Jigsaw Feeling fades in after a brief silence, a chromatic riff with the guitar riff high on the fretboard, building until it reaches altitude when Siouxsie barges in with her bludgeoning voice. It's all wrong - pitchy and unbalanced - but it's perfect for the song, overbearing, harsh, punitive. "My brain is out of my hand, there's nothing to prevent, the impulse is quite meaningless in a cerebral non-event." The last syllable is punched out, percussive. You can hear the barre chords on the guitar now and they behave the way you'd expect a punk band but it's the descant lines, the metallic slashing overhead that will account for the band's guitar sound for this and the next album. It's not chaotic sonic flailing, there's a clear skill and direction to it, but it's troubling, violent but psychologically violent. As Siouxsie's voice punches about a shattered mental state, the bright stinging of John McKay's guitar is her equal. After the spooky opening, this is a torment ... and it appeal is strong and instant.
Overground also fades in but it takes longer and keeps the tension from breaking into a barre chord assault. It's a strident Flamenco rhythm in the guitar which breaks the expected four on the floor of rock (let alone punk). Siouxsie comes in plaintively, worried about having to appear conventional to others. It's not what you'd call characteristic but it's worth remembering that bands off the mains of the time had to bend backwards for a foot in the door of a record company. Not everybody pranced around like the Sex Pistols, getting attention for swearing and spitting. The calibre of the music on this disc, the seriousness of purpose indicates that whatever they were like at parties, this band was looking to express their independence from their own peers. Not superiority, really more independence, the freedom to explore how they would, regardless of canons of behaviour that had already formed around them as to how a punk band should and sound and how they should act. Instead of pretending they weren't doing it they wrote an unignorable song about it which features hesitant guitar screeches between verses that suggest the danger of it. It's less the amped up football chants of Sham 69 than the exploratory noise of The Kinks or Who of the previous generation. Towards the end of the song, rather than bring it to a crescendo, they just intesify, Siouxsie doubling on the vocals, harmonising with herself but also getting mixed down as though polished into normality. Bold move, no guarantee the listeners would get it.
Carcass follows with a kind of reassuring familiarity. It's an early one and sounds it, a smashing descending guitar riff, a wailing vocal and insistent drums, it's tough nut punk all the way through even to the chorus: "Be a carcass, be a dead pork. Limblessly in love!" A sexually frustrated butcher dismembers the object of his affection, heightening his arousal as never before. It might sound like New Rose but the story could be straight out of The Painted Bird. We end on a field recording of snorting pigs.
The same brooding bass presence as the start of Pure. It's sliced up by the atonal guitar blades. Siouxsie begins the words and we realise, holy fuck it's a Beatles song. Her voice climbs through the ascending opening lines, twice by which time the band has picked up speed and her voice is a full throated wail. The chorus is robbed of the descending guitar line of the original but Siouxsie blares out an odd imitation "helter skelter, nananananananana!" The band charges through to the next chorus and then ends on the same doubling of the opening lines, climbing up through the noise. But this time it cuts abruptly as though it's fallen and crashed to the ground. The Banshees would revisit the Beatles again as a much changed band for 1983's Dear Pridence. It was from the same album but was not the same kind of cover version. Helter Skelter trades the screaming distortion of the White Album original and puts it by the other tracks in the dark. Dear Prudence was given a kind of post punk psychedelia, phasing and big production and a video shot in Venice with lots of dayglo colour distortion. It's the statement of an established band, comfortably flaunting an influence. Helter Skelter here is an experiment, a dare, brash young punks gatecrashing a Fab Four classic (well the song's Manson connotations didn't hurt). End of side one.
Side two starts with the big sound of full barre chords through a phaser. This quickly turns into a more chunky rhythm as the band and Siouxsie come in. The vocals are in close harmony and kept in a block low in the mix. "I am just a vision on your t - v - screen. Just something conjured form a dream." Even the fame of the still small punk club scene led people to typify the band, particularly Siouxsie herself and as tv appearances and positive press increased, the richly imaged singer attracted attention from all quarters. "My limbs are like palm trees swaying in the breeze. My body's an oasis to drink from as you please." The sense of cultural predation was felt deeply. The spiky rhythm of the track with its pummelling tom toms, the compressed howl of the vocals and the lashing guitar tell us how angrily.
Metal Postcard (Mittageisen) begins with a threatening march rhythm on the toms and bass. The guitar comes in with sharp dissonant bends like staccato siren blasts before settling into the kind of chord riff that would sound like Black Sabbath if it were played on the lower strings. Up there on the higher frets it sounds more machine-like and cold. Siouxsie comes in with images of families dining on metal, workers saving metal for later as a chorus declares, "metal is tough, metal will sheen, metal will rule in my master scheme". This strange scenario is an image of fascism. The band had received aggressive responses to the inclusion of oppressive symbology like swastika armbands, however ironically or just provocatively they were worn. Siouxsie based the the lyric on work by Wimar-era collage artist John Heartfield whose surrealist anti-Nazi work (and his own Anglicisation of his name from Johan Herzfeld) put him afoul of the brownshirts and on the right side of history. The Banshees evocation of Heartfield was even released in German translation in Germany and made it to an equal best double A side in the U.K. (the other side Love in a Void won the airplay, though). It might not have assuaged the detractors (but not even the later song Israel could do that, however much of a classic of the era it became) but it stands as clear testament to the power of a band that could tighten its politics so forcefully and still produce a compelling rock song. As with most of the lyrics on this album there is an unsettling play between the nursery and the dystopian nightmare.
