SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES' JOIN HANDS @ 45

The difficult in the term difficult second album usually refers to the problem of coming up with the quality of material in weeks that had taken a lifetime to make the first batch. I know too many counter examples of that to consider it anything but subjective. Closer, This Year's Model, Plastic Letters, Reckoning, A Quick One all shape up as impressive platters bursting with creative energy. The Banshees second go was difficult in other ways. First, it's a lot spikier and less user-friendly than The Scream. Second, it is the abrupt end of Banshees Mark 1. Whatever they went on to, they would never sound like this again.

Poppy Day starts a loud bright bell. Then a guitar rasps high on the fretboard from a cloud of distortion. The drums enter, sounding like a Joy Division song. When Siouxsie enters, she's low in the mix and wailing at the top of her voice.  The lyric is a call from the graves of soldiers who fell at Flanders. Buying a poppy is meant to remind us of heroism but this is more like a cry from a zombie movie. At two minutes, it won't test your attention span and its brevity through the harshness of the execution brings an extra layer of eeriness. It's an indication that the darker sides of The Scream are about to crawl up out of the earth an dominate this one. And that's what happens.

Regal Zone carries the war history theme, the title referring to the unaffected state of warmongering monarchs who can gaze out upon the carnage with impunity. Even the site of a sculpted soldier depicted in mid writhe before death leaves their bright portraits untouched. The guitar, again distorted through effects, punches at the air while the band plough through an unusual beat and a rasping saxophone plays above. Siouxsie's wail is mixed higher but is making melodic shapes as much as singing lyrics. A cry of outraged description as much as vindication.

Placebo Effect could have been written much more recently with its references to alternative medicine and characterising it as a mass of bullshit. A strange guitar effect similar to the one in Wire's I am the Fly starts with an insistent chord riff. Siouxsie begins closer to her speaking voice about dodgy alt.medicine procedures as McKay's guitar settles into the slashing style of the first album with more conventional reinforcement in lower octaves. Siouxsie wails above the grind and swirl to the repetition of the title until the guitar returns to its abrasive opening figure. A proto stab at a voodoo doll of future mass conjobs. Pretty impressive for a band later considered the mothership of goth.

After the triple bash of the opening songs Icon slows things down for its introduction of quietly menacing muted chords playing under sighing ride cymbals. Siouxsie comes in with a confessional tone and the surreal observation of her eyes lifting or falling in the sky, religious lies or diversions. And then there is the initial calm refrain of the chorus: "Icons feed the fires, icons falling from the spires." And then the pace picks up as McKay's pealing guitar plays the chord progression in a dirty jingle as Siouxsie raises her voice to a wail for the first full verse: "Those words hang like vicious spittle dribbling from the tongue. Close your eyes to your lies force feed more pious meat." The language turns abstract but the voice beseeches. Steve Severin, author of this one, has said it was inspired by middle eastern religious figures that danced themselves into frenzies that allowed them to withstand pain and proved it with physical tests (the lines about skewers apply here) but he took it further to ponder religious fervour and its motivations. The song is a marvel of suspension, stretching a bright, modal harmonic pattern beneath a vocal that travels and then soars. When the middle eight arrives, calling ecstatically for the guilt to be golden, and Siouxsie's lung-testing elongated notes, the celebration of the music and the horrors of the words, creepily, weave instead of disrupting each other. The closing din of Siouxsie's wail and McKay's slicing chord frenzy bring things to an abrupt end. I always feel like putting it on again but I always know better.

Premature Burial begins with volume swells on the guitar, a series of two chords repeating, until the band comes in with a thudding grind. Siouxsie's voice comes in at full strength, describing the condition of the title (lifted from an Edgar Allen Poe story) as her character tries to claw her way out of her coffin and back into the world, aided by chanting that might as easily be voodoo or Christian. She supplies her own backing vocals in the form of wordless rises and falls beneath her lead lines. The song grumbles forward like a tank, aggravated until the lines about sisters and brothers are augmented by a hellish baritone choir and the usual tom-heavy drumming until the grey skinned progression retreats back to the volume swells into the distance. In the same way that Bauhaus' later Bela Lugosi's Dead did, The Banshees push this into a pisstake ("oh what a bloody shame") but it's one that never quite erases the big doomy power of the bed track.

Side two starts with the phlanging rush of McKay's guitar sounding more machine like as it runs from the minor tonic to the fifth, supported by the bass, drums and bells in a big proto goth wash that is called Playground Twist. As the lines mix images of childhood play and grownups loping around drunk at parties there is a strange swinging vertigo to the number, aided by its 3/4 time and relentless metallic rush. A melodic but dizzy sax solo mixes it up even more. "You can drown when you're shallow, you can drown, drown droooooooowen, drooooooowen.!" 

If Playground Twist took us to kitchen sink horror movies Mother/Oh Mein Papa lures us into a dark house filled with familial severity and abuse. A musical box plays the old standard Oh Mein Papa as it winds down Siouxsie sings on one side of the stereo about how she longs to please her mother who watches over her and on the other side how oppressive her mother's disapproval and authority suffocates her.  A final visit to the English lyrics of the original, sung feckless, exhausted. The spring winds down and the energy drains with the final chime.

The Lord's Prayer is a kind of tribute to the band's origins. When Siouxsie and various Bromley Contingent cronies mounted their first stage with Sid Vicious on drums and future Ant Marco Pironi, they made a lot of barre chord din while Siouxsie wailed the words to the Lord's Prayer and anything else she could think of until it ended somehow. That's what we get here for the last half of side one; grinding punk with growling chords, thudding bass and toms with Siouxsie caterwauling overhead. The sole qualification this track has for the status of epic is it's fourteen minute plus length. While it's not as one-and-done as PiL's Fodderstompf, it does test its listeners. While it's frequently funny ("you'll never - get - to heaven ... not even if you're good!") and this lineup of the band can play its way into listenability with little effort. Here, only two years after that first performance, it does outstay its welcome like someone who repeats a joke rather than stay quiet or willingly retreat into the crowd. Well, I bet the first time was a blast.

But we come to the other meaning of the difficult second album: after this one, the band changed. Kenny Morris and John McKay fled the band in the middle of a tour after a botched gesture at an in-store promo disgusted them (the management had run out of copies of this LP and were mistakenly selling promo copies to fans). There is no coming back from desertion when a young band in that culture needed to be tight knit. Then, however mistaken the reason (which they admitted much later) there is no cleaning up sell-out corruption. At that point, the band that had formed from pub-going mates and had a bash on stage once but honed their craft to the extent that they were effortlessly the equivalent of the likes of PiL or The Clash, were never to be more.

