Former God Machine guru Robin Proper-Sheppard spent the mid-'90s in a
dark hole, mired in mournful musical melancholia, excavating the
explicit sorrow of his recent grief. After his partner in the God
Machine, Jimmy Fernandez, up and died, Proper-Sheppard ditched the
stadium-sized black-clad sadness of the GM's industro-goth agony for a
more personal brand of writerly woe. Starting up Sophia,
Proper-Sheppard crafted hateful hymns — despondent with depression,
smoldering with anger at the-most-possibly-not-existing God, mumbling
cries of sullen rage at the loss of "departed" friends with a near
theatricality — from behind an electric piano. Deliberately avoiding
the rock biz, Proper-Sheppard seemed happy for Sophia to be a wholly
personal vehicle, one concerned not a whit with fashion or sales or
even that favorite musician's maxim of "having my music heard by as
many people as possible." Buried down in a Sophia bunker, he was happy
to have only those willing to put in the extra yard hearing his
half-speed heartache, the first record of such, 1996's tortured Fixed
Water, initially being recorded with no goals of "release" or "band" in
mind. With a loose crew of helping hands brought aboard to help him
play live, this disc was soon followed up with 1998's The Infinite
Circle, another album eking out shadowy songs authored under a pall of
grief. It's taken six years, now, for Proper-Sheppard to make another
Sophia album. Sure, there's been a live record, which I think only got
sold in Germany (somewhere where Sophia's misanthropy has translated to
popularity), and, then, there was the detour of the May Queens, in which
he and other Sophia helpers remembered the fun of making noisy music.
At the time, it seemed like a logical dividing of his duties, doing the
rocking outside of his dour main digs. But the curious development of
the third Sophia longplayer, People Are Like Seasons (his first for an
outside label, German hipsters City Slang), is that Proper-Sheppard's not
afraid to rock anymore. Whilst there are still those fragile ballads
(like "Another Trauma") and those grandiose epics of loss ("I Left
You"), there's also a song where he sounds like he's having fun
("Holidays Are Nice"), a single with a definite Echo-ish bent ("Oh My
Love"), and an alarming pair of back-to-back tracks where his industrial
past comes crashing into this over-a-decade-on present ("Darkness
(Another Shade In Your Black)" and "If a Change Is Gonna Come"). And,
sadly, the intermittent, scattered qualities of the record actually add
credence to one of the more misguided beliefs of our time: that great
art can only come from great loss, and that being fucked-up is the only
way of achieving artistic authenticity. Whilst I'd feel horrified with
myself if I truly believed it, the circumstantial evidence here — album
made right after friend's death better than album made a decade on — is
kinda incriminating.
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