The Sisters of Mercy in Vicar Street | Review

The Sisters of Mercy in Vicar Street, Dublin, on 10th July 2014

In zombie movies, a lone reanimated corpse never poses much threat to the heroes. It’s the zombie horde, a mass of encroaching disaster, vast and inescapable, that is the source of fear. But on its own, and zombie isn’t anything to worry about – it is slow, dumb, directionless, and more frequently the source of a moment of comic relief than terror.

So while the Sisters of Mercy should be a force of doom, they lumber onstage like a reanimated corpse of their former selves, threading along blindly to half remembered instincts from when they were alive.

It’s not surprising really for a band – influential as they are – who nonetheless haven’t released a new album since the early ‘90s and have only one consistent member throughout their checkered history (unless you count Doktor Avalanche the drum machine, now transmogrified into the body of MacBook).

Vocalist Andrew Eldritch appears amidst a barrage of heavy duty lighting and shrouded in a storm of dry ice like he doesn’t really want to be seen at all. His vocals don’t fare much better, with his super-deep droning voice frequently getting drowned out by the two guitarists.

The music itself chugs along monotonously in one rigid tempo, with early appearances of Ribbons and Alice doing very little to set themselves apart. Crash and Burn, an unreleased track which suggests that Eldritch has in fact written some new music in the last twenty years, offers little in the way of musical progression, fading blandly into a set that is painfully same-y.

It quickly becomes clear that The Sisters of Mercy aren’t about to offer much in the way of variation – you can forget about the likes of 1959 or Something Fast making an appearance – but they do at least manage to find their comfort zone in on the storming industrial surge of Dominion (Mother Russia) and a medley of Doctor Jeep and Detonation Boulevard.

Despite both guitarists being given their own opportunities to break off into some neat solos, the Sisters of Mercy have little to offer as a live act. The beats being produced by Doktor Avalanche are so similar that it’d hardly be surprising to discover that he’s had a glitch and has been playing the whole song all night.

Eldritch meanwhile maintains his decrepit, walking dead look throughout, droning through song after song with zero audience interaction, frequently slumping off into the smoke-filled shadows at the back of the stage to wait out the instrumental sections.

When the band slouch off after just under an hour onstage it wouldn’t be hard to believe they had no interest in coming back. It’s surprise then that they return for not one but two encores, rolling out Lucretia and Vision Thing before the show culminates on Temple of Love.

The familiarity of these dark wave anthems are about the show’s only saving grace, as the performances themselves are flat, flavourless and underwhelming.

At times it seems like it’d be a mercy to replace Eldritch himself with a machine. Herr Doktor could probably just play the whole gig on iTunes and it wouldn’t have been much different.