The whole record flows beautifully, and there’s no track that doesn’t add to its majestic stature. But when we talk about Floodland, we talk about three songs. One, of course, is the eternal “This Corrosion,” the closest thing the album had to a hit single, and an idea that originally emerged around the time of Gift. But as the song evolved—with its neverending build and incessant, singalong chorus—Eldritch realized it was a card he should keep up his sleeve for maximum impact. This was the composition that encouraged him to set up shop at New York’s state-of-the-art Power Station studio, where he enlisted a team of session musicians, backing vocalists, and Meat Loaf collaborator Jim Steinman—the crowd-pleasing writer of Bat Out of Hell and “Total Eclipse of the Heart”— to polish his missive into a full-on dancefloor-filler.
The second single was “Dominion/Mother Russia,” which opens the album as a call to arms. Its seven-minute runtime introduced Eldritch’s new favored mode of songwriting: patiently riding a groove like a surfer on a towering wave, finding little slivers of quiet to squirrel away each clipped phrase. In the second half of the song, he builds tension with an almost spoken delivery, gaining momentum as the words start to avalanche, all set to a pounding, insistent rhythm that shows why, a few years later, Public Enemy would seem a natural fit for tourmates. (“America still has a big problem with white crowds and Black crowds in the same place at the same time,” he explained after the tour’s abrupt cancellation. “In addition to which, our record company is thoroughly useless and doesn’t like Black bands.”)
And then there is “Lucretia My Reflection,” the closest thing Eldritch ever crafted to his own classic rock anthem. It’s got the single best riff in his songbook—played on the bass, of course—and some of his most unforgettable lyrics. “I hear the roar of the big machine,” he announces, all bravado and momentum and impending disaster. Each chorus culminates with an invitation to “dance the ghost with me,” sung just before the song whips into a fiery, electric groove that still lights up the crowd at every festival this band plays.
Which is to say, 30-some years later, Andrew Eldritch is still playing festivals as the Sisters of Mercy. Which means Floodland worked. It allowed him to record and tour and keep the story going on his own terms, a boon for an artist who always fought against being seen as a cult act. But it also brought new trials. As the ’80s switched to the ’90s and alternative rock became a catchall term to replace the hyper-specific regional scenes from which he emerged, Eldritch felt boxed in by his reputation. He felt inspired by R.E.M.’s slow, shapeshifting ascent toward mainstream success: “But I can’t get my record company… to understand that I am Michael Stipe and not Ozzy Osbourne,” he said in 1993.
