Sisters

So we learn this is the first song they wrote together. You can easily imagine how someone finds that lovely lovely twinkling guitar melody and the other someone tests different chords against it until they got stuck with the ultra-classic chord pattern that became Sisters a few hours and probably several spliffs later. As always, the effect of repeating a strong guitar melody in different chord contexts does the trick, as it would do later in Aura, Anaesthesia and other masterpieces.

This is not only the first song they wrote together, it must be the first featuring Kilbey's distinguished one-note-chanting: "I can see them all, I can see them call...breathing all the wasted hours, talking to the dying flowers..." Compare it to Shadow Cabinet's "Bliss comes first as a jangling flood" or Aura and you know what I mean. Also, this section gives us, for the first time, a certain flowery whiff of hippy incense, in strong opposite to the hard rock outings and the wavey jangle of Skins and Heart.

Whenever I listen to Sisters, I always thought the song had a younger, much younger sister. I guess I even planned to think about it, but it had to wait until now. I guess the sister is a Business Woman, born some 13 years later. There are certain similarities in the guitar lines, and the falling fourth cadenza ("...tooooo her") of Sisters makes a comeback. This very cadenza, that falling note at the end of the verse and the resting on the dominant chord is so bloody Kilbesque, if The Church ever get their Rutles, they would use it all the time, together with the one note intonations and the melancholic tendrils always twining around the happy songs...