Floodland (album)


Floodland is the second studio album by English gothic rock band the Sisters of Mercy. It was released on 13 November 1987 through Merciful Release internationally, via WEA, with Elektra Records handling the American release. After the release of the band's debut album, First and Last and Always, members Craig Adams and Wayne Hussey departed the band to form the Mission, causing the dissolution of the Sisters of Mercy. As a result, band frontman Andrew Eldritch formed a side project, The Sisterhood, and recorded new material with them. After his first album with the project was received negatively overall, he went back to recording as the Sisters of Mercy and hired Sisterhood member Patricia Morrison for the recording of a new album.
Eldritch wrote the songs of Floodland in Hamburg; the city's large amount of water influenced the album's title as well as its recurring lyrical theme of water. He then called upon Larry Alexander and Jim Steinman to produce the album with him. Recording sessions began in New York City during January 1987 and carried on throughout the first half of the year in various studios throughout England. Eldritch served as the vocalist, performed all instruments, and programmed the band's drum machine, "Doktor Avalanche", which acted as the drum player; Morrison did not contribute to the album despite being a member of the band. In contrast to First and Last and Always, Floodland was done in a less conventional way, with the album being pieced together on computers using sequencers. The album musically incorporates gothic rock and dark wave, while lyrically, Eldritch is cast as the observer of a slowly deteriorating world. Some of the events that inspired some of the album's songs include the Chernobyl disaster, Cold War, and the band's previous breakup.
The band chose not to embark on a tour to support the album, but despite this, Floodland and its singles had a positive commercial performance. The album debuted in the United Kingdom at number 9. Its pre-orders assured it silver certification status from the BPI upon its release. In 1988, the album was certified gold by the BPI for selling 100,000 copies in the UK. The album also peaked within the top 40 in other European countries. The three singles released to support the album were "This Corrosion", "Dominion", and "Lucretia My Reflection". In the UK, "This Corrosion" peaked at number 7, "Dominion" peaked at number 13, and "Lucretia My Reflection" peaked at number 20. The song "1959" was also released as a radio single. While it initially received mixed reviews from critics, Floodland has retrospectively received praise and been considered a seminal gothic rock album by several critics.

Background

After the release of the band's debut album First and Last and Always in March 1985, frontman Andrew Eldritch intended to record an ABBA cover as a single, and tried to hire Jim Steinman as a producer. Eldritch originally contacted him when the ABBA song "Gimme Gimme Gimme" was in the band's setlist. Steinman was interested in producing the cover, but was too busy at that time. Shortly afterward, the Sisters of Mercy disbanded. The break-up occurred while the band prepared their second LP in October 1985, which was going to be titled Left on Mission and Revenge. Eldritch, who still intended to record the album as a solo artist, on the same day called bassist Patricia Morrison, who was on a UK tour with her band Fur Bible supporting Siouxsie and the Banshees, and asked her to collaborate with him.
The music press reported the break-up on 2 November 1985, announcing that "the Sisters of Mercy were down to singer Andrew Eldritch and his faithful drum machine Doctor Avalanche this week after guitarist Wayne Hussey and bassist Craig Adams left the band. Although this has scuppered recording plans for a new album this month, Andrew now intends to record the same album in the New Year and could well be using Wayne as a session guitarist. Andrew has also approached former Gun Club bassist Patricia Morrison—now in Fur Bible—to play on the album, but it's not yet known whether Andrew will continue with the name Sisters of Mercy." Eldritch had no intention to carry on under the old band's name, as members of the band who left to form the Mission had an agreement with him that the name "the Sisters of Mercy" would be used by no one after the break-up.
Eldritch released the single "Giving Ground" on 20 January 1986 under the name "the Sisterhood", which featured vocals by his musician friend James Ray. At the end of February 1986, the Merciful Release label announced that he "forthcoming Andrew Eldritch album which for some months has had the working title Left on Mission and Revenge." This solo album, which was eventually titled Gift, was released in July 1986, again under the Sisterhood moniker. It was recorded at Fairview Studios in Willerby, Hull. Eldritch did not sing on the album for contractual reasons. Morrison collaborated with him for the first time, contributing a spoken passage on the track "Jihad". The album was negatively received overall and Eldritch lost his publishing deal with RCA Music Limited as a result. A Sisterhood 12" EP titled This Corrosion was planned for release and would feature an American vocalist, whose identity was meant to be kept secret until release. It had been recorded at Fairview Studios with Alan Vega but remained unreleased. Eldritch instead kept the idea for when he would reboot the Sisters of Mercy.

