SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES - Mantaray

After the avant-garde infatuation with Japanese culture laid bare on her previous record “Hai!” (credited to the Creatures project), the dark queen Susan Janet Dallion, better known as Siouxsie Sioux, is back.

With this new work, one thing remains certain: as things stand, you can't ask Siouxsie to replay the role of the cursed rebel that made her a rock icon. The reckless, wonderful era of “The Scream”, “Join Hands” and “Ju-Ju” is now long gone, and it would be downright unfair to expect, from an artist now in her fifties, a rehash of the very stylistic tropes and models she herself helped create. Today Siouxsie looks much more like a romantic songwriter, an enigmatic entertainer, than the riot girl of old; and that's exactly as it should be.

In light of all this, then, it would be pathetic to tear into “Mantaray” (as happens with so many new records by rock's sacred monsters) simply because Siouxsie isn't who she used to be. “Mantaray”, to be clear, is a record full of flaws, but the English musician's experience and skill (maturity, you might say) manage to turn it into a work that is at the very least enjoyable.

Looking closer, what the record lacks is solidity in the songwriting: a compositional problem, then, which is offset by the accuracy of the arrangements, lavish at times but never redundant. All of Siouxsie's collaborators are, in fact, hugely talented: Steve Evans on guitar and ukulele, Hossam Ramzy on percussion, Ted Benham on dulcimer and xylophone, and our fellow countryman Davide Rossi on strings. In short, if once, with the Banshees, Siouxsie worked by subtraction, today she proceeds in the exact opposite way.

The opening “Into A Swan” is an explosive track: ragged distortion and manic percussion sketch out an epic, shadowy song, one of the best of the bunch. With the second track, “About To Happen”, the quality drops; the song's subversive charge gets lost in a keyboard carpet so garish and baroque it recalls the worst of Muse.

The record recovers nicely with three atmospheric tracks: the nocturnal fanfare of “Here Comes That Day”, the sensual noir crooning of “If Doesn’t Kill You” and the morbid “Loveless”.

Traces of purely Siouxsie-esque madness resurface in the delirious gallop of “One Mile Below”, while “Drone Zone” sketches out a surprisingly “sick” rumba for double bass, piano and horns.

The last three tracks swing between the acceptable results of the decadent tango “Sea Of Tranquillity” and the regrettable ones of the overly saccharine “They Follow You” and “Heaven And Alchemy”. Finally, the glossy, polished production perhaps strips some immediacy from many of the tracks, but in return clothes them in a particular charm, a murkiness that's less unsettling and more elegant.

Like it or not, this is the Siouxsie of 2007: take it or leave it? The choice is yours.

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20/10/2007