To their credit, when Siouxsie and fellow remain-er Steve Severin decided to carry on at any cost, they did so with an eye to how this came about and a path of committed exploration. They found a whizbang drummer in Budgie but changed their guitarists every album or so and recooked their sound around its persistent marks (mainly Siouxsie's voice) and gave the world of goth to come an origin story. So, yes, for two solid records, a band with a sabre like approach to forging forward with great integrity accepted a challenge to a reinvention by necessity that gave them a far longer life than their titanic contemporaries. Me, I like almost all of it (and The Creatures afterwards) but if I didn't, I'd still have the first brace of discs that ends with the yell, "this prayer goes on and on!" and a final dissipating stutter of guitar distortion. That's how it happens. 

UNKNOWN PLEASURES @ 45

I didn't have this LP in 1979. The only Joy Division record I owned until 1984 was the Love Will Tear Us Apart seven inch. As for the band, I laughed at them but this was really about their fans, the people who would tell you at parties after midnight that you could hear Ian Curtis' epilepsy in his vocals. They seemed like a hobbyist death cult. Still, the name and the album title and the black leather look cardstock of the cover and the white inner sleeve blended strangely with the gloom and force of the music and I pushed them away because I feared what would happen if I didn't.

If I recall this album rather than play it, I think of it as samey, track after track of gloomy slow guitar rock. It takes a listen to remind me of the varying textures and moods and that the songs are quite distinct from each other. I think that's the artwork. Black, leathery cardstock with a small spiky diagram and a white inner sleeve with a creepy negative photo of a hand at a door on one side. Even the label was enigmatic: both sides repeat the cover image but one is white on black and the other is black on white and they aren't just sides one and two but outside and inside. If there is something being communicated it isn't being open about it. It was as though it had beamed in from another dimension.

In 1979, when cover art was still a matter of brash punky images against the airbrushed mainstream, this was edgy. A band that had emerged from the punk scene and considered itself a punk outfit was hitting the record shops with mystique. Had we not fought in the punk wars to rid the world of such Hipgnosis blare? If you're going to go around in a T-shirt that says I hate Pink Floyd, you should probably avoid the enigmatic on the old record sleeves. 

The problem is that Peter Saville's cover design for this record says everything visual about this record that you need to know before you've heard a note. The cow on Atom Heart Mother might well have been an inspiration of opportunity that worked because that's what was put there. The Unknown Pleasures cover looked like manual for something you didn't want to know about. It was forbidding. No rock album cover since Never Mind the Bollocks served the music on the disc more aptly than this one.

And the music? The band had already had a stab at some of these tracks and had produced an EP. These sides, for all their promise, were raw and recognisably punky. In a series of now famous decisions, producer Martin Hannett effectively future proofed the songs, taking them from overdrive and vocal snarl to a kind of cinema.

Disorder starts with palpitating drums and a picked loping bassline before the two-note pattern guitar comes in like a siren before the vocals begin talking about looking for a guide to help him cope with normal life. He has the spirit less the feeling but needs the feeling. This is one that can easily be imagined as an outright punk attack. Here it is more mildly paced and spacey. The voice that builds from a mumble to a cry (as it does in many of these songs) is in the centre set in warm reverb.

Day of the Lords cranks things down to glacial pacing. A guitar and bass figure rise menacingly through the minor scale before crashing deep and dark, the bass finishes the full figure with what at first sounds like major third to tonic but falls back down to the shadows around the minor. Curtis is central and darker with lines about a room and associated images of atrocities, warfare, torture and deadly competition before asking where it will end as a shrieking synthesiser calls out and floats above. The final verse is an octave up and repeats the opening verse ending with the question, "where will it end?" in a scream. This grinding atmosphere of nights of crime against humanity is what many people who have heard Joy Division think of when they hear the band name, a sound that couldn't be reasoned with and preferred skulking in the dark at the party.

Candidate comes slowly out of the shadows with a reverby drum pattern, slow and splashy. It's joine by a bass with a modal figure. Curtis comes in strongly but also heavily reverbed, the guitar making distant and barely tonal punctuation points around it, squeals, croons, metallic processes. "Forced by the pressure, the territory's marred, not longer the pleasure, I've since lost the heart..." Whatever the relationship was it is now beyond negotiation. The end, as the warped guitar wanders around in the dark like a stumbling ghost, is a repeat of the plea, "I tried to get to you."

Insight begins with what sounds like someone getting punched in the guts by a car door before a ride cymbal intro gives way to another descending bass line. Curtis' voice is phased or phlanged. A lyric of disappointment at one's own youth. A middle section sounds like a blast of video game laser effects before a calm return to the verse. This ends with the repeated claim, "I'm not afraid anymore," as the track closes with another burst of laser fighting.

New Dawn Fades is one of the band's most celebrated and covered songs. It's also one of their most forbidding being a statement of defeat. Spacey drums and a descending bass line lead to a big present guitar line that moves upward before finding its place in one of Bernard Sumner's signature two-note patterns. Curtis comes in as the guitar changes to a spooky but pretty arpeggio down the scale. He sounds full voiced but exhausted. After a brief instrumental respite playing through the progression twice the vocal returns an octave higher but more angry and desperate than anything else on the side. By the time he wails about them waiting for him in futility, Bernard is playing his own two-note figure higher on the fretboard and returns to a much higher iteration of the opening growling scale before he leaves it to the bass s it rushes to capitulation and the last few bars of the drums. End of side one.

She's Lost Control starts as a drum pattern that seems to start halfway through before one of the band's most famous bass riffs comes in with a crooning tone. Curtis' vocals are anything but crooning, describing a woman having a seizure but she's not just helplessly flailing on the floor. The source point for this song was something that Curtis saw in real life. He had epilepsy himself but the horrors he's describing here are not just about a medical condition but a general force that the woman in the song finds is wrenching her away from life into an inner chaos. She talks to the song's narrator, explains and corrects him. Whatever he witnessed on that occasion took him to further imagined states. To leave it at the seizure undercuts the lyricist's creativity (which is where those first gen JD fans used to leave me cold). The guitar doesn't appear in the arrangement until the end of the first verse when it clanks up through the minor scale. When the bass re-enters with its cooing riff there is a clear sense that for the woman in the song, this thing accosting her feels like it's taking forever, just repeating when she allows it. "And walked upon the edge of no escape and laughed I've lost control."

There's a version recorded later which ended up on the b-side of the Atmosphere single. It's cold as hell and ends with a wall of searing keyboards. I never worked out why they re-recorded it like that. It's from the same session as an instrumental that feels like it continued or emerged from the older song so it might only have been that. There's a mumbled coda that's all but unintelligible. What interests me about it is that for all its stripped back emotion, it only sounds crueller than the Unknown Pleasures version which scrubs up a lot warmer, despite the nightmare of its situation.

