It has been roughly 10 years since Thighpaulsandra’s last solo album, which is notable because it definitely feels like an entire decade-long backlog of ideas has been poured into this sprawling and overstuffed release.  Fits of great inspiration, masterful songcraft, baroque orchestration, meandering filler, and plenty of very ill-conceived motifs all tirelessly vie for their moment in the sun over the course of an exhausting 2-hour tour de force of intermittently wonderful and oft-grueling excess.  The Golden Communion is simultaneously a celebration of the joys of unfettered imagination and the perils of complete creative freedom.  There is probably an absolutely perfect LP buried in here somewhere, but Thighpaulsandra certainly does not make it easy to find.
The Golden Communion might be single most bizarre and uncategorizable album that I have yet heard in my entire career of music criticism, as it is simultaneously hugely ambitious and absolutely impossible to figure out what exactly Thighpaulsandra was trying to achieve.  This album is all over the place and nearly impossible to categorize.  That said, The Quietus amusingly compared it to an Andrew Lloyd Webber rock musical, which certainly seems apt, if unintentionally cruel.  To me, it feels more like an intended career-defining opus by an artist intent on making a huge statement, yet constantly derailed by multiple-personality disorder, resulting in endless jarring shifts in tone and vision.  I have no idea if that kaleidoscopic aesthetic was by design or not, but Communion nevertheless does feel like the work of several different artists with very different visions.  The personality that I like best (The Sophisticated '80s Pop Visionary) sadly surfaces in earnest just once (in the sinuous and burbling "The Foot Garden").  He does not even manage to turn up for the entire song either, as the piece opens with over 4 minutes of hallucinatory and discordant electronic meandering (the Mad Scientist personality?) before the actual song kicks in.  Once it actually comes together, however, it is absolutely wonderful, resembling the best song that David Sylvian never wrote.
Another one of Thighpaulsandra's more appealing sides is The Pastoral English Psych-Rocker from the Late Sixties, which surfaces in "Valerie."  Following almost 2 minutes of requisite synth noise, the piece suddenly blossoms into a beautifully melodic Beatles-esque piece in the vein of "Eleanor Rigby," but Thighpaulsandra’s restless imagination makes yet another surprise appearance after a few minutes, resulting in a typically wild series of transformations.  First, it explodes into rousing a church choir reprise of the chorus; then sidesteps into a baroque, candy-colored prog-rock synth fantasia; then closes with something that lies somewhere between Sylvian and suave '70s pop a la 10cc.  Each new twist is executed beautifully, but it amounts to a very disorienting (albeit still enjoyable and unique) whole.  Happily, yet another of Thighpaulsandra’s appealing guises is (of course) that of Former Coil Member, which manifests itself in the closing epic "The More I Know Men, The Better I Like Dogs," which culminates in an increasingly chopped loop of John Balance’s recitation of the title.
The rest of The Golden Communion’s ten pieces are a definite mixed bag, however.  The stomping glam rock-meets-industrial rave-up "Did He Fall?" is quite good, for example, offering strong up hooks, ample personality, a fun groove, and wonderfully surreal film dialogue interlude.  Later, "Devil in Every Hedgerow" takes the dark pop sensibility of "The Foot Garden" and gnarls it into an abstract nightmare.  Other highlights includes the brilliantly ruined orchestral crescendo of "The Sinking Stone" and the sultry and subtly psychedelic vamp that erupts during the 25-minute title piece.  Elsewhere, "Salute" bizarrely erupts into a fried-sounding stoner metal groove with questionable results.  Much less questionable is "On The Register," which brings back those same distorted guitars for a legitimately bad and wince-inducingly meat-headed shout-fest (though I was grudgingly amused by the distinctly non-radio-friendly chorus of "You're a fucking pedo!").
While "On The Register" is the only uniformly unfortunate piece on the album, The Golden Communion is nevertheless a deeply flawed opus.  It is also quite a compelling one though.  In fact, my honest and unfiltered opinion can only be summarized as "what the hell just happened?"  The problem is essentially that Communion is a victim of its own insanely ambitious vision and scope, as the album took a decade to finish and features quite a shifting and varied array of collaborators.  In fact, there are more than a dozen credited contributors involved to various degrees, most notably the god Pan, though Peter Christopherson turns up as well.  Also, Thighpaulsandra seems terminally incapable of doing anything succinctly, maddeningly couching all of Communion's best moments amidst plenty of digressions and filler. This album could easily be half as long without anything being missed.  Still, parts of it are legitimately dazzling and sound like absolutely no one else.  Therein lies the proverbial rub: Thighpaulsandra is a restlessly creative supernova, but one who is badly in need of both focus and an editor (or at least a very opinionated foil).  Ultimately, The Golden Communion is absolutely singular in ways both bad and good.  Those looking for something far outside the ordinary will definitely find a lot to like here, but they will likely also find a generous accompanying helping of exasperation.  Proceed with caution.
 
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