Skeletal Family: Eternal: Singles, Albums, Rarities... 1982-2015

The 80s dark side revisited.

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.

Formed in Keighly, West Yorkshire, Skeletal Family followed in the billowing dry ice plumes of The Sisters Of Mercy to create, along with the likes of Red Lorry Yellow Lorry and March Violets among others, goth’s second wave as it relocated from the Batcave club to the north of England.

This epic five-CD set collects both of the band’s albums, 1984’s Burning Oil and its follow-up from the following year, Futile Combat, as well as radio sessions, live sets and demos. To listen to the albums once again is to be reminded of tribal drums, circular bass lines, spidery guitars and Anne-Marie’s yelping vocals.

At their best – see the spiky chicken-inducing floorfiller Promised Land and the 12-inch version of She Cries Alone – Skeletal Family combined propulsive rhythms with a sense of over-wrought melodrama that made for convincing and exhilarating rock music. Not all of it has weathered the years well with tracks such as Ritual remaining rooted firmly in the 80s.

The BBC radio sessions offer an alternative insight into the band but of less interest is the 1986 live set, recorded after Anne-Marie’s departure to form the superior Ghost Dance with erstwhile Sisters Of Mercy guitarist Gary Marx.

Julian Marszalek

Julian Marszalek is the former Reviews Editor of The Blues Magazine. He has written about music for Music365, Yahoo! Music, The Quietus, The Guardian, NME and Shindig! among many others. As the Deputy Online News Editor at Xfm he revealed exclusively that Nick Cave’s second novel was on the way. During his two-decade career, he’s interviewed the likes of Keith Richards, Jimmy Page and Ozzy Osbourne, and has been ranted at by John Lydon. He’s also in the select group of music journalists to have actually got on with Lou Reed. Marszalek taught music journalism at Middlesex University and co-ran the genre-fluid Stow Festival in Walthamstow for six years.