Faith and the Muse
The Burning Season
by Bill Whiting-Mahoney

The breathtaking Faith and the Muse have never been just a goth group and it's always so disappointing to see Monica Richards and William Faith, the wonderfully clever dynamic duo behind this fascinating project, commonly labeled as such. In their own way, Faith and the Muse has yet to birth a project that is not convincingly passionate, imaginatively lush, endlessly seeking (even whether re-listening to their art) and convincingly unique.

Monica Richards has always held her heritage and herself ever so dear, whether swelling the meaning of Tennyson in song (altering Tennyson’s male camaraderie words in "Frater Ave Atque Vale," on 2001's superb Vera Causa: Night and Morning, to a celebration of womanhood) or placing her late grandfather's poem to a work of overwhelming beauty. Each song from this remarkable singer has always seemed emotionally genuine, as if pure, undiluted personal truths were pouring forth with indisputable honesty. Melancholy seems constantly a half-step behind every hopeful note crafted within the Muse's world, where death is known to be a certainty, faced eye-to-eye rather than ignoring, yet, in the time between, evoking worlds of poetic sound, so deeply enriched with observations, celebrations, longings and an unbridled need to appreciate the beauty in a world that is anything but.

The Burning Season is commonfare Faith and the Muse - that is, it is rich, beautiful, embracing and invitingly personal. Perhaps the opening "Sredni Vashtar" is simply what it appears to be, a poetic notation from Richards on the sometimes understandable morbidity of human nature in H. H. Munro's tale. Or perhaps it's the duo reflecting on their mortality when Richards, now in her late 30s, sings, "This is not a darker age/Just the turning of the wheel/I am here to reassure we never really had control/This world was never kind/Separate your present mind."

Ah, but isn't that the ultimate pleasure of art? To be entranced by one piece of art that generously leads one to another remarkable piece while offering up a distinctly enriching message of its own?

By all accounts, Richards, still one of the most gorgeous voices in the whole of underground music, has lost not a thing from her two decades in music. Her literary fascinations and homages are as plentiful as they have always been (making Faith and the Muse a very rare, almost endlessly giving experience) and "Boudiccea" is a perfect example. Focusing on the obscure history of female Celtic leader Boudiccea, the tale spun here accentuates the tale but also offers the beautiful advice to "Hang your head in shame every time you break a woman's heart."

Still, The Burning Season looks inward often to reflect upon the paths that have led to this beautiful aural gift. Richards observes, "It's fragile work to keep your dreams but the older that we get the farther they seem" on the emotionally uplifting "Whispered In Your Ear," a track so wonderfully yearning that it bests everything else in this excellent collection.

In other great spots, Faith’s vocals and excellent instrumental work on "Failure To Thrive" is as much goth as one is to find here while the beautiful lounge of "Gone to Ground" strays as far away from such easy labels as possible.

To say more, however, simply relinquishes one's own duty to explore Richards and Faith's treasure chest of satisfying knowledge and sweeping art.

Bill Whiting-Mahoney
http://www.technopunkmusic.com

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