I'll cut to the quick, as this album does. Many close friends, musicians and family of William Faith and Monica Richards died before the recording of this album was complete. Hence, the entire thing is full of grief -- its various guises (anger, self-contempt, sadness) -- and ways of trying to get beyond it. The pale artwork is not the only faded thing about this album. The whole affair is haunted by a scrim of sadness and waste.

Some people would excel in these settings, but Faith and the Muse has always been more about celebration and community than death and destruction. Hence, Evidence of Heaven is Faith and the Muse's most inconsistent work. That being said, when Faith and the Muse are inconsistent, they treat the listener to some of their most spare, haunting, personal tunes, coupled with some of their most meandering and mediocre. Simply put, there are too many good tunes on this album to not recommend it. If you based your judgment on the overlong "Chorus of the Furies," the impotent and clangy "Dead Leaf Echo," or the slight instrumentals "Porphyrogene" and "And Laugh -- But Smile No More," you'd probably say "Why bother?" But I promise you, friends, the bother is worth it.

"Joy" opens the album with an echoey piano tune filtered through. If you look at the liner notes, it says this little song was played in 1959 by Joy Richards. I'm guessing that's either Monica's mother or sister, and I'm also guessing she is dead. So, already, we see a playful title become a memoriam. You can tell the snippet is recorded on old equipment, giving it a ghostly air.

Next is "Scars Flown Proud," one of the first songs that caught my attention by Faith and the Muse. It is filled with that guitar tone that William Faith excels at -- all-encompassing, swallowing, yet not heavy. A suffocating atmosphere that slowly builds and can only be released by Richards telling her listeners "We are the inheritors -- the Evidence of Heaven." She tells us to dance to our graves (and beyond), and who would be disrespectful enough not to follow?

"Shattered in Aspect" is the flip of "Scars Flown Proud" -- attacking grief from a more sparse, less cathartic angle. A dry drum beat keeps time like a metronome, as gentle filagrees of piano and touches of organ sift here and there against Richards' incomparable voice. She spends most of the song's pulse mired in sorrow and anger, but comes out in the end with such a heartbreaking hope -- "We're ready for a new age of innocence" -- that you feel shattered, in aspect.

"Patience Worth" is another beautiful song, done with strums of acoustic guitar, that points to something extremely personal in nature. In it, Richards invokes a haunted child whose "home is hell." I'm not sure if this song is about abuse, about an upbringing with distant parents, or about something else entirely. The way she whispers "Leave me .... alone" only complicates matters. It will never leave you.

"Through the Pale Door" is probably my favourite of Faith's solo tracks. While some people find Richards chilly in her delivery, intimidated by her intelligence, I've always taken longer to warm to Faith's tracks. His voice is so eminently gothic and theatrical that it sometimes seems out of character -- this brusque, male energy, exceedingly sexual, played against the feminine, inward aspect of the rest of the music. But on this track he excels, with a melody you won't be able to get out of your head, and lots of wordplay that tries to find a lullaby, a creation, in death -- "Dancing and reeling/We move beneath shadows we've hung from the ceiling" seems especially about his late friend, and Christian Death frontman, Rozz Williams. Sometimes it seems like Faith is wearing mask after mask to hide his vulnerabilities. But on this track, Faith turns out to be human after all.

"Plague Dance" basically reinvents what Joy Division knew all along: when you're going to sing about black subject matter, make the beat so pummeling, the music so savage and danceable, that you'll be too busy sweating and twirling to divine the intentions of lines like "A Tantarian lamb torn piece by piece/The prayers released." What should be a comedown is instead a new rising. Just keep on dancin'.

"Denn Die Todten Reiten Schnell" is a multilayered fugue in step with the ones that Faith and the Muse painted all over their previous album, Annywnn, Beneath the Waves, to the point that it seemed like that was all they would ever try to write. To have this rare moment of uplift spirited away among these otherwise spare tracks makes it that much more of a fighting spirit, a sign of how much Faith and the Muse have evolved, with a chorus that revels "Wake the Walls of Remembrance." I could play this one on repeat for days, remembering.

"Importune Me No More" takes a Faith and the Muse tradition -- performing self-composed period music to somebody else's period text. In this case, it's a poem most likely written by the Virgin Queen herself. (altogether now, "I am married ... to England") It has a sly humour in it, basically telling suitors to get lost, but that is also its loneliness. A perfect fit for this album.

"Reine La Belle" is one of the most intimate, beautiful things I've ever heard by this group. I wish that were hyperbole, that I was just indulging in worship with flaccid cliches. But I tell you, this structured lullaby, done a capella by Richards, backed just by her own voice, sounds like a lonely night of thunder and rain, a woman lying in bed, watching the shadows on the ceiling and asking the air "Is that wrong of me to escape these surroundings?" The word "beauty" connects each verse, and she is so closely mic'd that you not only hear her breathing, you can almost hear her thoughts.

As if that intimate moment weren't enough, a pause, and then the song comes back at a faster clip, this time backed by medieval instruments, sounding like a call-out for a dance at a RenFaire. To take something so personal, then flip it and make it communal shows a wordless way of overcoming grief, one that makes this track a powerful call to moving on.

We close with "Old Souls" a song by Paul Williams written for Brian de Palma's cult movie "The Phantom of the Paradise." Having never seen it, nor heard Jessica Harper on the original, I can only say that the song in slow, smooth, and perfectly fits the needs of this album, feeling as though you've grown old too fast, but given a new chance by love. Monica Richards and William Faith tellingly both sing on this one, and the closing lyric, "All souls last forever/So we need never fear goodbye/A kiss when I must go/No tears, in time, we kiss hello," is a testament to hope in the face of despair, a wave both beckoning hello and receding in goodbye.

Recommended: Yes