by Stewart Mason
Continuing the trend of the previous year's Core, 1988's Music from the Scourging Ground tempers the sonic intensity of Controlled Bleeding's early releases by wrapping that strength in prettier finery. The results are a peculiar but often fascinating kind of beautiful noise; the instrumental "In Blind Embrace," for example, mixes near-industrial scrapings and doomy, rattling basslines with passages of ambient fragility. That knife-edge tension continues throughout the largely instrumental Music from the Scourging Ground, resulting in an album that lacks the overpowering bombast of many similar goth rock efforts. Songs like "An Awakening," which mixes wordless keens and wails from drummer Joe Papa with a dramatic piano figure, and the Durutti Column-meets-Coil closer "The Peacock (Music for Four Guitars)" are powerful without being pompously pretentious.