The black-as-hell, lacerating gutter chic spike of the pop pantheon refuses to lose its amphetamine nerve. A fact Death In Vegas are surely aware of.
However, it's frighteningly dark and scary in there and we're all starting to have nightmares and look like death. Thus, reeling from the hellish concrete electro-grooves of 1999's imperious 'Contino Sessions', DIV pilots Richard Fearless and Tim Holmes set-out with a 'brighter' modus operandi for their third long-player.
Fearless claims 'Scorpio Rising' is "about good coming out of evil" - check the cover, which features a scorpion emerging from a pentagram behind a prism. We can deal with that. More significantly, while the Lords of Darkness on 'Contino' - Iggy, Bobby G, William Reid - will have epitaphs of glacial cool and daggers of 'evil' plunged into their crosses at death, DIV have chosen their collaborators wisely this time around, to execute a slight retreat from the inferno.
Crucially, it works. And though the influences/peers - Stooges, Velvet Underground, Krautrock, Spiritualized, Primal Scream - remain the same, this exceptional collection of visionary psychedelia is more ethereal and somewhat bereft of the cloaked fug of death threats, serial killers or "eggs bearing insects hatching in my mind" that made 'Contino' such a brain-damaged future Goth classic.
So, while DIV do rely heavily on the cool quotient of their collaborators, here the impact is as much about the lush atmospherics generated by Dot Allison, Hope Sandoval and the tremulous sensuality of Susan Dillane. Melted alongside Indian string impresario Dr L. Subranamian's arrangements, DIV excel, with or without - clutching for the populist jugular here - the presence of Liam Gallagher and Paul Weller.
Particularly powerful are the matchstick fragile '23 Lies' which burns - like Massive Attack/Liz Fraser's 'Frozen' - with breathless passion through the wonder of Dillane's vocals alone, and Allison's 'Diving Horses', which engulfs you like creeping fog. Even more formidable is Sandoval's symphonic closer, 'Help Yourself', as it builds gently like a Mogadon 'Private Psychedelic Reel', before Subranamian's soaring strings take us home alongside backwards guitars, probing bass and inevitable sitars.
Elsewhere, there are a host of other highlights, notably the spliced motorik instrumental 'Leather Girls', which dives effortlessly from Krautrocking electro into glorious swathes of Spiritualized ambi-pop, while a spitting, rasping Liam Gallagher towers above skyscrapers on the swaggering psyched rock trance of the title track. In the right hands this man is a God.
And, naturally, there has to be some subversion - sadomasochism style - in the shape of the sweltering, metronomic molestation of 'Hands Around My Throat'. Which is deeply fitting, because 'Scorpio Rising' is much like sadomasochism itself - dangerous, exhilarating, uplifting and brutal, but ultimately propelled by a twisted form of love. As are all the best records.
