However, circumstances -- specifically, a far from harmonious relationship with his European label East/West -- have kept Andrew Eldritch from releasing any remotely new Sisters of Mercy material since the early nineties.

Until now.

Now, his relationship with East/West dissolved in a make-good arrangement involving a by-all-accounts-horrible non-Sisters album project, Eldritch is free to record again. And so he's hit the road with a crew of hired hands, playing a month's worth of dates (including 7 scheduled in North America) as a way of saying "Hi, remember me?" A new single will allegedly hit the stores on the day the East/West contract officially expires, with an album to follow, supposedly, this summer.

Of course, with no new vinyl (or any other format) in years, and only one original member, the Sisters of Mercy are little more than a nostalgia act at this point. You can tour with a hundred new songs under your belt but if fans don't know them, and have no way to buy them, you can't expect a very involved audience.

Chicago's Riviera Theater, which isn't quite the worst place in Chicago to see bands (the Aragon Ballroom and several larger venues take that prize), is pretty well-packed for a Tuesday night. The audience is a somewhat surprising mixture of history-minded Goth kids and older fans who've all but outgrown the trappings of the scene. That said, there's probably not a single article of pastel-colored clothing in the place, and the floor is a heaving throng of black clothes, black hair and black makeup.

The Riv's cavernous stage looks spartan, with only a large hunk of instrument-holding scaffolding set up towards the back, and a healthy assortment of Intellabeam^®-type lights. Not much of a "set", considering the high ticket price. Still, it's the music that matters, right?

There's no opening band, which is probably a blessing. Shortly before eight, a bunch of smoke-machines begin belching out their noxious, contact-lens-destroying fumes, creating an environment in which Mr. Eldritch can survive. Once the smoke has filled not only the stage but most of the rest of the theater, the lights dim and the audience begins to cheer. Clearly, the Man is on his way.

Ushered in by billowing clouds of smoke and strobing lights, Andrew Eldritch enters. But -- bleeding hell -- Mr. Goth Icon has bleached-blond Euro-cropped hair (and has for a couple of years now, but it's a fact that midrange fans are only now confronting). He looks not unlike an emaciated Bruce Willis circa The Jackal, and with his trademark mirrorshades his resemblance to Sascha Konietzko of KMFDM is downright uncanny. But then, there are plenty of similarities between the two bands (think about it -- both have have had a standard artwork style that has been used on nearly every album and single they've released, both have an aloof, disdainful lead singer, both rely increasingly on heavy beats and buzzsaw guitars, and TSOM lyrics, like KMFDM's, are so formulaic you could write a computer program to spit them out). The bastard's not even wearing all black! It's very amusing.

Eldritch immediately launches into "First and Last and Always" -- which, since it isn't one of the handful of Sisters singles that has received ex-post-facto radio airplay, doesn't gain immediate recognition from the entire audience. This is followed by "Ribbons," the coolest (and darkest) track from 1990's Vision Thing -- and unlike the tour to support that album, on this occasion it comes pretty close to sounding like the album version. The audience likes this.

The rest of the band -- Adam Pearsons, Michael Varjak, Ravey Davey and, of course, Doktor Avalanche -- have clearly taken the time to learn the songs, and unlike some of the original Sisters of Mercy (or the post-First and Last and Always incarnations), they're obviously skilled enough to reproduce them in a live setting. Unfortunately, they look like session guys (well, except for Doktor Avalanche, who looks like a black box), and they play with all the passion of high-billing temps on a three-day assignment. These are not, after all, their songs (although they've got writers' credits for the new stuff).

As more songs follow, several things become clear. First of all, the sound quality is horrible, and Eldritch (who's apparently recovering from an illness) sometimes loses his vocals in the sea of guitars, drums and, I suspect, backing tapes. Between the sound problems and the fact that many of the songs have been given new arrangements, the audience can't always tell what songs they're listening to until some ultra-familiar bit comes up.

