Welcome back to the Banshees' glittering world of terror and hocus pocus.

The subject matter maybe familiarly obsessive but this is a transitional LP.  Using a heady mixture of strings, keyboards and 'exotic' instruments, the Banshees have done their best to leave their old dervish rock style behind.  The results are intriguing, if a trifle meandering.

If Siouxsie still wants to matter, she needs to bring this new brew to the boil before she becomes too private to count.

Back to the fray, Banshees!  

3/5  

Nick Adams 

The night Siouxsie wore her hyaena suit and made mischief of one kind of another God called her "Wild Thing!" and she threatened to engulf him in her blackness.  God annoyed sent her to the video playpen without any supper, wherein she was condemned to wail with the other nasties.  The multiply screens roared their terrible groans and nashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and flashed their terrible claws, till Sioux, bored, caught their yellow gaze and snapped "be still!" And they were so frightened they crowned their Queen of the place where the Wild Things are.  Since when, insensibly pleased as a punch drunk Judy, she has refused to leave the playpen, "Now" you can hear Siouxsie cry, "let the wild rumpus start!"  "Dazzle" opens this wild rumpus so well you'll wish for it to go on all night, or at least as long as the 12" version, which has Sioux queening it rather splendidly, marshalling massive blocks of orchestral noise and sending them to do battle with marvellous queenly irresponsibility.  When she promises a "jamboree of surprises" the Wild Things are beside themselves with glee.  But they discover the jamboree bags have been opened, all the sweeties gone, no surprises here, only used wrappers carrying scraps of screenplay and crumpled stills.  By the time they reach one marked "Swimming Horses" enchanted though they are by the jaunty piano into getting lost in it's tortuous sexual labyrinths, they're ready to believe their Queen's "words fall in ruins", just like the song says.  They might be as prone to the emotional value of ruins as the next Wild Thing, but the over familiarity of word and image sifted from the ashes of God's censorious fire have been piled high to shore up a crumbling notion of Banshee black heartedness.  On hearing thunder roar on cue to the mention of lightning, setting the guitars off whinnying in the Wicker Man like "Blow The House Down", the mutter of discontented Wild Things grows.  "Why, this is so obviously Sioux it might just as well be a Sex Gang Child", the Wild Things curse.  Not even the giddy chain of exotic noise and naughty phrase, nor the intrusion of phantom organ and the guitars' spidery sideways scuttles, nor the rapidly expanding majesty of Sioux's voice, can disguise the frailty of "Hyaena's" paper video palace.  With the fury of Wild Things betrayed, a wild rumpus begins good and proper with their storming of the Winter Queen's palace.  It's foundations scattered like scraps of newsprint in the wind, Siouxsie, onetime Queen of All The Wild Things, is sent tumbling to the floor with a bump....She wakes up in the night of her very own room where she finds her supper waiting.  It is still hot.

Biba Kopf 1984

Their prey may have varied over the years, but it's still the same old carrion carry-on.  At their transcendental best, the Banshees are a million times more than the sum of their parts.  That arrogantly independent attitude, those embarrassing excursions into the occult, the creeping spell and the sudden rush of blood is so unique that it takes on a life of its own.

There are many such moments on 'Hyaena', moments where the Banshees are caught up in the revelry of their own creations.  Parts of it are so wistfully carefree that it's impossible not to credit Robert Smith as the talisman - his irreverence seems to course through everything.

'Take Me Back' is the Banshees rollicking like some primitive jazz combo drunk on the Good Lord's wine.  On 'Belladonna', Smith's liquid guitar relaxes Sioux to the extent that she drops a few masks to reveal her vulnerability.  When the siren sings "daylight devours your unguarded hours", she's illuminating her own predicament so acutely it surely can't be coincidence.

'Dazzle', too, is naively daring:  Siouxsie's voice, framed alone against the firmament of strings.  It could be Lloyd Webber's Cats or something by Vaughn Williams.  You can get impressed, wrapped up and lost in this.  That's the beauty but then there's the complacency.  'Running Town' tries to sound eerie but instead of evoking the awful truth behind the clown's cheery mask, it just sounds giddy and silly.  And 'Hunger For This' and 'Pointing Bone' are just the Banshees being the Banshees.

I doubt 'Hyaena' could be any other way.  It urges itself to the turning point where we stop assuming what the Banshees should be and start accepting that they can do anything they like.

'Hyaena' is an immaculate conception.  Again

Steve Sutherland.  09/06/84