Sisters of Mercy – FIRST LAST & ALWAYS

Sisters Of Mercy – FIRST LAST & ALWAYS arrives here on the Mobile Fidelity Silver Label Series, catalog number MFSLS 6, and if you have been waiting for a serious pressing of this record, this is the one worth stopping for. Released originally in 1985, the album came out of Leeds carrying a sound that had not existed in quite that form before, and a great deal of what followed in goth-rock owes its vocabulary directly to what Sisters of Mercy built here.

Why Sisters Of Mercy – FIRST LAST & ALWAYS Still Hits

Andrew Eldritch’s vocal delivery is the defining element. Low, sepulchral, and oddly precise, it sits somewhere between a croon and a pronouncement, like something broadcast from a long-shuttered church on a cold night. What keeps the album from being purely atmospheric is the rhythm underneath it all: the beats are physical and propulsive, designed to move bodies, which creates a genuinely strange tension against the claustrophobia and gloom the songs are drenched in. Black humor surfaces throughout, cutting through the fog at unexpected moments. The album works as a complete environment, not just a collection of tracks.

The Mobile Fidelity Silver Label Pressing

Mobile Fidelity built its reputation on taking source material seriously, and the Silver Label Series represents that commitment applied to albums that reward careful listening. This LP, cataloged as MFSLS 6, is the format that suits this record well. The low end on a pressing like this carries weight, and Eldritch’s vocals benefit from clean, detailed reproduction rather than the smear that can come from a worn or poorly mastered copy. If your existing copy of this album is a well-played original or a run-of-the-mill reissue, the difference here is worth hearing directly.

Who Should Own This Copy

Collectors focused on post-punk and goth-rock who take their pressings seriously will find this one straightforward to recommend. It is the template: the record against which subsequent goth-rock albums were measured, consciously or not, and the one that established what the genre could do at its most focused and deliberate. Beyond collectors already deep in the genre, anyone building a serious library of 1980s British rock should have a quality pressing of this album accounted for, and the Mobile Fidelity edition makes that easy to justify. Clean copy of an album that defined an entire sound.