forcing Douglas to wade through sordid matters of money and personal grudges. All of this would naturally be reflected in the man's art, leading to ruptures such as the one with David Tibet, who remained loyal to the label. Revenge would come in two forms: one, the satisfaction of witnessing World Serpent's bankruptcy in 2002; the other, true to the man's character, driving him to devote time and energy to genuine musical assaults.

The partnership with Albin Julius continued, and in 2000 Operation Hummingbird was released, a short work (seven tracks for under half an hour) that at first glance keeps to the path set by its predecessor. So, no acoustic guitar whatsoever; room instead for sampled fanfares, scored scenarios and morbid, decadent atmospheres. In fact, there are also some new elements that make the record perhaps the best work since But, What Ends...: the opening "Gorilla Tactics" shows quite a bit of pitch-black irony, as, amid a roundup-like atmosphere of cuckoo clocks and hunter-and-hunted panting, Douglas denounces the censorship he suffered over a cancelled concert in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the climate of hypocrisy in a country whose "Banks are filled with nazy gold, But Death In June's banned". "Flieger" samples a lounge-style keyboard riff lifted from an old Brigitte Bardot track (!), turning out to be the "easiest" song (with all due caveats) ever written under this particular banner, carrying listeners up and down along the flight paths of pilots devoted to glory.

But even the remaining songs, though more conventional in their load of spleen, are of high quality and show the artistic good health of the duo: special mention goes to "The Snows Of The Enemy (Little Black Baby)", with its insistent string movement and dissolving backdrops, and above all to the magnificent "Hand Grenades And Olympic Flames", murky and painfully evocative (in the sense that it evokes pain, and once again a grandeur that is ancient and now lost). "Winter Eagle" then seems to be the final track, with its circular, hypnotic progression, but then a melody (ancestral, folk-like, one might even say völkish, for the sake of ambiguity), which like an underground river had appeared and vanished throughout the record, fully reveals itself in the closing "Let The Wind Catch A Rainbow On Fire", a title so elaborate and laden with symbolic meaning that it deserves its place as the incipit on the band's official website. The choirs of the damned, the voice so low it seems like mere spoken word, doubled in the background by another voice, the hypnotic motif in which everything drowns: it all makes for an intriguing and conclusive listen.

Having also severed his artistic ties with Albin Julius, Douglas P. shed his skin once again and released All Pigs Must Die in 2001. This is his revenge against World Serpent: a barrage of insults hurled at the treacherous pigs, laying bare the disappointment and accumulated rage. Having returned to his folk ballads for guitar and a handful of other instruments, including trumpet and accordion, Douglas also took something of a step back in terms of the final result: the concept about the three little pigs (alias World Serpent) is of a far lesser calibre than the subjects he had sung about previously, and while it once again reveals the author's determination to keep art and life inextricably bound together no matter what happens, it suggests that other modes of expression might have better served the bitterness he had built up. Musically, the record follows a curious trajectory, starting out as a neo-folk ballad before, after six tracks, flipping polarity entirely and turning the preceding songs into a brutal continuum of power electronics and distorted vocals, split into a further five tracks that should really be considered as a single whole. The result is striking, but not especially incisive, truth be told, at least for anyone already accustomed to this kind of sound.

All Pigs Must Die features a collaboration with Andreas Ritter of the German neo-folk group Forseti.

In 2004, yet another transformation arrived with Alarm Agents, the fruit of a collaboration with Boyd Rice and credited to the two of them jointly. The record essentially consists of Boyd Rice's virile, monotone voice declaiming the lyrics, with musical contributions from Douglas P. alongside John Murphy (the multi-instrumentalist who had by then been a loyal touring companion for some years) — acoustic guitar, scattered percussion and keyboards, plus a few noise-industrial treatments, all embellished here and there by film samples and seagull cries echoing through (as already happened on "This Is Not Paradise" from the 1992 album).

Alarm Agents isn't bad, though it is excessively fragmented (at least in the CD edition) into numerous tracks that often amount to little more than brief snippets. Rice's voice, moreover, eventually creates a kind of numbing effect, which is an elegant way of saying boredom. The album does, however, contain isolated moments of great beauty, such as "Black Sun Rising", classic Death In June, the vividly imaginative "Get Used To Saying No!", a kind of raga built on country-folk guitar that lifts you to astral heights, or the retreat into familiar industrial territory of "Are You Out There?". The record closes with the brief "Body's Gift", which manages to condense into under 30 seconds an entire worldview, a pure and unyielding philosophy that allows for no concessions.

