����� The recent spate of vinyl reissues of older Christian Death has been pretty killer, and continues with this new vinyl edition of the band's 1993 album The Path Of Sorrows. Originally released under the name "Christian Death featuring Rozz Williams" due to ongoing conflict at the time between Williams and former bandmate Valor Kand, Path is one of those later albums that inhabits a weird space in the band's discography.

����� One could see this album as more of an offshoot of Williams' Shadow Project, actually, as it features a number of musicians who had previous involvement with that outfit, like William Faith (Faith And The Muse, Sex Gang Children) and Wayne James (Divine Horsemen, Flesh Eaters), and the sound itself is more experimental and free-flowing. But you still get some of that weird death rock that one would expect from a Christian Death record, interspersed amongst lush soundscapes and spoken word pieces, the band expanding their instrumentation with the addition of violin, piano, harp, samplers, and even a human skull used as a percussion instrument, in a typical show of sacrilegious behavior.

����� Still obsessed as ever with morbid death-worship, blasphemy, despair, and the occult, Williams' singing resembles a suicidal David Bowie more than ever, the lyrics etched with Baudelaire-influenced depravity, sometimes descending into a weird sort of demonic word-salad, like on the bizarre quasi-spoken word track "Easter (In The Tombs)" that closes the album. That one features Williams's surreal ravings joined by what is apparently the thunk of that aforementioned skull, resonating over other percussive metallic tones and some jazzy bass guitar.

����� Other tracks are just as weird, opener "Psalm (Maggot's Lair)" combines Williams's pungent spoken-word prose with a sampler-stitched soundscape of hymn-like voices and clanking industrial sounds, but there are several tracks like "Hour Of The Wolf", "In Absentia" and "The Path Of Sorrows" that evoke the trippy death rock of mid-80's Christian Death, just with an added element of doom-laden, dirgelike heaviness and lupine delirium lurking beneath the surface. The campy, glammy quality of those post-Theatre albums from Rozz feels even more pronounced, but they were also going for something a bit more ambitious, layering the album in synth and electronics, the songs arranged into off-kilter, often meandering structures. In fact, the most focused song on here is the cover of Velvet Underground's classic "Venus In Furs", which is transformed into a flamboyant, ghoulish dirge, the erotic undertones of the original well suited to Christian Death's sensibilities.

����� Sure, Path Of Sorrows is pretty self-indulgent, like a lot of the stuff that Williams was doing in the early 90s. But I dig his indulgences, his meandering and rambling gothic hallucinations. I wouldn't recommend Path to anyone but the most fervent Christian Death / Rozz Williams fans; it's nowhere near the absinthe-drenched punk magnificence of Theatre Of Pain and Catastrophe Ballet, of course, but it's still a fascinating and entertaining listen for hardcore fans, especially those who dug Rozz Williams' more experimental projects like Premature Ejaculation and Shadow Project.