When this album came out in 1990, our local library had a music lending selection and I gave it a go simply because I liked the album cover. I didn’t know anything about The Mission before listening to this LP other than seeing a few crusties wandering around Liverpool with the band's logo drawn on their old army coats in marker pen.
So what did I find? Well, it is a Goth-rock album with a ballad thrown in for variety. It was not my thing at the time, I was obsessed with pristine synth-pop so 47 minutes of guitar songs with vocals belted out shouldn’t have worked for me, but you know what, it did.
After listening to this record as a teenager, I assumed that The Mission had already conquered the world. There was no way an album this good wasn’t being played in stadiums across the globe but in reality, it never happened for them.
Doing some research it turns out that America never really took to them which is puzzling, I would have thought they were made for our rock-loving cousins on the other side of the Atlantic.
A commentator noted that this album should have done for The Mission what ‘Disintegration’ did for The Cure and sent them into the stratosphere. The lack of success wasn’t helped by the band going off the rails around this time due to the amount of drugs they were consuming. An opportunity missed.
In my opinion, it is worth picking up a copy of this record for Side A alone, there is not a bad note on it at all. Side B isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, it just isn’t as strong as the first but there are still some decent songs on it (I’m looking at you ‘Paradise (Will Shine Like The Moon)’ with your folk/rock crossover goodness!)
If you fancy a copy there are plenty on eBay and Discogs with prices that reflect their condition. I picked up this near-mint copy for just £5, I’d pay that for ‘Amelia’, ‘Butterfly On A Wheel’, ‘Deliverance’ and ‘Paradise…’ alone so for me, it was a real bargain.
Tracks To Try: ‘Amelia’, ‘Into The Blue’, ‘Butterfly On A Wheel’, ‘Sea Of Love’, ‘Deliverance’, ‘Paradise (Will Shine Like The Moon)’, ‘Hungry As A Hunter’.
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