Vision Thing

"Vision Thing" is the Sisters of Mercy becoming something harder to categorize. Released in 1990, it carries the influence of American hard rock more explicitly than anything before it — the guitars are thicker, more overtly riff-based, and the production has a clarity and force that feels almost confrontational compared to the atmospheric murk of earlier records. Yet it is unmistakably them: the drum machine is still there underneath, Eldritch's voice still holds that quality of someone reporting from a position of extreme exhaustion, and the intelligence behind the songwriting has not softened. The song is explicitly political in a way the band had not been so directly before — it takes aim at the American conservative vision of power and spectacle with a contempt that is all the more effective for being delivered without heat, almost clinically. The vocal performance threads a needle between outrage and boredom that serves the subject perfectly: this is what it sounds like to be genuinely disgusted rather than performatively angry. The hook is enormous — this is the most purely accessible thing in the Sisters catalog in some respects — but the accessibility serves the poison rather than diluting it. You listen to this when the news has reached the level where you need music that shares your assessment of events but does not require you to be optimistic about them.