The Sounds Of John The Revelator is not a conventional album, nor is it an audiobook per se. Instead, it’s author and former Hot Press scribe, Peter Murphy, reading excerpts from his debut novel over a backdrop of musical mayhem created by a host of like-minded cohorts, led by Revelator-in-chief Acko, Murphy’s former Grasshopper bandmate from back-in-the-day, and featuring The Frames’ Colm Mac Con Iomaire on viola and We Are Kings’ Joe Kingman.
As Murphy’s Wexford intonations narrate his passionate, poetic prose it’s clear that a lot of effort went into matching his reading to the music, and it works. You are reminded of Bono’s classic rendition of John F. Deane’s ‘Driving To Midnight Mass’ set to a musical backdrop that fits the tone of the prose like a strait-jacket.
There’s the gentle melancholia that marks the whimsical ‘Picnic At Blowhole Cave’ and the brooding bass of ‘A Dream In Dub’, the bright electro of the quaint ‘My Mother Among The Flowers’ and the alt. country acoustics of ‘What A Tree Looks Like’. Providing sharp contrast is the clanging Waitsean trash-can blues of Murphy’s frequent visits to the Old Crow medicine show, nowhere better than ‘Murder Of Crows’: here, his writing spews forth in globules of sweat-streaked, pungent phraseology, contrasting dream-like sequences of domestic harmony with a nightmarish menagerie of monsters, plague and pestilence. It’s not for the faint-of-head or weak-of-heart. His is a world where the stations of the cross are like “14 frames of a strange snuff film”, where Jesus hangs to his cross with “the emaciated body of a supermodel”, all of this served up on a bed of string-soaked classical stirrings in ‘The Terrible Grace Of God’.
‘Letter From Hell’ is Dante’s Inferno copulating with Cave’s ‘Carny’, as Murphy layers brutal image upon terrifying vision, a brilliant if sick-inducing litany of sins, while the industrial clanks, grinds and mechanical farts form a fitting soundtrack.
The Sounds Of John The Revelator won’t be to everyone’s tastes: it’s the end of the world news narrated by the preacher from the black lagoon, scored by Aphex Twin’s evil siblings and directed by Hieronymus Bosch. Listen and be afraid.
Key Track: ‘Letter From Hell’