Angeltread

You figure the album is going to sound like the last one, but maybe with better production, as the first few chords kicks things off and other instruments tentatively enter. Then -- badadada! (Baker and his four snare hits again)-- the bombast, the anguish, the distortion! The first magazine article I ever read about Sixpence was in, believe it or not, a Focus on the Family magazine aimed at teenaged boys, and in it, this album's producer, Armand John Petri (what a name), said that the first four songs on the record were meant to cement Sixpence's signature sound. While this didn't actually happen -- maybe the band didn't truly "find their sound" until the s/t record -- "Angeltread" is a template for the whole of This Beautiful Mess: dark, moody, questioning, and, frankly, erotic. This is a song about being in bed, alone, without a recently departed lover ("hands rhthmically grope the sheets again for you"), sexually and spiritually frustrated. The moon painting the walls white, the silk sheets, the crickets outside, it's supposed to be romantic, perfect, it's one Marvin Gaye track short of a seduction, but... you're not there.

The perennial problem with religious pop music is whether we are dealing with God or (Wo)Man -- whether the love, lost or found or longed for, comes from a romantic impulse or a spiritual one, and perhaps the most interesting is that which blurs the disinction, Julian of Norwich-style. Judee Sill's "The Kiss" comes to mind. So does this song.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ANGELTREAD VIDEO (below)

1.  How painfully  1995 is this video? Notice, for example, the unironic presence of doll parts; yes,  DOLL PARTS.

2. What's up with Jude 1:6? Does that mean this song is about scary evil angels, and if so are you a little creeped out?