Recording

After what was dubbed the "Sisterhood fiasco" by Sounds, Eldritch decided to continue under the name "the Sisters of Mercy", feeling as though doing so would improve the name's reputation after the previous fallout. He also thought that it would have been nonsensical to change the name, as he still wrote songs the same way as before. Eldritch, who in 1985 first moved to Bramfeld and then to St. Pauli, began to compose a new album, under the Warner Elektra Atlantic label, in Hamburg. The demos were mainly recorded with a Casio CZ-101 synthesizer, acoustic guitars and a new drum machine. At the time, Eldritch was attempting to find a MIDI drum machine that featured a "tighter snare drum" sound at a modest price. With the exception of "This Corrosion", he recorded demo versions of all Floodland songs in 1986, which later began to appear on the bootleggers' market.
According to Eldritch, Morrison did not contribute to the songwriting, saying that the album was practically a solo record. He insinuated that she suffered from writer's block and was unable to come up with many musical ideas, also adding that he "couldn't even get her to pick up the bass in the first place." He reaffirmed this in a 2012 interview with Classic Rock, in which he stated that she "didn't make the cut" and therefore did not appear on the album. Merciful Release office manager Boyd Steemson also confirmed that her contributions were minimal. Eldritch denied that his approach to songwriting had changed since the band split, saying that "'This Corrosion' sounds like 'Temple of Love' II, '1959' sounds like 'Afterhours' part 2. I don't see any difference or any real change. I think I just carry on where I stopped." He licensed the publishing to SBK Songs Limited.
served as a producer for "Dominion" / "Mother Russia" and "This Corrosion"
The starting point for the album was the song "This Corrosion", which was to be produced by Steinman. Eldritch had immediately thought of him when he came up with the idea for the song. He stated that "when we were trying to sell 'Corrosion' to Steinman, we told him it was like the high-point of a Borgia's disco evening and he went for it." He also used Steinman to get his record company to concede an appropriate recording budget. He figured that the company would not grant money to use on choirs, but that they would immediately do so if Steinman were to ask for it. According to Steemson, Max Hole, the head of Warners' A&R, managed to get the band a budget of £50,000 for the song.
The recording of "This Corrosion" and "Dominion" / "Mother Russia" started in January 1987 in New York. Steinman and Eldritch used Power Station Studios in Manhattan, New York, where they worked with engineer Larry Alexander. On both songs, Steinman used six background singers and 40 members of the New York Choral Society. Eldritch recalled that he was unsure as to why so many vocalists sung all at once, but noted that it "seemed like a good idea at the time" and worked out well in the end. Steinman mainly focused on the production of the choral singings and did not contribute much to the actual composition and arrangements. This caused him to receive only partial production credit for "Dominion / Mother Russia".
The remainder of the album was recorded in England. Initially, Eldritch worked with an unknown producer, who he eventually fired. He called Larry Alexander while in New York and hired him as a co-producer. They travelled to England, where they recorded at multiple studios. They spent time at Strawberry Studios in Manchester before transitioning to The Wool Hall in Bath. Recording was completed at AIR Studios in London. Roy Neave, an in-house engineer at Fairview Studios, engineered the sessions. Originally Eldritch intended to work with his colleague John Spence, who had worked with the Sisterhood in 1986, but he was committed to another project at the time and recommended Neave as his replacement.

Composition

Music

staff reviewer "ManosG" described the music of Floodland as a mix of gothic rock and dark wave. In contrast to the previous album, First and Last and Always, which had been recorded in a conventional way, Floodland was pieced together on a computer with the help of sequencers. Eldritch worked on the recorded parts with a Voyetra Sequencer Plus, with a Yamaha SPX-90 being used as an effects unit and the parts being saved on a Compaq Portable 286. The guitars were played by Eldritch himself, apart from the solo on "This Corrosion" which was played by Steinman's friend Eddie Martinez. The drum sounds on the album were sampled together from various drum machines with an Akai S900. The tom sound was from an Oberheim DMX which had been used on First and Last and Always. The remaining drum sounds were from a Yamaha RX-5. The track "1959" features only the sound of a piano, but was pieced together with a sequencer by Eldritch and played without an actual piano.

