But Superstition can't be dismissed just as easily as that.  Siouxsie's ever expanding range is matched by a reborn Banshees ambience in which the clutter of lush psychedelia sounds second nature.

The presence of This Mortal Coil trustee Martin McCarrick may have something to do with the exotic blend but as Siouxsie is prototype and matriarch to the post Cocteaus crowd it'd be a mite cheeky to forget who helped kick start that style in the first place.

You want songs?  They got 'em.  'Cry' is an epiphany for the slaughtered creatures of the deep while 'Ghost In You' seems to have something to do with the killing in China.  No one said pop music had to be a laugh a minute but these aren't dirges either since the lavish attention to detail is too meticulous to ignore.

And enchanting and intelligent record.  

7/10  

Max Bell

'The Banshees', eh?  They've been around for well over a decade now, but they don't just sound like a bunch of old Goths because they've listened to all the happening new dance tunes and incorporated them into their unmistakable sound, as in their latest hit, Kiss Them For Me.  Except they haven't really.  In fact, their single is the only track that's even slightly 'happening' here.  Songs like Silly Thing and Gotta Get Up are failed attempts to go all dancey, ones like Drifter and Softly are those quiet sort of 'ambient' tunes, and things like Fear and Cry sound like loads of other Siouxsie And The Banshees songs you've heard before.  Oh well.  Maybe they are a bunch of old Goths after all, so if you're an old Goth yourself, you'll probably love it. 

6 out of 10  

Tom Doyle

'Imagine two complete strangers who suspect they were meant to be/Yet their suspicions prevent something heavenly':  Thus intones Siouxsie in 'Fear'.  This is her pithy who'd-have-thought-it-in-'76 craft.  True, not every lyric on 'Superstition' is so incisive.  is 'Little Sister', say, about euthanasia, sibling incest or lesbian love for a nun?  But altogether unambiguous is the flexible power of the post '87 Banshees (with Martin McCarrick, keyboards, and John Klein, guitar).  They pop it up with sweet string textures on the single 'Kiss Them For Me', bear down on the maritime metaphor of 'Drifter' with doomy foghorn and bells effects, give it the all but Twin Peaks dreamscape for 'Softly' and the very nearly Van Halen rock out for 'Got To Get Up' (entendre definitely double).  Meanwhile Siouxsie is superb, sometimes hard as nails in the old way, sometimes high and shimmery as  a tassled hippy folk maiden. 

4/5  

Phil Sutcliffe

To many, Sioux and her 'Goff' mates have always seemed to enjoy sole access to the largest supply of bad acid in the world.  Just look at the old witch, her detractors grumble, belching into their pie and chips, just look at the sad crone staggering about in circles with only a bunch of small-time art dealers and a stick with a skull on top for support.

Even certain of her supporters miss the point by several thousand kilometres and have been known to indulge in gormless hikes about the alternative Cluedo board.  "It's the Wicked Witch Of The West," they gabble hopefully, "In the tomb with the stone(d) gargoyles," when Isadora Duncan in the Real World with the Dream Mafia is, quite possibly, much nearer the mark.

The fact is, despite numerous flirtations with mediocrity, Siouxsie & The Banshees have always had balls - and not just of the crystal fortune-telling variety.  Quite the opposite of being fake eccentrics, they echo the voice of the practical lunatic who knows he's a bit odd but can't do a damn thing about it.  'Superstition' therefore documents their latest mocking escape from straitjackets and 'normality'.

the album spins into life with the current single 'Kiss Them For me'.  Brilliant, morbid and preposterous in turn, it features Sioux slyly dissecting the tiny worldview of a frivolous socialite from behind the tinted windows of a rented limousine.  At another time, in another place, F Scott Fitzgerald and Dot parker would have waltzed to it.

'Fear Of The Unknown' is not quite so great despite incorporating the 'WHIRRR! WHIRRR!' noise from 'Crazy Horses' and shades of vintage Yello.  What offends here is Sioux's vocals.  They're so horribly reminiscent of Hazel O'Connor's 'Eighth Day' she may be held responsible for a widespread revival of robot dancing.

Happily the next track, 'Cry' - a fast, almost tribal melody coasting into town on a lyrical 'Green' ticket - drags the index fingers from my ears in time to chill out the glacial, superior 'Drifter'.  A song which examines the concept of sad isolation so convincingly it might have been recorded at a Bros fan convention.