Shadowplay is one of the older songs on the record. The version on the Warsaw album is punkier and has a higher pitched Curtis vocal. Here, Martin Hannett has tamed the snotty edge that made it sound like too many other hopefuls and gave it gravitas. When the band kicks in from the slashing ride cymbal and bass hook it's crunching rather than thudding and Curtis' vocal has more confidence and character. Assassins, secret rooms and more despair. Bernard's guitar rises to the end of the track, insisting on single notes played high before a final chord.

Wilderness begins with a gymnastic bass lope before settling into a guitar grind. The singer has travelled far and wide and reports what sound like religious atrocities. A high two-note guitar figure sounds white against a black background. The second verse calls out more misery.

Interzone. A snarling chord riff and a distant scream start this rocker with its call and response vocal. Peter Hook takes the first vocal and Curtis responds, often repeating the initial line. This is another of the songs that sounds like it would be at home as a punk number. Images of violence that might well exist in the title's source, William Burroughs setting for some of Naked Lunch. This was one of the songs the band wrote in the studio when some of the tracks were dropped form the album (another was Candidate) and was very vaguely based on Keith Hudson's Turn the Heater On. 

I Remember Nothing swells up as a formless electronic drone, blostered by a spacey drum pattern, big picked bass notes, more synth and a clicking muted guitar. Suddenly a shattering of glass. Curtis comes in already at ten with the main refrain: "Weeeeeeeee were strangers ... for way too long." Alienation, violence, gaps between people filled with frozen air. The outro continues the drone, spiking, thudding and clanking with more noises of slamming and crashing in a spacious reverb. A few final moments of violence as metal collides with walls and floors. End.

My 1984 had been enjoyable, the complete antithesis of homelife from my undergraduate years with my brother's bad marriage. While that circumstance was good for driving me into my studies and music it wasn't good to come home to. Then that ended and all but myself and another brother were left the next year. I was still able to spend a little money every dole cheque on records and books and Joy Division were among those catch up bands whose records I bought. 

I found this at Skinny's for about $2 and spent the next week living in it. Closer came soon after and then Still. I didn't become one of the uberfans that I'd ridiculed until a few years on and I still can't quite work out why that happened. But back in '85 when the fragments of the previous year's enjoyable lifestyle eventually blew away, I was left feeling flat and the big gloomy notion that that was all my life would be. After three years of ecstatic cultural blitzkrieg it was the path to the mainstream and colourless conformity. I was still writing short fiction and had some ambitions there but no one makes money out of that. In the gap between hanging on to the fun of the early eighties as the mid point was about to click over and absorbing into the Brisbane streetscapes and the revitalising move to Melbourne, Unknown Pleasures made a kind of sense to me. Not a self pitying wallow but a kind of recognisable cultural filter, something that told me I wasn't like the rank and file and could still get something expressive done. 

You give up on such things when you understand how your best efforts cannot match your ambitions. There's no shame in that but unless you have something to break your fall you're going to have a harder time of it. Unknown Pleasures was one of a number of records that gave me that break. Now, if I see the cover image on a T-shirt worn by someone too young to know what it means, I let it pass. And however absurd and self-embarrassing the more extreme fandom redrew them I forgive it all, knowing I once had the judgement to allow a couple of sides of music, a guide to take me by the hand, to keep me from a quiet surrender.

Listening notes: I took the bold and clean hi-res downloads from either Pro Studio Masters or HD-Tracks to guide this post. Utter bliss and not loudness-warred.

KINKS @ 60

A brief tuggle of guitars and drums and the band bashes into Beautiful Delilah. The guitars are hot but clean. It's the vocal that sounds overloaded, a constant rasping growl that could be a young buck's inner monologue or that of some aging lech looking where he shouldn't. This unmelodic assault stretches time for its mere two minutes and wraps around your ears like fine grain sandpaper. That's what most of this album is going to be. It is the sound of a sustained wince.

Not only does this band that has originals on offer, start with a cover of a Chuck Berry song but it's not even frontman Ray Davies singing but his brother Dave. You can tell when, for all his torn tonsil rawness, his "r" that sounds like a "w" plonks him right back down to London and not Tennessee. It really screams ersatz. When the originals turn up, they are just like that with the name Davies on the by line. It sounds like the grubbing square-spectacled record execs of the U.K. scooped up anyone under twenty-five who looked good in a suit and could at least hold an electric guitar, kicked them into a studio and gave them an hour to make a record. 

That, I emphasise, is how it sounds. Stand back, make sure you're not hungover (as this music will punish you in that state), think a little more historically, and you might well hear something you didn't at first, the beginnings of greatness, looking here more like a larval stage of a buzzing insect than a rock band but forming, all the same, right in front of you.

Yes, most of these two sides are rusty, clanking covers and soundalikes. Yes, Shel Talmy had a lot to learn about record production. Yes, this is not a patch on what was to come. No, this was not the last anyone would hear of The Kinks and for good reasons.

I'm going to be selective about the tracks I'll describe on this one as most of them are made of the same adjectives and I don't want to put either of us through that. However, I'd like you to consider what people who bought long playing records back in the '60s expected of them and how they made their way into daily lives.

The music discs that mattered the most in the early '60s were singles, seven inch vinyl platters with one song per side that got played on the radio. These were where bands put anything they called art, the big statements that failed or succeeded which meant the band did either. The Kinks had already flopped with a (with hindsight) horrible version of Long Tall Sally and an under appreciated original called You Still Want Me. The reason this album was made on the Pye label's shilling was the breakthrough of the third single, which we'll get to.

What that meant was that if the singles proved the band to be viable in the market, they go to do an album. What most of them did was a version of their live set. And that is where you get to why this record is so rasping and ugly: this is what The Kinks sounded like live. If you bought it, you bought it for a sound that could get a party dancing to the slamming beats and cut-through vocals of R&B standards. If the originals didn't stop anyone dancing, that was more of a proof of concept than anything. Repeat.

Follow the various threads through to 1965 to find out how albums became something more than this by the mid '60s and you'll see how the LP became an attempted art form. Before then, it was a long ad for live shows or live shows you were too young for.

Also, none of these emulations are slavish recreations of originals. The later '60s were plagued with blues purists whose museumish covers attempted authenticity only to sound more irritatingly British. In the early '60s these bands found their own feet by doing the songs the way they worked at the pubs. 

Then you get to the end of side one and the single that made the difference. If Long tall Sally was weirdly reserved (compare it to the Beatles' screamfest) and You Still Want Me second rate Beatles, You Really Got Me was an explosion.

It starts with a snarling two chord riff, mean as mustard and unstoppable. The emphasis changes as soon as the band kicks in but it's still going. Ray's vocal comes in slyly but changes into earnest with the first rising chord change. A chorus of humming voices starts up and the momentum gathers, hitting the ceiling repeatedly when it leaps up a fourth for the chorus, a raucous shouting of the title three pounding times before a brief relief with a chord one tone down before everything starts again. The next time that happens Dave Davies' solo scratches its way in, scurrying around the room and hissing dissonantly. Back for the verse with a distant piano and the chorus finished with four bamming barre chords. End of side one.

