This Mortal Coil - Filigree & Shadow

Released two years after their debut album, This Mortal Coil’s Filigree & Shadow was no less ornate than its predecessor; a double album with each of its four sides a self-contained unit. New faces joined the cast for this record, including a variety of singers Ivo handpicked like Alison Limerick, Jeanette, Dominic Appleton (Breathless), sisters Deirdre and Louise Rutkowski (Sunset Gun), and Richenel. This Mortal Coil's second album is arguably their best, a sprawling double-LP expanding on the gothic intrigue of It'll End In Tears with even more widescreen production and symphonic grandeur; vocals are handled largely by Breathe's Dominic Appleton and the wonderful Rutkowski Sisters. This is tender, emotional music - sometimes cloyingly so - but by god, is it good, and unlike pretty much anything else out there these days. As before, and after, 4AD and TMC mastermind Ivo Watts-Russell delves into the songbook of West Cost American folk-rock - which, lest we forget, wasn't as well-documented and canonised in '86 as it is now - and comes up with gold. A sepulchral version of Tom Rapp's 'The Jeweller' opens the album, Appleton turns Gene Clark's cocaine-strained love song 'Strength Of Strings' into a fire and brimstone epic, and Deirdre Rutkowski gives one of the finest vocal performances of the 1980s or any other decade for a soaring dub-pop take on Gary Ogan's 'I Want To Live'. Tim Buckley ('Morning Glory'), Judy Collins, Colin Newman, Talking Heads ('Drugs') and Van Morrison ('Come Here My Love') are also covered, but remarkably one of the album's most classic-sounding and resonant songs, 'Tarantula', was originally by 4AD's own Colour Box, whose own Martyn Young fronts a transformative, celestial chamber-pop arrangement by Watts-Russell. And of course there's no shortage incredible instrumentals like 'Ivy and Neet', featuring the unmistakably laconic saxophone of Dif Juz's Richard Thomas, the title track, and the incredibly grave 'The Horizon Bleeds & Sucks It Thumb'. The influence of this album, at once mournful and ecstatic, can be heard in everything from Massive Attack through to The xx and even the likes of The Haxan Cloak and Raime - and though not without its cloying moments, it remains an out and out classic, bound together by John Fryar's engineering and Watts-Russell's visionary gusto.

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This Mortal Coil; Filigree & Shadow

Side 1

1 Velvet Belly - Instrumental - Martin McCarrick

2 The Jeweller - Pearls Before Swine - Dominic Appleton; D. & L. Rutkowski

3 Ivy and Neet - Simon Raymonde - Simon Raymonde

4 Meniscus - David Curtis - David Curtis

5 Tears - Instrumental - Simon Raymonde

6 Tarantula - Colourbox - Dominic Appleton; D. & L. Rutkowski

Side 2

7 My Father - Judy Collins - Alison Limerick

8 Come Here My Love - Van Morrison - Jean

9 At First, and Then - Peter Ulrich - Peter Ulrich

10 Strength of Strings - Gene Clark - Dominic Appleton; D. & L. Rutkowski

11 Morning Glory - Tim Buckley - D. & L. Rutkowski

Side 3

12 Inch-Blue - Instrumental - This Mortal Coil

13 I Want to Live - Gary Ogan - D. & L. Rutkowski

14 Mama K (1) - Instrumental - This Mortal Coil

15 Filigree & Shadow - Instrumental - This Mortal Coil

16 Firebrothers - Quicksilver Messenger Service - Richenel

17 Thaïs (1) - Instrumental - This Mortal Coil

18 I Must Have Been Blind - Tim Buckley - Richenel

19 A Heart of Glass - Instrumental - This Mortal Coil

Side 4

20 Alone - Colin Newman - Alison Limerick

21 Mama K (2) - Instrumental - This Mortal Coil

22 The Horizon Bleeds... - Instrumental - Mark Cox

23 Drugs - Talking Heads - Alison Limerick

24 Red Rain - Instrumental - Simon Raymonde; Caroline Seaman

25 Thaïs (2) - Instrumental - This Mortal Coil