To be honest, the abyss stretching between the good and bad bits of this album is enormous.  Whereas 'Shadowtime' reveals that only Siouxsie and her crew could fashion a rock 'n' roll epic out of lace-edged doilies and Lapsang Souchong tea, 'Got To Get Up' is so misguided and fingers-down-the-back-of-your-throat cute your only wish is to stay in bed, pull the blankets over your head and shoot yourself.

'Softly' is another stinker masquerading as a poisoned rose.  The idea behind the track is interesting enough, with Sioux prowling, tender as a school bully, through a sleeping lover's psyche, but the reality is depressing.  Not only does she take Julee Cruise along for the ride, Sioux neglects to push the idiot into the path of the nearest moving vehicle.

'Silver Waterfalls', however, is a welcome return to pristine 'Christine' form.  The sound of the much-missed Mad Eyed Screamer wallowing in a new puddle of grumpy ecstacy.  As well as being a song people with a strong sense of irony can strip-tease to, 'Silver Waterfalls' also features La Sioux in fine Velvet Glove Encasing Loaded Uzi mode.  When this woman fakes the loving, maternal touch my only advice to you is to duck.  Trusting her in this mood is like believing Lady Macbeth when she insists that she's only washing her hands because she's been doing a spot of gardening.

'Little Sister' starts off sounding like a run-of-the-mill love song, at which point you remember that The Banshees can be as middle of the road as the next squashed hedgehog.  Then all of a sudden it veers off and shambles off into the distance, its core obscured by a decidedly dodgy operatic beat.  Perhaps if Budgie stopped using drums covered in human skin it would help.

'Superstition' ends triumphantly with 'The Ghost In You'.  The Banshees spiking the dance butterfly to the heart then apologising afterwards.  Wanton humourists that they are, they even throw in the famous catchy bit from 'Groovy Train' (only famous because The Farm have stuck it in all their songs since) and take care to sprinkle its lyric with OTT pathos.

'Superstition' is a not a sign that The Banshees are ready to take the modern world by the horns at last, or even acknowledge it particularly.  It's just another chance to hear them teasing the sun with a raindance.  An acquired taste certainly, but one only the blackest of hearts would want to smother in contemporary urban ketchup.  

6/10  

Barbara Ellen

Or are we?  Frankly, would such acutely aware careerists as Ms Sioux and her friends continue to plough a dark and deathly furrow in these hippy, dippy days?  Would that not be to appear hopelessly outmoded?

To avoid this, the hard core of Siouxsie, Severin and Budgie, plus John Klein and Martin McCarrick (guitar and keyboards on the last release, 'Peepshow') have turned for production assistance to Stephen Hague.  Fresh from his work with the Pet Shop Boys, New Order and Pere Ubu, Hague was presumably recruited to temper the customary Banshee dirges with something more upbeat to help the band re-invent themselves for the '90s.  Occasionally, this works well.

Take, for example, the passionately laidback single 'Kiss Them For Me'.  It bears the exotic, sitar-based signature of Talvin Singh and, although its subject matter is the life and gory death of Hollywood starlet Jayne Mansfield (decapitated in a car crash after a satanist laid a curse on her lover), its funky, Manchester mantra guitar line and New Order-style keyboards - plus an underlying hush of electro pulsebeat - make it dancefloor friendly, though it remains more beautiful than baggy.

The rest of the LP doesn't always maintain this intoxicated bravado.  The disembodied vocal of 'Fear' throbs with a dated alienation, and 'Cry' is a toothpaste bland disco throb.

However, 'Silly Thing' cavorts with dervish energy, and 'Little Sister' riots with a fresh-sounding version of the original shivery Banshee menace.  'Drifter' is a peach, lazy Sergio Leone cowboy grit all mixed up with the ethereal sensuality of Simon Dupree's indispensable 'Kites'.

Put that together with the gorgeous 'Silver Waterfalls', the delicate 'Softly' (lyrics bare and tender enough to be almost Scott Walker-type haiku, here) and the ragged cadences of 'Ghost In You', and you have a most bizarre collection.

Perfect and imperfect; eccentric, as in cracked and crazed - but only like a good Ming vase; ambitious... oh, and a bit of dancey stuff.

4/5

Glyn Brown.