Heartland

"The Reptile House" is Sisters finest moment,and it
warms my heart to see that there`s some others that thinks alike..For a while I thought that the majority prefered the incarnation from `84-`86 a.k.a "the merry folksmen with coats and silly hats"

First and Last and Always is THE BEST ALBUM EVER! Sorry for being so blunt, but this records literally changed my life.

Floodland was too much keyboard for me.

Vision Thing ... There was only one song to stand the test of time: Ribbons

Kutan

Exactly. Exactly.

TragicSerenades wrote:"The Reptile House" is Sisters finest moment,and it
warms my heart to see that there`s some others that thinks alike..For a while I thought that the majority prefered the incarnation from `84-`86 a.k.a "the merry folksmen with coats and silly hats"

I'd have to say that my first play of the 12" vinyl that was the original Temple of Love had a pretty profound effect as well. I have patchy recollection of my teen years, but I do remember moments like that quite clearly.

Always found The Reptile House to be the lesser of all post-DD, pre-VT output, to be honest. Always a bit miffed that Burn didn't even come close to the promise of the live versions with, proper lyrics and the like.

For years, the poor CD mix of FLAA lowered my opinion of that fine album, but the re-release fixed that. However, I think most of the first-side could have been recorded a lot better... from Marian to SKOS, its all good.

For me, it doesn't get much better than a copy of Temple of Love 12", and a hot bootleg from 84/85.

Hands down , The Reptile House is the strongest work.
Always was, always will be.

nodubmanshouts wrote:
For me, it doesn't get much better than a copy of Temple of Love 12", and a hot bootleg from 84/85.

Yeah, I basically agree (especially about those 84/85 era bootlegs); but I'd add the late 90's Pearson/Varjak/Starling era as well. Sometimes--like the 2-night stand at San Francisco's Maritime Hall--when that incarnation was on, it was incredible. It is such a shame that they never released anything.

The Reptile House is very good, but I think the songs work much better live, at ear-bleed volume. It's a hard thing to capture all that tension on vinyl.

Checking in for the reptile house.

FALAA is the best in my opinion, its their definitive "goth" album...dark as f**k, they never sounded the same way; in Floodland things got too New Wav-ish for my taste (maybe Mr E wanted to distance himself and the band from the "gothic" label?), for example Dominion I mean the voices and arrangements are too over the top, and VT was just a kind of "desperate" try to reach the American audience, for example Something Fast is just an Arena Rock ballad, thats 100% American style, but in the other hand the lyrics are brilliant on almost all songs, and some "darkness" is still evident on the record with Ribbons (I love the paranoic fell of the track) and the melacholy of WYDSM...about the 81-84 stuff everything is just genious, fresh and the most important; you can dance to every track, my heart is with the 1985 era, but is closely followed by the original incarnation