Lyrics

Regarding the album title, Eldritch realized that, after writing all the songs, the theme of water came up multiple times throughout. He attributed the recurrence of this theme to the amount of water within Hamburg, where he was writing these songs. Michael Bonner of Uncut viewed Eldritch as casting himself in a role where he is a "jaded observer, watching cynically as he and the world slouch towards Armageddon," adding that the songs are bonded together by "images of the apocalypse that straddle the gap between the personal and the political."
The two-part opening track, "Dominion" / "Mother Russia", was inspired by "Ozymandias", a Shelley sonnet about a tyrant whose legacy of conquest diminishes as time passes by, from which one line is lifted. Bonner noted that the song seemed to have been inspired by Cold War geopolitics as well. Eldritch considered the song to be about "the prostitution of Europe by the Americans". On how the song was created, he said "I made the mistake of getting caught in central Europe when Chernobyl started sprinkling its residue over the land. It's part of my hate/hate relationship with America. I just had the idea of all them huddled in their mobile homes while Mother Russia rained down on them." "Flood I" and "Flood II" use the word "flood" as a metaphor for sex. Eldritch commented on the song, saying "most people, if you think about it, only get wet under certain circumstances. Water is something so mammoth, so a flood is emotionally very stimulating." He called "Lucretia My Reflection" his "Welcome on board, Patricia" song, saying that he had always thought of her as a "Lucretia-type person." The partially-autobiographical song "1959" takes it title from Eldritch's birth year. He thought of the song as regarding "innocence–inherited as opposed to environmental."
from the band and his "clichéd lyrics" served as the inspiration for the lyrics of "This Corrosion"
The centre piece of the album, "This Corrosion", goes back to the conflict between Eldritch and his former bandmates who were now in the Mission. The lyrics are a parody of "clichéd, meaningless rock lyrics" as Wayne Hussey especially wrote them. Eldritch noted that "it is, of course, directed at somebody and it doesn't take a genius to work out who, although it'll probably take the person concerned some considerable time. Nearly all of should be thought of in quotation marks. It would be too confusing to print them all." He also notes that the title is capitalized on the lyrics sheet because "it's the title of somebody else's song. Wayne used to withdraw himself with a book of song titles, select those which sounded best and piece together a song lyric from it. It didn't have to have any meaning, it just had to sound good."
"Driven Like the Snow", like "Nine While Nine" on the band's previous album, is about Eldritch's former girlfriend Claire Shearsby, even being noted as "Nine While Nine Part 2" by him. He thought of the song as a way to logically explain why the relationship had to fall apart. On "Never Land", Eldritch commented that it imagines "the entire population of the earth starting to travel from some indefinable point in space toward the earth at increasing speed. It would take an eternity to reach the earth—by which time you'd be reasonably spiritualised—and even when you reached the destination, you wouldn't actually hit the ground. You'd be going so fast you'd just go through and out the other side, where there is another eternity of nothingness. I just tried to write a song about these impressions." The lyrics Eldritch referred to would be found on the full twelve-minute version of the song, which remained unreleased until it was included in the 2006 reissue of Floodland.

