"You said life could be painless" howls Robin Proper-Sheppard over and over again. "Well, I'm sorry, but that's not what I've found". Like many other lyrics on this second God Machine album, it's easy to read poignancy into them since band's bassist, Jimmy Fernandez, died suddenly of a brain tumour in May. Though completed well beforehand, "One Last Laugh..." is even harder to get your head round than last year's debut, from that viciously ironic title downwards. Most people will still be baffled as to why these three healthy-looking Californians moved to London, got themselves signed to The Cure's label and made music of such morbid, often oppressive intensity. West Coast goth. Unlike the taut-torsoed rage of hardcore, say, GM's reaction to America's bland, empty happiness was to withdraw, to reach within and, from the depths of their darkest emotions, to create a truly beautiful landscape of their own imagining. Musically they pulled it off by tapping into the power of mantric, loopesque riffage ( "Mama", "Evol", etc), or else crushingly-sparse balladry ( "In bad dreams", "Boy by the roadside"). Their sound also looked towards a kind of arabic mysticism, echoed in lines like "I want to go where the sun goes" ( "The train song"). These songs were all written during a few months that the trio spent at a musicians' commune in Prague, and the exhilaration of at least partially fulfilling that eastern quest crackles through every moment of the LP's widescreen 70-minute odyssey. The journey won't be going any further, tragically, but this is a mighty final achievement.