Amp distortion had only ever been accidental on British recordings until that moment when Dave put a little amp through a bigger amp so the stressed output valves of the first one blare out to the mics in front of the second. That's a fuzz pedal by longer means. You can find overdrive on blues records and select  rockabilly sides but even The Beatles only seemed to get to its outer edge (listen to Misery on Please Please Me), remaining hot clean rather than blasting. Dave Davies gets it monstrous, making it huge when matched by the bass. Even now, after decades of evermore refined guitar overdrive, this scratchy early step still thrills. When I went to see Ray Davies and band (not The Kinks) play the Palais down here in Melbourne there were very young ushers dancing to this in the aisles, getting up and into the song's celebration of everything good about being young and ready.

More of the covers and clones populate the second side so the party can just keep going. That is until the penultimate track comes up and we can with hindsight, understand one of Ray Davies' strains as a songsmith at its beginning. Stop Your Sobbing. Ray starts before the band. "it is time for you to stop all of your sobbing". When they come in on the word sobbing it becomes a kind of beatgroup ballad led by Ray's melancholy plea. A second part of the verse calls the others in before Ray repeats the title with a non verbal extension on the last syllable. It feels like whatever began with You Really Got Me has ended crushingly and his narrator is fronting up with a kind of tough aloofness but knows it's a see through mask. The change for the middle eight with its admission that he really wants to hold her and conquer her sadness and would if it weren't too late. The music of this section is, however small its scale, momentus, showing what drama can come from a slight rhythm change and plainer chords. So it's on to the fade and the next one who really gets him. Repeat. The sense of this inevitability is the other side of swinging London, the one that happens in all those kitchen sink epics of the East End and Ray knows it.

From this song came the serious pausing for thought audible in See My Friends, Waterloo Sunset, Days, Shangri-La and so many many more. The page representing The Kinks in the Nik Cohn and Guy Peellaert picture book Rock Dreams, after the louche fantasies of The Beatles, Elvis and the Stones, is a back street of London at night. Ray stands beside a woman with a pram, they are both looking at the viewer. Stop your sobbing, there's more.

The album plays out with what was the last song favourite of every R&B combo in the greater city of London. Got Love if You Want it was the cue for a rave up jam and experiments with dynamics. That's what happens here. What's up next? Oh, there's this new one from The Yardbirds!

Think of these two pinnacles on this LP. Let them stay visible over the duty-bound live set chestnuts that make the mood, remember that, equipment limitations aside (Abbey Road this wasn't) these two sides of songs were pretty much exactly what The Kinks wanted out of their first LP, something you could dance to and keep dancing to. Most bands, if they got as far as this, put it out, split up and lived on memories. If you revisit this you will start noticing the vocal arrangements, use of piano, growing awareness of why songs work, and get a sense that Ray Davies knew the music his friends could make and took it there.

BEATLES FOR SALE @ 60

Ok, so you're in the biggest band in the known Milky Way and you began the year getting bigger by cracking America, getting a future-proof movie done and the first all original LP. Time for a break. Sorry, gotta keep it up because tomorrow all that news will be wrapping fish and chips. Right, so in the middle of interminable world tours, loss of sleep, finding out if you can actually have too much sex, playing the same set day after day to crowds who scream too loudly to hear a note and your record company wants another worldwide hit single and an album. Easy. Just cancel some of the dates and make some room on the timeline for songcraft and more learning studio magic.

Sorry, the tours are top priority. Ok, we'll tour. Sorry, the records are top priority. So, they write in hotel rooms and record when they get back to the U.K. and at some point there's enough for an LP. The Australian release of this record was reissued in 1977 along with all the pre-Pepper albums and the cover art was a repeat of the local original: a photo of each member at a concert, playing their instruments against a canary yellow background. They look like they're having a blast. The original UK Parlophone release, however, is more like reality. Against a cold season woodland backdrop, the four lads are rugged up against the chill and they look like they haven't slept in years. Even Paul looks ordinary. On the back, it's the same but from a high angle. There's a gatefold with the characteristically daggy blurb and some touring photos, one live and one posed. All of it says one thing: we're famous but we're tired.

The thing is, that's not what you hear. Lennon's voice starts No Reply and it's in full definition. There's a rasp but it's style rather than exhaustion. "This happened once before..." On the last syllable the band come in with John's acoustic strumming out the front. The narrator knows that his object is home and that when he calls, her flatmates lie about her being out. He's seen her. The verses are descending melodies which vary from angry to weary but end with solid harmony flashes of passion before calming to an adaptation of the opening tune. The middle eight carries on the tradition taken very high on Hard Day's Night in that they are melodic and harmonic showcases that could only be at that part of the song. In this one ("If I were him...") the Lennon McCartney interplay is stunning. It only happens once and feels more dramatic for that. The son ends on the anguished repeat of the title in harmony blasts. We could be unkind and call this an ode to stalking but, more genuinely, it's a perfect understanding of the sense of powerlessness felt by the rejected one and the fade of his futility is touching.

I'm a Loser begins with those words sung in bright harmony through three different intervals before the line, " and I'm not what I appear to be," leads into the Dylanesque masochism of the song. The lines tying it to losing a love to someone more adept at it seem there to seal the Beatles deal on it but the body of the number is self accusation and pain. The melody is sweet but Lennon's vocal is raw. Paul's high harmony soften the piece a little but it's mind is made up. Harrison is appealing in this one with a range of country licks bending out of his big clean Gretsch. 

Baby's in Black changes the time signature to a waltz. A twanging figure from George and they're straight into the harmonies. An acoustic rustle underneath and electric bends above a fairly busy tom tom-led performance from Ringo. The melody is quite playful and sweet for a song about a woman who is either in mourning or dressing like a black card and forbidding communication. The middle eight of this song is so delicious that it has to come back after the solo where Paul's soaring descant drives the lyrics: "Oh how long will it take, till she sees the mistake..." The final verse features an opening of the bed track with deft work on ride cymbals as Harrison plays the lowest notes he can and putting the Bigsby whammy bar to great effect. Short and utterly delectable.

And that's it, almost. The rest is covers done with varying skill and effect as well as some fine originals that feel dropped in at random. Rock and Roll Music is an energetic Chuck Berry number that's fine but outstays its welcome. Mr. Moonlight starts with a magnificent introductory scream from Lennon before it descends into the kind of guff that home organ salesmen would trot out to nail the sale. Kansas City is big and perky and feels like McCartney's replacement for the bellowing scream of Long Tall Sally only in another song. Buddy Holly's Words of Love does benefit from some colling harmonies. Ringo gets to go all Carl Perkins with Honey Don't which George garnishes with some plunky rockabilly twangs. He gets the last word with a second Perkins standard featuring some vocal delay that was dated even for then but some fine chiming guitar licks.

