The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @brendonbouzard for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!

This Mortal Coil is a vibe.

I mean, they’re certainly not a band. The pretense of This Mortal Coil is famous to anyone who knows their work: TMC was crafted by producer and 4AD label head Ivo Watts-Russell as a playground for ideas. He invited collaborators — many, but not all from his own label — to help him record songs — many, but not all covers. Luminaries of the goth, dream-pop, and indie rock scenes appear throughout the sessions, including Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard, all the members of Cocteau Twins, and Kim Deal and Tanya Donnelly of The Breeders. Most tracks, however, feature singers like Denise and Louise Rutkowski, Alison Limerick, and the late Caroline Crawley (Shellyan Orphan) — semi-anonymous chanteuses whose startling vocals you could imagine emanating from Pallas Citroen, the model featured on the covers of the collective’s three albums.

Blood is the final of those three albums, and perhaps the most ambitious. It sprawls languidly across seventy-six minutes, blending the goth-pop sound heard on 1984’s It’ll End in Tears and 1986’s Filigree & Shadow with more abstract passages. Opening track “The Lacemaker” is instructive: it layers thick, Badalamentian synths in waves, rising to wordless vocals and a single sung couplet: “Dreams are like water / Colorless and dangerous.” Just as you think we’re entering into traditional pop territory, however, a chamber ensemble takes over, and Romantic strings swell and crest.

If what you’re looking for are great songs, they’re here too. Some highlights include Crawley’s open-hearted vocals on a cover of The Apartments’ “Mr. Somewhere” and a stunning, piano-driven interpretation of Gene Clark’s “With Tomorrow.” Deal and Donnelly are here, bringing beguiling naïveté to their cover of “You or Your Sister,” written by Big Star’s Chris Bell. My personal favorite track, and the place I’d tell any TMC newbie to start, is Heidi Berry’s interpretation of Rodney Crowell’s “Til I Gain Control Again.” Like “With Tomorrow,” this cover has been rediscovered in recent years because of its prominent placements in the documentaries of TMC mega-fan Adam Curtis. Curtis’s films are histories of the near-past, attempts to explore the emotional and psychological circumstances behind the great forces of the late 20th and early 21st century. He returns, again and again, to a sense that the reality of our world is just out of grasp: that we’re lost in a dream, out of control and fighting just to make sense of it all. In the murky shadows of contemporary life, a song like “Til I Gain Control Again” offers a spark of hope.

Blood is an album of lullabies for an unstable world — it is without a doubt one of the best albums of 1991, and its defiant glimmer in a world of darkness is needed now more than ever.

– @brendonbouzard