You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

With both The Skeletal Family and Ghost Dance, Anne Marie Hurst once cast quite a dark shadow across the land.

In an age when the Sisters Of Mercy were a benchmark for elegant misery (eloquent, clever, musically accomplished, but ultimately brooding – you wouldn’t want to get stuck next to them at a dinner party) bands like Skeletal Family, with songs like She Cries Alone and Promised Land, and outfits a highwayman might favour, caused quite a stir.

Twenty years later and not much has changed. Hurst, together with some members of her former band, still sounds like she has the weight of the world on her shoulders and is constantly moving headlong through clouds of dry ice while waving a lace handkerchief around in stupefying slow motion. Dreamy Days is sullen and flat, while Heaven’s Mist drones slowly in and out of life.

It’s hard to get excited about it all when she’s so devoid of excitement herself.

Philip Wilding is a novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, biographer and radio producer. As a young journalist he criss-crossed most of the United States with bands like Motley Crue, Kiss and Poison (think the Almost Famous movie but with more hairspray). More latterly, he’s sat down to chat with bands like the slightly more erudite Manic Street Preachers, Afghan Whigs, Rush and Marillion.