Eyeless In Gaza
Orange Ice & Wax Crayons
(Document DCD5/DLP5, Unissued songs and pieces 81-85, Sept 1992, Cd/Lp)

Review 1

by Jules (MFTEQ, 1992)

Here’s one for us broken-hearted, manic depressives. EIG’s immortal soul re-emerges with more hidden ghosts from their halycon past. Genius spirits rising from 1981-85. immersing your nerve-ends on a hauntingly emotional journey. EIG patented passion and distress with their melancholy yearnings and pleas resulting in an atmospherically devastating effect. Like all EIG creations this release is scattered with the debris of broken dreams, disillusionment and shattered hope, an eternally downward spiralling emotional trip. Vocally incoherent at times but Bates’ vocals are designed for reaching out and caressing not appraising, a cry for help, bleeding helplessly from the wounds of experience. Sadness, stripped of all its pretences stands pure. EIG attack the gut and psyche, emmanating a sometimes senseless desperation, a knowing darkness exchanged between listener and songster, an almost unspoken style that escapes in a whispered lyric, a note cut short or an empty gasp. Perhaps you need to have seen such darkness to fully appreciate submitting to EIG’s full intensity, indulge in their tragic incarnation of feelings, and willingly succumb and drown in their overwhelmingly painful landscape; but if you’re not wracked with tragic, paranoid and suicidal tendencies as these … you don’t know what you are missing!!