Nicotine Stain is plummets back to Ur punk the way that Carcass did, slamming powerchord riffs and yelling. It's all above ground this time as Siouxsie tears through smoking addiction. This applies to all other nasty habits, of course, which is a dangerous thing for potential rock stars to do, considering how many take the overcalming approach to tour stress. However, making it about cigarettes rather than heroin keeps the habitual nature of it in focus. Anyone can write a slamming anthem about smack (Lour Reed already did the depressing one about it).
Suburban Relapse starts with stark dissonant guitar chords high on the fretboard. They come in from different speakers, left-right-left-right, stark and uncomfortably bright. The bass enters softly. The drums hit a bar of tom toms, four on the beat and no more, until the rhythm fills out, this time he's using the snare. The tense cacophony tightens and breaks into a grinding progression laced with a cutting sax riff. Then Siouxsie comes in, the words already sub-hysterical: "I''m sorry that I hit you but my striiiiiiiing snapped .... I'm I'm sorry I disturbed your caaaaaaaat nap!" The lines themselves stretching until they snap. Every other line, almost, is like that, stretch, with wailing notes drawing out into tight, dangerous lengths before the violence of the last syllable. The band moves around the vocals, speeding here, slowing there around the cyclonic voice as the song swells into a massive fist of intensity before coming to an end as orgasmic as it is brutal: "Re-lapse! Re-lapse! Re-lapse! howling against the punching of the band.
The Banshees did this a few times in their initial career and it's something worth noting here, almost at the end of the record: they sound live. Suburban Relapse, like all the other songs (except the opening instrumental), benefitted from being part of their live sets for about a year. By the time they got to the studio, the arrangements were in place, including the dynamics and developmental passages. The band was ready to explore familiar territory in the unfamiliarity of the recording environment. Suburban Relapse, though, sounds entirely live. Like The Lord's Prayer on the next album or Voodoo Dolly on Ju Ju (also made after the songs had been played live extensively), Relapse feels organically arranged and dependent on how well the band was playing during one take. Young producer Steve Lillywhite gave the band all the air they needed to get this done, tweaking only when necessary for the production. This, and the band being ready to do it this way, created one of the truest documents of a celebrated live band finding their sea legs in the sterility of the studio.
Where Lillywhite did come in handy were moments like Pure where something formless was given form and established the signature for the whole album in minutes, like an opera overture. Another such is the closing song Switch. This is a carefully managed piece in which the arrangement follows the strange lyric about professionals changing their vocations, taking characteristics of the opposite world view: priests become scientists but keep their religion which contaminates their results; scientists become religious which pretty much leads to the same disastrous ends: the authorities of society and culture render themselves into dystopic tyrants. At the time this felt like weird science fiction, an update on Orwell and Huxley and a response to some of the more adventurous moments on the BBC like The Guardians or 1990, or (thought I didn't know it at the time) J.G. Ballard.
In a well judged break from the previous track's sturm und drang, Switch begins with a clean electric guitar playing a minor chord in arpeggio. The unexpected texture of this, both calming and worrying (it has a horror movie score feel to it). The band comes in with Siouxsie with lines about different lives and categories merging. The band gets insistent until it pauses for the line: "watch the muscles twitch for a brand new switch." On that word the band takes on a higher gear to move the darker passage of the tale. At the end of the first new phase verse the rhythm suddenly sparses out with hard echo on the guitar slashing out high chords and the drums (more unusual snare from drummer Morris) as we hear about the doctor whose treatments become religious. Then it's back to the galloping band as a vicar who tries science cannot shake the constraints of religion. We end as gently as we began with the clean arpeggio as the people stop and protest in revolt before an apocalyptic event which might be a terror attack leaves body parts beyond redemption. "They're dying to switch." Finally, after the cataclysm, a slight hammer-on note on the guitar. End.
What felt like fanciful sci-fi in 1978 sounds normal now. There's a YouTube clip of Jordan Peterson claiming a credits list of qualifications well beyond his genuine ones, anything that might lend credence to his highly influential word salad. The song also describes the kind of post-truth world we are continually told we live in. Steve Bannon helping to win the election for the monster Trump famously declared his strategy to be, "fill the zone with shit." This has been adopted in Australia and some of that has circled back to places like the U.K. whose recently aired refugee policy was almost verbatim that of the troglodyte Coalition from the past decade. Then there's the mass of bullshit that rose from lockdowns and resulted in a self-proclaimed freedom movement which held rallies where libertarians marched alongside uncloaked neo-nazis. "Watch the muscles twitch ..."