This is all Hamburg and Cavern fare. Six out of fourteen songs on a fourth album that followed one of only originals. It smacks of desperation. While the rest of the originals are not up to the standard of that mighty opening hat trick, they're still pretty good. I'll Follow the Sun is a gentle whimsical Paul. Eight Days a Week is big Beatles jangle and harmony (another fine middle eight). Every Little Thing has real charm (love the tympanum in the chorus) but it runs out quickly. I Don't Want to Spoil the Party is a good stab at a kind of commercial Nashville toe tapper with another story of being on the outer (did ever such creatively and socially rich kids cry so poor?) What You're Doing is ok but feels last minute and undercooked. Eight originals but only three break through. These sessions were when the band also recorded the single I Feel Fine with its opening feedback and heavily doctored blues riff (well beyond what some people report as plagiarism), latin drumming, and business-meaning vocals. But they didn't like putting singles on albums. Why? The U.S, record company Capitol not only doubled up on the singles, they shortened the running time of each record so they could release more with the same price tag. I like the U.K. better, too, but if any Beatles album could have done with the concurrent singles on the LP it's this one.

Then again, neither I Feel Fine nor the b-side She's a Woman make a good fit on Beatles for Sale, even if you scrap Mr. Moonlight and, maybe, Everybody's Trying to be my Baby, it would sound as force-meat as the American albums (Meet the Beatles is a solid exception to this, just to say). What we got was almost the end of the early stage show. The next album, Help, added two more but these were well part of the stadium Beatles set, however goofy they sounded beside the other songs on that album.

Beatles for Sale does one thing well, though, it advances the scope of the bands recorded sound. There is a lot more space around the core of each of these songs. They are also more dynamic in the arrangements, allowing for a relief from the big shouty choruses and bluster so that John's lines about trying to telephone in No Reply after the huge middle eight sound like he's exhausted. This aids the song immeasurably: if it had just been played at the same intensity all through and Lennon had sung the lines like that it would have sounded like a bad take. As it is, it draws us in to the centre of the character's crushing sadness ... in a light and boppy Beatles song.

I used to skip when really listening to this one when I first got it. The covers felt old and stodgy and seemed to rub themselves off against the frailer of the originals. The sleeve art with its loud yellow field and old style photos of the band also felt a little senior. Where A Hard Day's Night pounds confidence and creativity, jingling with twelve strings and sophisticated vocal harmony, Beatles for Sale feels like a step over a cliff edge. The best songs here point to the next step which, at the end of the following year would sound as joyous as Rubber Soul and leave the old band back in the beer-stinking bar where the covers should have stayed. Could a couple of strong EPs been put out instead? Not when the album cost more per unit and the monster single compelled its purchase. Whatever other qualities that might now allow us to prise this disc from its commercial purposes, there is one thing it does tell us: it says, "we're shagged out but still moving. Keep listening."

THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE @ 45

If you've heard Cars from this album (and hours of hits and memories radio), you already know this record's sonic pallet: a crunching rhythm clanks below an ethereal screaming synthesiser playing a cooling modal motif overhead. Between the two, the voice of Gary Numan, melodic in shape but emotionally flat. Repeated listens will distinguish one arrangement from the next and the emotion in the vocal will advance. But it will take those listens.

For brevity, I'm going to refer to the rhythm tracks of this album as the machine. This will alleviate having to repeat the description of the beds of almost every song on this record. So one song gives way to another and the machine is already working. That kind of thing.

Airlane

A slight wisp high on the synthesiser and the machine starts with a clanking rhythm track with the wisp becoming an industrial scream overhead. The motif is altered here and there and several gear shifts and turns but the process keeps working. This is tinned Gary Numan and is as luscious as it is cold. Not just emotionally static, physically cold, as though the aircon has been turned a degree too low. It's an instrumental but with this artist there is no tokenism to it as there would be with any other rock artist. Well, maybe that should read any other rock artist before him. This album opener from the last year of the '70s, released on the brink of the term post punk gaining currency in the consumer base, is of a time when the demarcation between mainstream and alternative was essential. Here is an instrumental told in bold strokes by an artist that, be the stadium ever so big, was not going to ask his audience if they felt alright, or if they could clap their hands (mind you, some of these tracks almost force you to do that). If you are not with this record by the end of its few minutes' duration, you might as well take it off and try something else. When this asks you in, it will lock the door behind you.

Metal

The machine kicks into operation. A hammering synth snare. Then the whole floor, bass, kit and rhythm, starts. Numan comes in as an android. It observes the ways of his engineers as they fit its circuitry and polish his outer finish. A solid synth wail rises and spread. "Picture this, if I could make the change, I'd love to pull the wires from the wall..." Perhaps his assemblers are aware of its aspirational daydreams. The song stops developing after the last line about confusing love with need. And then a solid electronic drone plays over and then through the closing rhythm. No more riffs for this operative. It's all down to the process completing. That's what this sounds like. A quick scare of a thought and then it's back to the assembly and programming. And the process just continues.

Complex

The formula is put on hold for this one. A viscous soup of electric slides and piano, the filters on the synthesiser frequently teeter into distortion. And then a mighty figure rises in the keyboards and a voice we'll hear again on the record, viola. The figure is intense, heartrending is a way difficult to define. The vocal has a familiar broken dejection with halting lines about betrayal and isolation. With the perfect blend of bowed strings and synthesised string sections, Numan's plaintive voice and the big space created around it, this remains the most beautiful and affecting track he has ever done.

 

Films

A drum pattern is joined by a perky bass rhythm before the scream riff enters, expanding the scale to airliner hangar size. The vocals enter with a statements of approval or disapproval about elements of cinema like the film itself, the actors etc. but reverses it with paranoid utterances about being exposed. We're not talking movies so much as living as though we move through our own or, even worse, someone else's. As the ugly beautiful synth riff soars and takes control we are yet again in a song-borne world where one change of perspective in a line will alter our own movement through a song. One of the most epically industrial of Numan tracks.

M.E.

Numan's vocal is the highest on the album or anything on Replicas or the self-titled debut. Clear, clean notes that describe arcs of melodic phrases. The lines are brief: "And M.E. I eat dust!" "I'll only fade away and I hate to fade alone." The title is an abbreviation of Mechanical Engineering. The suggested narrative is an old sci-fi staple in which a massive computer fixes humanity's problems by getting rid of the humans. The riff will be known to more recent generations as sampled by Basement Jaxx in Where's Your Head At? Here, it is one of the machine tracks, driving down as the warm lower synthesisers rise around it. And then, unexpectedly, in a reiteration after the first vocals, the riff is augmented by plucked viola strings, one of the woodiest and most human-like sounds available, adding a blunt texture but also a real fingertip on string. In a later instrumental passage the viola adds Celtic trills and melismas to the phrase adding a palpable yearning to the sound. The electronic keyboards rise to a height of modal figuring as the machine gears up again, alone, screaming over the wasteland. 

