����� Gotta admit, since my death rock obsession reignited a couple of years ago, I've been revisiting much of the post-Rozz Williams Christian Death output and finding quite a bit of it to be better than I remembered. The later 90's industrial metal stuff still ranks as a low point in the band's history, but for awhile there directly following the departure of founding member and iconic frontman Rozz Williams, guitarist Valor Kand managed to release a handful of solid albums that, while not reaching the depraved heights of those classic early Christian Death albums, nonetheless serves up some seriously dark and driving death rock.

����� One of the more ambitious post-Rozz albums was 1987's The Scriptures, a conceptual album exploring Kand's anti-religious scorn in greater depth than ever before, set to a backdrop of malevolent, heavy goth rock and experimental soundscapery. Unavailable for years on any format, the album has just gotten the deluxe vinyl reissue treatment from Season Of Mist alongside the previous album Atrocities. Considered by many to be one of the best album's that Christian Death ever released, Scriptures examines the history of world religions through the band's nihilistic lens. As with their previous album, it's much more polished than the earlier albums, most of the punk influence diminished in favor of a sleeker, more ambitious songwriting style. Hardly commercial though, this still has lots of dark, blasphemous energy seething beneath the surface of the songs, Gitane Demone's witchy gospel-style singing again featuring prominently alongside Kand's brooding baritone. In some ways comparable to what Sisters Of Mercy were doing around the time, the album pairs dark hard rock riffs with sprawling atmospheric pieces. The first half of the album is distinguished by infectiously rocking numbers like "Song Of Songs", "Four Horsemen" and "Vanity", delivering a jolt of late-80s era gothic rock (as well as a weird interpretation of Hendrix's "1983"), but the second half begins to shift into a more experimental, twisted direction with passages like the industrial-tinged piano-led dread of "Omega Dawn", and the looping noise and unsettling samples that are woven together on the experimental soundscape "A Ringing In Their Ears". Tracks like "Raw War" slow down to offer a kind of grim art rock, sometimes detouring into frenzied improvisation; the psychedelic qualities that first began to manifest on Ashes continue to seep to the surface under Kand's direction, and his guitar playing launches into flights of screaming psychedelia, with lots of spacey effects employed. As the chilling orchestral ambience sweeps across the closer "Reflections", punctuated with terrifying Bernard Herrmann-esque strings, martial snares and ominous piano, the band guides us from the previous indictments of organized religion into a squall of swirling, nightmarish noise.

����� Like Atrocities, this album is really worth checking out if you're a fan of morbid 80's-era post-punk and underground goth rock, definitely deserving of a second look. And this vinyl-only reissue on Season of Mist looks fantastic, featuring a faux-leather-bound gatefold jacket and an oversized twelve-page booklet loaded with lyrics, liner notes and more, pressed on black vinyl in an edition of eight hundred copies.