It's also obvious that Eldritch is lost on the huge stage. Naturally, he doesn't dance or anything like that -- he's the sort of vocalist who's at his best when the equipment boxes him into a small triangle of space at the front of the stage, forcing him to wrap himself around the mike stand and stare down the audience. Sharing a whole lot of space with a couple of pretty static guitarists, he winds up wandering around as if looking for lost change on the floor. Still, his costume changes (!) present him with opportunities to taunt his audience to hilarious effect. After ditching the white mandarin-collared jacket in which he made his entrance, Eldritch reappears in what seems to be a psychedelic Hawaiian shirt -- probably the most brightly-colored piece of clothing in the entire building, and a garment that might even have lost him a few fans. Later on, he'll do encores in a white mock turtleneck, no doubt twisting the knife a bit for all those scandalized by the Hawaiian shirt.

The Intellabeams^®, however, are very cool. Every living room needs a few of them.

Despite weak sound, the set is good, with some surprising song choices. First and Last and Always is revisited in "Amphetamine Logic", while "Flood II" and "Torch" are pulled from Floodland. Older songs show up, too -- I'm pretty sure I heard "Kiss the Carpet", not to mention "Train", which medley-evolved into "Detonation Boulevard" from Vision Thing. And then there were new songs. Probably. The sound made it hard to tell, but I'm still sufficiently conversant in TSOM's music and lyrics to know when I haven't heard something before. As long as whoever mixed sound for the show doesn't produce the new album, I think the new songs are likely to go over pretty well -- better, indeed, than most of Vision Thing. Although lyrics for three of the new songs are posted on the Merciful Release website, I'm not sure we heard any of those. The not-quite-as-new "War on Drugs" was a cert, though.

As the minutes tick by, I'm getting a little concerned by the passivity of the audience. With the exception of a small contingent at front-and-center who seem bound and determined to start a pit (but fail), everyone on the main floor is fairly uninvolved (though, to be fair, the crowd behind me could be dancing up a storm). I'm starting to worry that I won't get a chance to use the phrase "the crowd went wild" in this article.

At which point, more or less, along comes "Dominion/Mother Russia", which has a sufficiently unique drumbeat to allow it to be recognized immediately by almost all of the audience. The crowd, as you might now expect, responds with greatly bolstered enthusiasm. People dance, or do the sort of weird Goth posturing that passes for dancing when you've got your attention span equally divided between sending out a psychic command for people to look at you, and hoping that they're looking. In the box-seats at stage-right, an Amazonian blonde in a strap-intensive black dress, her back to the stage, dances feverishly while fellating a beer bottle. On the floor, a shirtless idiot tunelessly parrots lyrics back at the stage, accompanying them with an undoubtedly self-devised series of view-obscuring hand signals.

Almost everyone knows the words at least well enough to mouth along.

There are other highlights later on. A sped-up version of early single Anaconda piles on the energy, albeit at the expense of the recorded version's undulating, reptilian bass line. And Eldritch closes the set with an all-too-short version of "Temple of Love", still the definitive Sisters song fourteen years along.

And the encores...

The first encore starts frighteningly -- it sounds disquietingly like Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb". It rapidly becomes apparent that the reason the song sounds like "Comfortably Numb" is because it is "Comfotably Numb", but this doesn't turn out to be the sort of ill-considered cover-version train-wreck one might readily expect when bandying about the phrase "Pink Floyd Cover". Not only can Eldritch and his hirelings handle the song (I gather it's become a live show staple), but the audience knows it better than most of the Sisters' songs. This fact is made clear when the lyrics and music make a subtle transition, becoming "Some Kind of Stranger" in mid-song, and most of the audience doesn't catch it.

The second encore yields "Something Fast" from Vision Thing -- and odd choice, at best -- and, finally, "This Corrosion", which isn't uniformly recognized until its chorus, which is the only part of the lyrics the audience seems to know.

When Eldritch et al leave the stage amidst howls of feedback, the lights come up abruptly and the spell is broken. The audience is disgorged, slowly but surely, into the lobby of the theater, where there are no t-shirts or baubles to buy, and where, amidst the throng, a young woman gives a thorough if somewhat impromptu breast exam to her girlfriend, while some of the more extreme Walking Pleas For Attention pose on the stairway that leads to the balcony.

Reeking of manufactured smoke, the crowd slowly spews onto the sidewalk, where many of them are horrified to learn, via a nearby bank's clock-sign, that it's not even 10:00 p.m. yet.

I guess the witching hour gets earlier, the older you get.