Reflections in the Looking Glass: A Tribute to Siouxsie and the Banshees – Review

Reflections in the Looking Glass

A Tribute to Siouxsie and the Banshees (Cleopatra)
by Kelly Ashkettle

The folks at Cleopatra continue their tradition of careless packaging. I still can’t believe they misspelled “Bela Lugosi” on their Bauhaus tribute album and then mixed up the track order on Switchblade Symphony’s “Clown” single.

This time, they mislabel a song as “Ordinates of Gold” when it should be “Ornaments of Gold,” and make an atrociously ugly attempt at capturing the feel of the early ’80s through the use of a neon green cover and an illegible, Atari-looking font.

Once you get past the artwork, however, the music leaves much less to complain about. Most of the songs here are covers of material released between 1980 and ’82. The featured bands are an excellent collection of up-and-coming Gothic artists who have come up with more than competent covers for this well-deserved tribute to Siouxsie Sioux and her Banshees, punk icons who later helped start the Gothic movement.

About half of these bands are a little too respectful, however. They’ve copied the Banshees’ sound so closely that they might as well not have bothered – although they did make me want to go buy 1981’s JuJu, which provides five of the fourteen songs.

The more interesting tracks here are those that offer new interpretations. Regenerator brings some interesting alto-soprano-tenor harmonies to (the mislabeled) “Ornaments of Gold,” and Corpus Delicti add testosterone to “Head Cut” with their growling male vocals.

I’m most taken, however, with Collide‘s “Obsession,” Sin‘s “Skin,” and Ex-Voto‘s “Monitor,” because their use of industrial elements takes Siouxsie’s tales of tortured psyches to a whole new level of haunting madness.