Alarm Agents marks the mutually agreed end of the partnership with Boyd Rice; by this point Douglas had closed the door on all the collaborations that had made his name famous.

Douglas P.-Death in June, who at the end of 2005 also bid a (temporary?) farewell to live performances, subsequently channelled his energies in various directions: contributing to film ("The Doctor", in which he provides the narrating voice), defending his album Rose Clouds Of Holocaust after it was censored in Germany, continually reissuing his vast back catalogue, remastered and padded out both graphically and musically (with kitsch highs such as the 20th-anniversary edition of Brown Book packaged in marble), a number of DVDs, and so on.

In 2008, Douglas — by now in his fifties and increasingly resembling a mild-mannered university professor with a penchant for military look — released his new work, The Rule Of Thirds. Consistent with his decision not to rely on other collaborators, this new album sees him as sole musician as well as sole author of the lyrics. The Rule Of Thirds harks back to the days of Rose Clouds Of Holocaust, with guitar arpeggiating classic melodies, only occasionally interspersed with snatches of dialogue, film excerpts or treated symphonic passages, and a voice revisiting all the themes dear to his poetics; unfortunately the final result is not reassuring, as it comes across as a step backwards in every respect. Douglas P. seems to have dug himself into a single idea of musical-artistic discipline and pursues it with his characteristic pride, but it suggests he no longer wishes to engage with the times, and would rather stop taking risks altogether. The voice is still the same, passionate and deep, but that's not enough: the musical structure is thin and, what's more, recycled from elsewhere, failing to make this work distinctive and truly incisive. Respect for the artist remains, but it is now harder to keep following him down this path of decline, which seems to point towards a sunset that can no longer be postponed.

The next step towards this sunset is represented by Peaceful Snow, an album on which the musical accompaniment is entrusted to a Slovak pianist, Miro Snejdr, whom Douglas met online through the Death In June newsgroup. Snejdr worked on the scores and translated them into a fluid pianistic mélange of an exquisitely romantic cast, over which Douglas then laid down his voice, his singing, his anguished pronouncements on the decline of the Western world.

The new approach might have seemed promising, at least from a musical point of view, as hinted at by a 7" released a few months earlier on Extremocidente. But while the first song is pleasant enough, the second reveals an unsettling monotony, both vocally and musically. As does the third, and so on. The trouble is that there are thirteen songs in all, amounting to nearly an hour of listening, and it's genuinely difficult to make it to the end. The sampled voices and breaths meant to add colour to the tracks do little to help, nor does the slightly more varied vocal delivery on a few pieces, nor indeed the musical backing, which does show the performer's goodwill and a certain degree of talent, yet also betrays a sound that is at times formulaic and predictable, quickly becoming tedious. On top of that, the second CD included in the first pressing, "Lounge Corps", offers up yet another round of reworkings of earlier Death In June tracks by the same pianist, adding absolutely nothing to what has already been said here or elsewhere.

In 2013, The Snow Bunker Tapes was released, containing the acoustic demos sent to Miro Snejdr so he could transcribe them for piano. These are extremely minimal tracks, whose narrative is carried essentially by Douglas P.'s deep voice and his guitar: very few elements were added during recording (occasional samples and some percussion).

The result recalls "The Rule Of Thirds"; here the project's sound is even more stripped-back, bare: although recorded in the studio, the tracks have a distinctly live feel, and Douglas Pierce's songwriting ability resurfaces intact.

What should one expect from a Death In June record in 2018? As the title suggests, Essence! aims to recapture something of the essence of Pearce's work, an artist who, since relocating to Australia, has continued — for better or worse — an introspective journey and a reckoning with his own inner demons, wearing his inescapable mask right to the end. Compared with his most recent output, the album is a more than decent return to form, though it adds nothing to the legend. Essence! pays something of a tribute to past glories with tracks that will probably not be remembered as masterpieces but that won't disappoint the many fans, old and new. A number of the arrangements knowingly wink at the classics (self-quoting to some degree), as happens for instance on "God A Pale Curse" and "The Trigger", or indeed on the pleasant "The Dance Of Life / To Shoot A Valkyrie". Detractors could rightly argue that by now Douglas Pearce is simply playing his part (fairly well, it must be said) to the full, giving his audience exactly what they expect of him. And ultimately, that will suit them just fine.

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