Tracks

A pealing piano figure underlaid with a gurgling synth bass. Numan comes in with a few lines before the machine bursts into gear, the drums catch up and the beat assumes a chug beneath a synth wailing the opening piano figure. In full force, the vocals tell of a swap between the narrator and an older person who then can experience both the past and present. The vocal for the full band body of the song is almost as high as M.E. and just as plaintive. It sounds like the experiment was a disaster. And perhaps time itself remains to witness, ending as a trickling piano arpeggio played high and softly. 

Observer

This is almost entirely instrumental as a high flying keyboard scream flies over and around the parts of the machine as it works and crunches. In this case the figure in the lower instruments is so close to the break figure in Cars that I still think it's an extended album version of that song starting up. But the synth scream flies in and it's its own number. After an intro that goes for half the track it's a surprise to hear the vocal come in. A plain lyric about people watching might, in the right context, be a sinister confession but all we have is the setting of 

Conversation

The riff is built around a brief trill and feels like it's going to be the same all through. When the vocals start it is a series of clipped statements referring to the failure of communication through incapacity. Is Numan referring to his Asperger's? The lines are stubbornly brief and the breaks between them increasingly elaborate, with a deal of warmth added through the violin and viola. The music, the invention internally is busier than his verbal communication could ever be until it swamps the words with a tide of swoonable synthesis soaring above the machines. This is more an acknowledgement of the condition than a cure but its depiction is oddly glorious, controlled, owned.

Cars

People whose parents weren't born when this was released as a single know this song. It gets everywhere, movies, commercials, daytime radio, clubs and deep inside remixes. In 1979 it screamed through the airwaves with a weird grooviness built of machine perfect playing and simple but commanding motifs. If we'd been wowed into silence by Donna Summer's I Feel Love and then shivered at side two of Bowie's Low, we might have just made it past the industrial architecture of Are Friends Electric but nothing prepared us for this hymn to the car as a place to isolate oneself from everyone else as it coursed through the night with lights as white as the elongated keyboards howling above the machine. If it came on the radio as you were getting yourself to a party, your night immediately felt important, not just fun.

Engineers

A theatrical snare roll settles into a locomotive rattle as the machine grunts and clunks. Numan sings high of his and his colleagues' lot as they maintain the lifestyle of the world from a system of conveyor belts underground. "All that we know is hate and machinery. We're engineers." It's the final track and ends as uniform as the opening instrumental. The main riff is more complex than usual and thickens over the top of the machine until that continues  to a finish on the snare drum and a wet, electronic sprinkler. End.

The cover art is of its time but out of time. A reimagined Magritte painting replaces the glowing head of the suited man at the table with Numan's own, eye makeup intact but now in a 1930s style double breasted suit. He sits looking with a worried face at a small pyramid that glows from the top down. The album is one of exploration of the theme of humans and technology dealing with each other in the world to come already beginning as he recorded. Taking inspiration from cinema, Phillip K. Dick and industrial advertising, he filtered his inspirations through his first year of fame with Asperger's. The title is Freud's concept of the Id's drive for self gratification and the forces (largely internal) that seek to prevent its expression.

This record took me a long time to really fold myself into. I picked out the more melodically pleasing tracks and let the others fade into disuse, at first. But then, all I had was a cassette copy so I'd put it on for study and it worked its way. I came to a few conclusions about it, especially in light of knowing it's Tubeway Army predecessor, Replicas.

If you are unused to these sounds and find them quaint and samey you should pause for thought. Yes, this album finds a formula and sticks to it as though the system that it supports would collapse without perfect observance. And you might think, that's not much to build a creative project on. Then, all you will need to do is find an album by an old blues master. It's not the difference between those classic guitar tones and chord progressions played organically that you should be hearing, it's the adherence to a grammar that must be maintained for the music to be blues. Same thing. 

Gary Numan did not emerge from Kraftwerk. Even the cinematic soundscapes of Tangerine Dream could not claim him. Gary Numan came from punk. The self-titled Tubeway Army debut features sparse synthesisers, usually helping out around the rhythm guitars and bass as texture. By the time Replicas was released the guitars were ditched and the approach sealed. Icy screams of synthesis screamed in flight overhead as a factory filled with perfectly maintained automation clanked, hummed and manufactured on the floor below, in a wash of blinding antiseptic fluorescence. Gary Numan made this setting and walked  through it, comfortably at home. 

Here and there he daydreams like any assembly worker, of being a machine himself, just cognisant enough to know he is a robot, or someone altogether more fleshly who prefers the protection of a synthesised skin. Stepping from the thick barre chord riffs of the first album through to this muscular and industrially tooled world building Gary Numan made himself instantly recognisable to the decades to come, needing only know that adventurous listeners of the future would pause and understand.

Listening notes: I listened to the superb hi-res flac downloaded from a online retail outlet. No loudness war compression, here, just the big airy white light soundscapes of the original vision. However, I got a lot of background from the booklet in the 1998 rerelease from Beggar's Banquet. I've found out that the mix on all CD releases of this album are unsullied by loudness mixing so, any you can find will sound very good.

QUEEN II @ 50

Second albums are always interesting. Flop or flight the effort put in alone compels. The number of one and done bands supports this. Can we easily imagine a second real Sex Pistols record or a follow up to Colossal Youth? Even if it is easy it is not always fun. Imagining a megastar band that collapsed after their first album and you have a forgotten Beatles, Rolling Stones and many, many more. All those bands who make it through the great filter of rock stardom get a toast with something bubby and a stab at immortality. So, how did Queen do?

The opening track Procession does a lot of the talking in answer. It's an instrumental made of a kick drum and layers of guitars played in ways they normally are not. Brian May makes his guitars sound like brass instruments and organs. Mostly this is done through volume swells to remove the sharp sound of a pick on a string. Also, he puts the signal through heavy distortion which adds a lot of sustain. We're not meant to think it's actually a procession band, we're meant to marvel at the ingenuity. And here's the thing: it's way more than smart, the music in Procession is emotive. If we're in for prog rock on this LP it will be as we've never experienced it before. It's almost over before it begins but it ends with the figure that the next song will progress to.

A slight mist of guitar beeps from the end of the track leads us to Freddie Mercury's piano arpeggio which ends with a giant power chord. A galloping guitar opens to another aural vista and Mercury's pure vocals in high register begin the direct contact with the audience. "A word in your ear from father to son". This gives way to the verse that will repeat around excursions into celestial vocal harmonies and hard metal workouts and impassioned pleas. The band is throwing everything they have at the wall and creating something far more focussed and deliberate than anything on their debut. By the time Mercury sings in falsetto, "the air you breathe I live to give you"  you'll be welling up. If this is metal it has never been so poignant, if it is prog it has never been this affecting. A choral chant and hard rock backing play to the fade. A high flute like guitar triad fades up.

