Death in June never really made an album quite like this one
again. I must confess ignorance of the output of Crisis, so I cannot comment on
how similar it is to their punk days, but listening to it with knowledge of how
they will sound in mind makes for an
odd experience. Patrick Leagas (now Patrick O’Kill) provides most of the vocals
rather than Douglas P., nor do we have the simple pleasure of the acoustic
guitar here; indeed, I cannot describe this as neofolk music. No, The Guilty Have No Pride is a very different
beast to what DI6 would produce later.
This being
said, we should remember that it would be several years before DI6 settled on
the sound that they are now most associated with. Though there aren’t really
any hints of the kind of music they’d be making from a technical perspective,
the spirit, atmosphere and the themes that would come to mark out their work
are already here. There is ambiguous mediation on the Second World War and the
Holocaust (the latter being dealt with by ‘Heaven Street Mk II’, which is not
only one of the best songs DI6 have ever produced, it is also one of their most
unsettling/upsetting); uneasy suggestions as to where they’re politics might
lie with songs like ‘Nothing Changes,’ ‘Nation’ and…well, the entire album has
uneasy suggestions about DI6’s politics. I could write an essay on DI6’s
relationship with the Far-Right, and I might even do that at some point- but
not here. Here, we’re just going to talk about some of the best music to come
out of the 1980s that no one listened to.
Speaking of
which…
Though,
inevitably, some tracks are stronger than others, as a whole the album is
more-or-less without fault. ‘Nation’ is also a rare instrumental piece, and is
one of the strongest elements of the entire album, though the title track
itself is something of a non-event, particularly if you’re listening to the
2006 re-release, in which it comes in the middle of the music rather than the
end, though this is due to the introduction of several previously unreleased
tracks, including a version of ‘Heaven Street’ which I personally prefer to ‘Mk
II’. Regarding the 2006 re-release, the extra tracks are worth getting your
hands on, though I didn’t much care for ‘In the Night Time.’
As a whole,
TGHNP is a remarkably claustrophobic
and extremely bleak piece of work, and like I said above, not something that
was ever quite repeated. Though the neofolk sound that DI6 would develop as it
went along is a thoroughly welcome addition to underground music, and one that
I am glad to have in my life, I cannot help but wonder how things might have
been if they had continued in this direction rather than in the one they would
tread. This being said, DI6’s greatest strength, in its early days in
particular, has always lain with its ability and willingness to experiment with
theme and format. Not many bands could go from post-punk to experimental-dance
to fashioning a whole new sub-genre of folk music more-or-less single-handedly,
and it is nothing short of miraculous that Death in June managed to do that.