Ok, so this is another long and ranty album article. But listening again, and more closely than I have for decades, has brought me back to how powerful its statements, how artful its execution and how arch its presentation. The Clash gave us some handy political slogans. Never Mind the Bollocks gave us the gobbing attitude. Damned Damned Damned gave us pogo-ing speedy fun. But The Scream gave us something altogether different. This album is often cited as the source point of post-punk, the more adventurous branching of U.K. musicians into new territories, eschewing the already canonical boundaries punk was forming for itself. There remains a fearless quality to the music of the very late '70s to the early '80s by which influences as diverse as Lee Scratch Perry and Stockhausen, Neu and The Beach Boys could be cooked up in the same pot. Just before all that, The Scream gave us a view into a world where the subject matter wasn't shocking but unnerving and to the credit of its producer, the band who already knew their material was left to express it, needing only technical assistance.
Even the cover art. The title, which might lead punters to thinking of Edvard Munch, was buried in the concept. People swimming under water in a pool. It's not the band, as I used to think, but a group of models in their teens, their colourless pallor accentuated by lights from above. There is nothing salacious about it, they really are kids in a pool. But they are in a place where it is impossible to scream, where a scream would only be attempted by the most severe of shocks, silent and self-annihilating. It's something that occurs only after looking at it while the record plays and then only after a few times. This was an image without band member mugshots or obvious statements.
As for that image, this was the band that did the most to suggest what the coming sub genre of Goth would look and feel like. And it was a new angle entirely. Screaming Lord Sutch had fun with the ghastly and grotesque but knew it was showbiz. Black Sabbath felt a little closer but veered towards their own sub genre. Alice Cooper was all frogs and snails and staged beheadings like a Vegas show. But this was different. American Debbie Harry's tough New York talk was glossed over by the media who preferred her cute and a little edgy. But this record that turned Sue from Bromley into Siouxsie Sioux from your holy, bloody nightmares didn't go for any of that.
The Pistols song Bodies left me shaking when I first heard it, there's almost a shock per verse in it. The songs on The Scream take time to do that, multiple listens. The sound is clear, if strange at first: John McKay's severe sabre like guitar figures weren't like anything around them (until Keith Levene, or The Edge but he was helped by Steve Lillywhite). Kenny Morris' insistence on every part of the kit except for the rock-defining snare put him one further out than Paul Cook in the Pistols (another gleeful tom-er). Steve Severin was not a bass virtuoso but what he did worked as well as Geezer Butler has for Sabbath (and he got nimbler as the years progessed).
And then there's Siouxsie, never have I cared less about a singer's wobbly pitch when the sheer overriding force of her expression comes in. A different vocalist would have left this record in the honourable mention stack but Siouxsie's vocal hurricane that can let you feel the coolness of its eye is a compulsion. Of her era it is she and John Lydon who sit at the top of the heap as far as personal might and influence, bludgeoning out from the speakers into the nervous systems of anyone listening. They are, of course both in the big tv moment where the Pistols swear at the drunken old Bill Grundy that pushed the term punk rock from a fanzine scene into the tabloids. Steve Jones does most of the swearing but Lydon is quietly seething. Siouxsie, to the rear with bandmate Steve Severin and the Selecter's Pauline Black looks like a prototype of herself, Westwoodian half-skinhead, half Weimar art-beast and chunky makeup. But she looks more like the scenester that she had been before she got in front of a mic and grievously assaulted The Lord's Prayer. Give that a little under a year and some aesthetic reinforcement and she is an icon feeding the fires, on T-shirts to this day with her spiky fright hair and Cleopatra eyes, recognisable across decades. Add but moments of her caterwauling command and roughshod poetry of unease and you'll have another fan. This is one of my favourite albums.
Listening notes: There's a lesson in this. I had a cassette back in the '70s which was replaced with an U.K. pressing of the LP. For this article I began by listening to the 2006 Deluxe Edition CD. Then, by chance, I found a copy of the 1989 CD in my work cupboard (I'd taken it in with a stack of others to help during the drudge bits of the day). With knowledge of the effects of the loudness war on the CD, I took it home and listened. It was immediately more airy than the later Deluxe which I was able to prove by comparing the waves of the same song from each. While there were clear dynamics to the 2006 master, the '89 instance was quieter but had far more separation of sound, particularly in the details of the drums (often the first victim of brickwalling masters). The 1989 master was in fact the original plus some boosting of both top and bottom not permissible for vinyl reproduction. It was from the brief glory days between CDs given exhausted old masters and the overcompression that has plagued digital music presentation since the mid-'90s. It is a perfect-sounding CD that proves the superiority over vinyl (more dynamic range and no noise) and its day has largely gone. Have any CDs from the late '80s to the mid'90s? Keep them. That beautiful sound is what we've lost in competition and the numbskulled vinyl revival. Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen,.
No comments:
Post a Comment