And then that is joined by a series of weeping glissandi on the same tone introduce White Queen (As it Began). A deep acoustic strums chords under the vocal which is gentle but melancholy. After an opening lament the song begins with a glacial arpeggio played through a flanger. A courtier's account of waiting for the queen of the title progresses confessorially until a mass of glittering harmonies end the verse before a harder, impassioned restatement of the opening phrases thunders out. A sitar like solo later and the passion reignites with an outburst of new melodic material and more orchestral guitar before a final choral outburst and a gentle coda with only voice and acoustic guitar. If you know your Pre-Raphaelite painting this is what one might sound like.

Unlike the three previous tracks Some Day One Day has a clean beginning with sprightly acoustic chords and a vocal from Brian May who supports his pleasant but lower tier vocal with more guitar arrangements in a love song of polite longing. Faint praise? Well we've just had two of the bands most impressive recordings to that time in their career. The nice number is thoroughly enjoyable without ever wafting into filler territory.

Another clean start for the Roger Taylor song The Loser in the End whose crashing drums tighten to the opening line, "Mama's got a problem ..." in mighty metal voice. It's so powerful we don't have time to acknowledge that the guitars supporting it are almost entirely acousitc. There's plenty of brash stadium rock to follow and it feels almost a relief for the band just to rock out to one of Roger's barnstormers. Mind you, the lyric about sparing a thought for the mums left behind by their hedonistic kids is poignant despite the Zeppish strut.

While the first side was almost all Brian May's songs, the second is entirely given over to Freddie's flights and showstoppers. Ogre Battle begins with a partially backwards playing of the song's final moments before smashing into one of the most authentic speed metal guitar workouts before the eighties adopted the approach. If the choral harmonies of the previous side leaned toward the sublime these scream out like side characters from Dante's Inferno. Freddie leads us through a folkloric episode  of breathless speed and imagery. It ends in partial reverse as it started and the wind effects are cut into by a persistent ticking which brings us to...

The Fairyfeller's Master Stroke which starts with a manic minor key chordal figure on a harpsichord before the big Queen choir and guitar orchestra kicks in. Then it's full steam medievalism of the kind in Richard Dadd's painting which gave the song its title. The song is not just a catalogue of the odd characters in the picture but a big, rich, bombastic celebration of their Tolkeinesque community. We end on a rushed harmonised final description as a trio of chords gives way to ...

Nevermore begins with a grand piano arpeggio that bears Freddie's mock melancholy song of love and loss with some big harmonies sounding operatically and trading speaker positions. Big and gorgeous if slight by comparison but you would never skip it.

A clean start for The March of the Black Queen on piano with some guitar stings before an explosion into harmony and the rest is not going behave. While the six minute opus changes every few seconds there is enough grounding repetition to keep the constant vocal and instrumental pyrotechnics on course rather than have it collapse under its own weight. If anything this is the parent of the more disciplined Bohemian Rhapsody and it is not hard to think that the later top 40 epic would have reached its clean lines and clipped humour without this near free for all earlier. Its final chord gives way to ...

The ringing acoustic guitars of Funny How Love Is with a throat lacerating high vocal by Freddie form the equivalent of Some Day One Day on the previous side (more on such soon). It's joyful and ringing with perfect voices and a constant shuffling rhythm, neither claiming higher purpose nor needing to. 

The Seven Seas of Rhye bangs in with the same kind of energetic piano figure the Elton John would use the following year to make the Who's Pinball Wizard his own. A powerchord later and the galloping number rushes into the most conventional mid-seventies radio song on the record. The lyric is the same kind of play upon character types that went into most of the songs on this side so while it might be of its time it's not Tiger Feet or Come and be in My Gang unless you can imagine those redone by Noel Coward. And then it ends in a crash that is immediately swamped by a pub singalong version of I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside. It conventionality bringing the unconventionality of the rest of the record into sharp focus ... and with a smile. This was the band's first charting single.

The debut album had charted within the top 40 but not spectacularly. Queen II was begun very shortly after the delayed debut LP and, by the band's insistence, under easier conditions (extended studio rather than the borrowed minutes and offcuts of other bands like the first one). With loosened belts and a set of songs they were eager to experiment with, Queen managed to make a far more orderly and signature work instead of getting lazier with it. They gave their record company a long player like no other on the market and a top ten charter (number five, below such giants as Band on the Run and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road!). Queen had arrived and distinctly on their own terms. From Brian May's extra ordinary guitar orchestrations, vocal harmonies to floor their contemporaries and songs that ranged from sublime to infectiously insane, the band was set and in such a profound way that they got through the onslaught of punk with barely a scratch. This album and its success gave them that.

It would have been late 1976. The song Bohemian Rhapsody had wowed everyone of us over the Christmas holidays and drove us to buy our own copies of the album without bothering with the cassette undermarket. It was straight to the LP with the cover art, lyrics and winking comments about Bechstein debauchery and nobody playing synthesisers. Owning the artefact by this band that had shown up underneath the elder sibling canon and who were ours to cherish, was to feel like starting on the ground floor of Coca Cola or space travel.

But it wasn't quite the ground floor, it was the band's fourth album. Over the months from the beginning of 1976 to its end and beyond, I looked for, found and bought all of the earlier ones, in order of discovery. Queen, the debut, was all British rock goodness, if uneven and occasionally messy. Sheer Heart Attack was accomplished and presented the formula for future Queen albums. But Queen II was different. When I bought the U.K. copy from Ken Hurford's Import Records around the corner, I had to wait to hear it as we were in between styli at the big four speaker (but not quadrophonic) hifi Dad had built. That was maybe at the end of the day when he got back from work. Until then I took it over to Nanna's to pore over while digging into pikelets with cream and cumquat marmalade and tea with lemon served in glass. Alright, alright, I just thought you might like the detail.

So, there was the cover. Black on the outside with the band members heads in chiaroscuro lighting just like the opening of the Bohemian Rhapsody video. The title, an art nouveau font in white in a corner, carried over in style to the rear cover which listed the tracks over a more elaborate coat of arms featuring a swan, fairies, lions and other heraldic inventions which looked medieval as imagined by the late nineteenth century. Also, the sides weren't simply one and two but Side White and Side Black. Opening the gatefold showed the band posed in the same kind of rough diamond arrangement but entirely in white (and the drummer and bass player in reverse places which would have them the same as the front cover if you could see through it).  The other half of the gatefold was a repeat of the back only, black on white with various production notes and the statement: "And nobody played the synthesiser ... again."

Dad got home with the stylus and I put the disc on, poring over the lyrics and marvelling at the sounds. As a kid whose first fandom was classical and previous, the record spoke to me directly, it's virtuosity and imagination was like reading the best of kids books from when I was much younger. Like those, it gave me pictures and daydreams.

