by Stewart Mason
The third and final album by This Mortal Coil, 1991's Blood is neither as unfocused as Filigree & Shadow or as conceptually pure as It'll End in Tears, but it's a solidly enjoyable set. Once again, nearly half the tracks are instrumentals (or tracks with minimal and often wordless female vocals) written by Ivo Watts-Russell and John Fryer, but this batch of tunes holds together much better than the much more amorphous originals on Filigree & Shadow; lengthy atmospheric explorations like &Dreams Are Like Water& sound composed and thoughtful rather than merely pretty. And as always, the covers are brilliantly chosen. The twin highlights are two songs written by Big Star's Chris Bell; &I Am the Cosmos& is reinterpreted as a ragged, brink-of-chaos rocker that sounds like it could have been on Big Star's post-Bell magnum opus, Third, while a delicate acoustic version of &You and Your Sister& with wispy, unsure vocals by Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly ranks with the first album's reinterpretation of Tim Buckley's &Song to the Siren& as one of the group's masterpieces. Other gems include a near-symphonic reading of Spirit's &Nature's Way& and a version of Syd Barrett's &Late Night& that strips the song down to not much more than Caroline Crawley's voice and a low-frequency hum.