Release

"This Corrosion" was selected as the first single from the album, although Eldritch initially had pleaded for "Dominion". It was released on 18 September 1987. It was released as a 7-inch, 12-inch, CD and cassette; each version contained a different mix of the song. Eldritch originally wanted the long version on the single, but the record company desired for an edited version instead. The mix of the LP version is identical to that of the 12" version, but lasts about 45 seconds longer. The cassette version was mixed by Steinman and differs from other single versions. The B-side of the single was "Torch", which Eldritch produced and played every instrument on. It had been written in 1985 for the aborted Left on Mission and Revenge album. The 12" single added Eldritch's version of the Sisterhood song "Colours". WEA conceded a budget of over £50,000 for the video. It was shot in a warehouse in Wapping and set in the ruins of a post-nuclear attack London and was directed by Stuart Orme. The band wanted to film in Kazakhstan in the Soviet Union, but at the same time, Russian record label Melodiya was in negotiations with the West regarding video rights, and filming there would have botched the negotiations.
Floodland was first released in Europe on 13 November 1987 through Merciful Release, a subsidiary of WEA operated by Eldritch. It later received a release in the United States on 11 January 1988 through Elektra Records. The album had simultaneous releases on vinyl, cassette, and CD. The cassette release included the "This Corrosion" B-side "Torch", while the CD release included both "Torch" and "Colours", another B-side from the "This Corrosion" singles, as bonus tracks. Morrison's name was not included in the album's credits although she was pictured on the sleeve and appeared under her real name Anne Rainone in the "Thanks" section of the inner sleeve. Morrison downplayed this in interviews, saying "if you look at Sisters' records, the names for what people play usually aren't there. Andrew writes the songs so there's no reason for anyone else to be featured. I was well aware of that when the album came out but what I didn't realise was that it would confuse other people. If people haven't seen the press we've done, they don't know I'm in the band." Eldritch still considered her to be a vital part of the band as she contributed greatly to the band's visual identity by appearing in music videos and on the album cover. Eldritch chose not to embark on a tour to promote the album, feeling that the album was never made to be played live. He later claimed that did not have a band ready to accompany him on a tour, which was really why he chose not to tour and instead opted to promote the album through singles, music videos, and television appearances only.
Following the release of Floodland in November, a remix of "Dominion" was announced as the second single in December 1987. It was released in the last week of February 1988. A cover of the Hot Chocolate song "Emma" was recorded for the single in January 1988 at the Church Studios in London, with final overdubs and mixing completed at Master Rock Studios in Kilburn. Morrison provided the bass guitar for the track. Eldritch recorded vocals for the song several times, but regardless of the result, he felt that it didn't sound as good as his vocals from live performances. As a result, he and producer Hugh Jones hired the Kilburn National Theatre and the Rolling Stones Mobile recording truck and played the track to him through the stage monitors, recording multiple performances with him singing on the stage. The other B-side tracks of the single, made from various "Dominion" segments, were prepared shortly before the "Dominion" video shoot. "Sandstorm" consists of various sampled saxophone and keyboard parts from "Dominion", mixed to a moody short instrumental track which was used in the opening section of the video. "Untitled" is a slowed-down instrumental excerpt from "Dominion". The CD single contained "Ozymandias", which is "Dominion" played backwards. The video for "Dominion" was filmed in February 1988 in the Jordanian city of Petra; it was the first ever music video to have been shot in Jordan. After the commercial success of "This Corrosion", WEA had again conceded a budget of £50,000 and enlisted director David Hogan, who shot the video in two days after four-and-a-half months of preparation. Eldritch called the video "Lawrence of Arabia part two."
The third and final single from the album, a remix of "Lucretia My Reflection", was released on 27 May 1988. The B-side of the single was "Long Train"; the title references lyrics from "Lucretia My Reflection". The video was filmed by director Peter Sinclair at locations in India, including a cotton mill in Bombay. Eldritch had also considered releasing "1959" as a single at some point. It was later released as a promotional single aimed for radio play. It also received a music video that was filmed in India.

Reception

Critical

Floodland initially received some mixed reviews from writers. Mark Coleman of Rolling Stone gave the album three out of five stars and felt that the album was a step down from the band's previous material. He described it as "Meat Loaf joining the Cure for a remake of Lou Reed|Lou 's Berlin", adding that it is "hilarious, sure, but always listenable at the very least". He provided praise, however, for "This Corrosion", calling it a "bona fide toè tapper of a single". Robert Christgau gave it a C+ grade, writing off the album as a lesser version of music by fellow gothic rock band Fields of the Nephilim.
Floodland has received retrospective praise from writers, however. Writing for AllMusic, Chris True heralded the album as "a definite milestone", complimenting its "lush production" and "lyric imagery that is both scary and glorious". He added that the band create "a black soundscape that is majestic and vast" with "Dominion" / "Mother Russia" and that "slower tracks, like 'Flood' and '1959,' are some of the best ethereal sounds goth has to offer, and the downright regal "This Corrosion" is one of the best songs of the genre." The album also received seven out of ten stars from Classic Rock and a four out of five rating from Sputnikmusic. Sputnikmusic staff member "ManosG" wrote that "Floodland may not be as dark, influential or focused as the band’s debut but is still an excellent album with an amazing vocal performance by Andrew Eldrich". He also called "Lucretia My Reflection" one of the best songs in the band's discography, while also giving praise to "Dominion / Mother Russia", "1959", "This Corrosion", and "Flood II". Floodland was also considered an essential gothic rock album by Classic Rock, Consequence of Sound, Spectrum Culture, LA Weekly, and Treble.

Commercial

Floodland reached number 9 in the UK album charts. Preorders alone assured the album silver status on the day of its release, and on 11 March 1988 it went gold with 100,000 sold units. According to Eldritch the album recouped the high production costs in 1989. In Germany, which Eldritch claimed was The Sisters' second largest market behind the UK, Floodland entered the top 100 albums chart on 14 December 1987, staying there for twenty weeks and reaching number 32. In 1993 it went gold, with 250,000 sold units. In the United States, the album debuted on the Billboard 200 at number 174 during the week of 6 February 1988. It reached its peak position of number 101, after spending six weeks on the chart, during the week of 12 March 1998.

Track listing

Personnel

The Sisters of Mercy
Technical personnel
Additional musicians

Certifications