THE GOD MACHINE : One Last Laugh In A Place Of Dying

It's hard to express feelings of loss in the printed word, still harder to pay adequate tribute to absent friends. As the title of the album suggests, "One Last Laugh In A Place Of Dying" is a more powerful testament to Jimmy Fernandez, the bassist who died in May this year at the tragically early age of 28, than any words could say.

In the space of two albums and four EPs, The God Machine reached higher, felt deeper and created more intense, eternal visions with their music than any of their contemporaries would ever have dared. This album is their peak, a thing of terrible, harrowing beauty that dips deep into the terrifying Pandora's Box of the human psyche to grapple with the raw nerve endings of existence. It brings back from the darkness in one, long howl of rage, pain and understanding the flaming torches of redemption, with a music that spans the worlds of the living and the dead. It surpasses Soundgarden's "Superunknown", Smashing Pumpkins' "Siamese Dream", even the back catalogue of Jane's Addiction, to whom they were initially compared.

"One Last Laugh ..." was recorded in Prague, and not for nothing does "The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" spring to mind. In the shadowlands of Europe TGM found the perfect surroundings for their haunted dreams, a place where secrets linger around dusty old architecture and winding streets, a place that has known the awful extremities of human evil : "Cut yourself so I can see the bleeding", is the opening line. "Tremelo Song" makes a sound like chandeliers falling, as Robin Proper-Sheppard, Jimmy Fernandez and Ron Austin turn guitar, bass and drums into one gilded eternity. You can sense the urgency and frantic release sought through the hypnotic "Alone", where the guitars burn with absolute power, and the tense, lingering spaces in between, where piano and strings soothe and tear in equal measure. And all time Robin's voice slices through you, evoking an alienation and loss you would wish never to feel : "You said life could be painless" he accuses on "Painless" - "I'm sorry but that's not what I've found".

And so The God Machine move onwards through the rooms of your mind, unlocking doors where secrets fly around like ghosts. " The Devil Song" looks over its shoulders at a fork-tailed shadow moving ever closer, the clamouring of voices at its climax coming from an old, two-reel tape recorder Robin found in a junk shop in Prague.

"The Hunter" is a thing of sensual, aching beauty, a waltz with that devil in an old, forgotten ballroom, while "Evol" is the scariest evocation I've heard since Killing Joke's "Revelations" frightened the life out of my 13-year-old brain. " Boy By The Roadside" is too painful to actually put into words, but the album drifts off to a beautiful piano elegy, "The Sunday Song", which sounds like the refrain from a ghostly carnival.

Three years ago, on a rainy night in King's Cross, The God Machine told me that the "Purity"EP was recorded as if it was going to be their last record. Their futures were so unsure at the time that they had to put everything into the one moment they had. "It's better to die on your feet than live on your knees", they said.

Thank you.