OCEAN RAIN - ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN @ 40

The opening chords of track one tell a lot of the story. They're played with acoustic guitars. Second sign is the cheerful figure in the string section. When Ian McCulloch enters with his vocal he's almost audibly smiling. For all the forward motion of the previous album's plunge into anthemic showstoppers and gloomy philosophy, there was little success to be had. Times were changing and the initial bleakness of the decade in rock music was being replaced with lightness. It was all in how you did it. The Banshees went briefly psychedelic with Dreamhouse and by the time you get The Cure singing about caterpillars and the top ten was filled with squeaky clean synth duos whose videos were all endless white backgrounds and spotless image. The scousers of doom stood up to the challenge and created a joyous feast that even they would dine at.

Silver's light-spreading strings, McCulloch's powerhouse tenor declared the skies blue and his hands untied as the rising wordless backing voices gave way to a refrain so melodic that it had to be kept to la-la-las. They did it: the song is a doorburst of happiness and not a second of it doesn't sound like the band that asked it they were the half of half and half or were they the half that was whole and pleaded to be spared the cutter. And it doesn't let up.

The epic scale strings and acoustics continue but on a Phil Spectorish epic scale. What starts sounding like more Porcupine darkness turns with the vocals into a quite romantic mess of imagery conflating sex and drugs with rock and roll. "Take me internally, forever yours, nocturnal me.

Crystal Days sounds like a major key version of Porcupine's White Devil. McCulloch sings high and pure about looking for hope and hoping it's you. A brief feedback solo gives way to an almost cartoonish '60s interlude on the middle strings. 

Yo Yo Man follows with a revisit to flamenco land like Nocturnal Me (and repeats its three time rhythm). It's the closest thing so far to the old Bunnymen with images of flames, snow, bones and prayers but it's again in a major key and the  keyboard instrumental at the song's centre adds a Brian Wilson like fairy tale whimsy. When the flamenco strut returns it is with the kind of development with layered vocal lines and a drifting band track before ending on a strident string figure and a droning hum.

Thorn of Crowns comes across as a showcase of the eastern flavours the band had explored on the previous LP as well as furthering the bright clean guitar riffing they'd always taken to triumph. This one was given some working out live and in the studio but never quite takes off. McCulloch's random screeching and shouting feel uninspired and space filling. By the time his impassioned vocals are given over to a list of vegetables you know this one was destined to be the album's hamburger helper. Whatever thinking might have gone into it, this end of side one piece sounds like the kind of Doors-inspired meander that a lot of the '60s influenced bands of the time were trying out (and almost always failing at).

Side two starts with one of the era's stone cold classic anthems. The deathless Killing Moon begins with a tense atonal riff and what sounds like a flub on the guitar but through repetition proves a feature. A tidal drift under the band, aided with a spooky reverbed figure high on the piano keyboard introduces the verse with McCulloch delivering a heartfelt vocal romantic in both senses. This lovelorn scenario happens in the rich blues of a storybook illustration. A brief instrumental led my Will Sergeant's electric 12 string on the lower strings adds drama before the final verse and the first of many farewell choruses in which McCulloch approaches the aching lines about fate variously in higher registers, near spoken word and finally in the full tenor mode that made him his generation's greatest male rock vocalist. The chorus repeats as the voice sinks into the distance and the fade overwhelms it. A point of interest here is how the verses and choruses of this arrangement are played almost identically, with the whammy bar waves and string section rises etc. One thing this band could boast from the first album on was that they never played the parts of the songs the same way. There was always a completely different way to end a chorus or get into a new verse and the middle eights were always offered with great dynamics (all of that can be heard in The Cutter but it's generally how they did it). It feels that the melodic material and emotional commitment to the song kept the riches of the arrangement (the strings are utterly gorgeous) were best left as was. Then again, seldom has a reflection about death felt so much like a love song, so maybe the straight and narrow course had to prevail.

Seven Seas begins with approaching acoustics and electric 12 string before kicking into the verse with crashing piano chords and a propulsive and lithe bass figure. After some lines about tears and happy cavemen the chorus belts into its rising refrain with a glorious intro on tubular bells that lifts an already appealing song into the celestium. The theme of the words is about change, heading from constrains to the open waters of choice and challenge. After a Byrdsy 12 string solo the passionate vocal-ed middle eight sings of burning bridges and smashing mirrors. And then we don't mind that the rest is almost all choruses because they are so infectious.

A three chord organ riff and cinematic piano flourish starts My Kingdom. The words are of conflict, of arguments intense and intimate told with figures of warfare. The electric 12 string in this one is used to clever effect as an intensifier approaching a chorus. The track is the only one on the record to have a distorted guitar solo but, while it gets close to stadium rock manages to stay nice. The stuttering chorus might remind us of the C-c-c-c-cucumber of Thorn of Crowns but here the melodic payoff makes the lines richer and it feels rhythmic rather than dramatic (as it was in My Generation). The trail out solo has some nasty phrases passing between parties as another refrain (ten a penny) comes up like an old drinking song.

The album closes with the title track. This time, unlike Porcupine's massive dirge, Ocean Rain is a gentle arrangement. A pendulous bass swings with the light percussion to suggest the motion of waves. McCulloch comes in weary and observes that he's all at sea again. The verse at first seems simply to be repeated a few times for the entire song but through some subtle substitution whereby you becomes I and your becomes my etc., a world is built around the sadness of the situation. The strings play their most affecting parts on any of the songs on the album, a light statement of a minor third falling to the tonic for the chorus. Before we can really take in the momentum that has been building we are in full crashing tide by the end and McCulloch in full voice: "Screaming from beneath the waves".  The lull and easy beauty of the opening has given way to the widest ranging dynamic movement on the album. It might have felt lulling and consoling but by the end it's a scream of pain but also of acceptance. And then the gentler restatement of the chorus leaves us with its difficult message as the song comes to a clean end. 

"All hands on Deck at Dawn,

Sailing to sadder shores

Your port in my heavy storm

Harbours the blackest thoughts."

Echo and the Bunnymen continued for a few years longer before breaking up. There have been subsequent reunions and tours but their legacy is firmly placed in four albums that describe an arc of discovery and commitment to power of invention executed with energy of youth and a clarity beyond their years. They are also one of those bands made of solid contributors and collaborators who understood that while you could repeat the lessons of the past it could provide lessons for the future with some restraint and mindfulness that different times called for different measures. The brilliant string arrangements on this record (and the previous one) are far from the big lush washes of the likes of ABC and are better sculpted into the sound and force of a rock band ready for change but loyal to their post punk culture. They contributed to the style and texture of that culture and this record was the apotheosis of that contribution.

Listening notes: I chose the recent  hi-res download of Ocean Rain which appeared a few years back on a few of the online hi-res retailers. Beautiful sound.