Well, damn. Just when I thought that Kate Bush was going to be the one to beat in the “Longest Wait for a Follow Up” category, here comes Fields of the Nephilim with their proper followup to Elizium entitled Mourning Sun. For those keeping score, the temporal distance between these albums is 15 years.

Anyways, it’s set to drop on 18 November (-or 11 November, there’s a bit of conflict-) worldwide. Yanks like me have to wait until 6 January 2006. If SPV were smart, they’d make the damn thing available for download for a modest fee instead of charging an arm and a leg for importing the CD from Europe. But no. In the meantime, you can go and visit the SPV mini-site for FotN here and listen to some snippets of the new album (unfortunately, encoded in RealAudio, which is teh suck).

ONE MORE THING BEFORE I SLEEP: I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Kevin Shields, release the followup to Loveless already. Have you no shame? I mean, you can’t be the biggest control freak in the studio (Kate Bush arguably has that one, we’ll see if the futzing was worth it shortly) so just stop it and burn a CD-R with whatever you have and send it to Virgin and get on with life. It’ll sell millions, and you can deflate the bubble of expections and go ice fishing. Or parasailing. Whatever.