Kaleidoscope - Siouxsie and the Banshees: You're meant nominate the first album, The Scream, if any Banshees title makes the list. It's mix of punk snottiness and musical sophistication packed the punch of the attendant blend of the London of John Webster and the 1976 garbage strike. But to my ear, this third effort found the band free of the uniform but still pressing forward into what would soon be known as goth but for the moment went happily unclassified. Leslied guitars piping a minor key birdsong, distant whistling and the slightly offpitch humming and oddly busy drumming that built Happy House didn't seem to come from anywhere but scary movies. Siouxsie's lonely owl hoot and curlew whistle take us into the fade and a night that will feel eternal. That's just the first four minutes. Tenant broods, hi hats and dark bassy synth. Hybrid begins with an air of resignation, leading somewhere difficult, wounded saxophone trading off note wails with Siouxsie. I have never stopped to find out what this is about but it always fills me with the same sadness as anything crushing and inevitable. Christine with a humming bass and crisp acoustic guitar and another saddening vocal from Sioux from another dark room in a movie. Desert Kisses floats on heavy waves of synth and processed guitar, Siouxsie sighing through another tale of wrong. Red Light freezes its pornography rooms with a steady dark stepping, the rhythm aided by the click and wheeze of a camera motor wind and the vocal rising from a Dietrich croon to an angered wail. Neither before nor since did this unit come up with anything so accomplished, so unsettlingly light and nasty, so arresting and so saddening.
In a Silent Way - Miles Davis: At the other end of the 60s Miles and a new crew play one song per side. Delicious grooves by restless percussion and keyboards and Miles coming in like Gideon distant but gigantic. Sudden edits take us from moments of exhaustion to bright new paths. It's long and at some point it just ends but it always still feels like too little. An inspiration for the great local improv trio The Necks. No surprises there.
The Necks - Drive By: Thinking of the last one made me think of this one. Gently insistent percussion brings a softly rising bass to the surface and a languid piano figure follows. It all changes without you noticing. Spoken word samples mutter into either channel and then fall back beneath the swell. You can either concentrate on it or let it bear you as you drift. Both work.
Quasimodo's Dream - The Reels: Australian post punk was as rich a vein of exploration as the sounds coming from the U.K. There was no uniform nor primer, you did what you were inspired to. This second album from the demons of Dubbo remains not just their best but the apex of the Australian scene. From the bright pop of Colourful Clothes through the breezy instrumental Smokey Dawson Show to the mighty architectural beauty and epic melancholy of the title track, nothing else comes close.
Remain in Light - Talking Heads: I'm still a little afraid of The Overload, the landscape sized stasis and severe drone of the vocals coupled with the disjointed lyric give it the same unnerving feel as looking at one of De Chirico's night landscapes. I have always found funk easy to resist but here it's frozen solid and put to a travelogue of other influences and mental states in the lyrics. From the spooky desperate monologue of Listening Wind to the joyous estrangement of Once in a Lifetime. One to leave on.
Ocean Rain - Echo and the Bunnymen: After their first three platters of operatic doom the Rabbitohs came up with their most varied set yet. The Spector-scaled Killing Moon starts off with a delicious arch chorus and continues through smooth pop thills like Silver or Seven Seas to the epic title track whose melody alone somehow evokes every atmospheric seastory I've ever read. Their last great one is a more durable than the angst of the others which can get cloying and bratty. Here it's great writing, playing and singing.
Second Annual Report - Throbbing Gristle: I knew about musique concrete, John Cage and the whole avant gardist shower but nothing prepared me for the cheek and violence of TG. Synthesisers dub effects and terrifying monologues that actually seem to cause pain. Unpleasant listening but it opened doors.
Magical Mystery Tour - The Beatles: In which the fabs manage to sound both exploratory and firmly mainstream. Over a busy bed of twirling tape manipulations, radio broadcasts and whatever else they came across the Beatles deliver a set of perfectly contemporary pop songs about going on trips, Lewis Carol's walrus, being lost, flying and the village schizophrenic. The production is thick and orchestral and always on the verge of trippy. Usually unsung tracks Flying (great instrumental of big guitars through amp tremolo, organ and mellotron) and George's three in the morning slow-down ode to perdition Blue Jay Way. The original side two was all singles and b-sides but what singles and b-sides. Huge, brash Hello Goodbye, the flavoursome drugdrag of Strawberry Fields, the dazzling city morning of Penny Lane, the cool and funny Baby You're a Rich Man and the big summer anthem of All You Need is Love. Nothing says 1967 in swinging London so much as this except maybe The Stones' Satanic Majesties.
Blue Wonder Power Milk - Hooverphonic: I bought the debut of this Belgian duo plus changable singer in 97 because I wanted more Portishead until the next Portishead. I got one song which was a clear tribute and a host of others which went off in a completely different direction. This second album ought to suffer from the transition from one vocalist to the next but that ends up as one of its strengths. Some tracks have Lisje on lead tonsils, others have the incoming Geike and the rest are voiced by the lads themselves in a kind of whispering Fleming learning Anglais. This serves to present the set as a unified front of high pop sensibility and melancholy cinema. Battersea's lush strings and helium vocal singing images of a breakup administered by a dark manipulator who terrifies the narrator. One Way Ride glitters with synthesisers from old stereo demonstration records, a cor anglais from a 50s muzak LP and a whispered vocal. Someone is puzzled. Dictionary starts with the bell like keys of a two chord figure from a suspense film. Vocals are whispered but fresh rather than sinister. Club Montepulciano breezes cool and drunken with cocktail names and characters so relaxing they fall asleep. And more. The mood shifts. The vocals change. The lyrics are range from naive to plaintive and you start to feel like you're watching the best French language movie ever made as Jeunet, Godard, Besson and Chabrol take turns at seducing you from the screen. Out Of Tune has a breathy wonder that I remember afresh every time I hear it and Eden's French horn figure melts my ears long enough for Geike to enter with her big sexy breathy sadness. I can never get sick of this album.
In The Aeroplane Over the Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel: I shouldn't like this album. It's made by a band around a magnetic central figure who are the type who change instruments every song when they play live just so you get to hear how crappy they can sound when they want to. But there is a strange confluence of eccentricity, melodism and eclectictricity in the approach to these songs which, when you listen to the words can make you cry or shiver. Jeff Mangum's writing, while his melodies return too often to the same figures, is like the best of David Lynch's imagery, short of total whimsy but long dropped overcontrol. From the opening track that sounds like a warm nostalgic thing until you notice lines about mum driving forks into dad's chest. The quiet and sinister O Comely, swinging between major and minor without formal modulation, the lines crammed with syllables as though turned musical from a rambling confession, Mangum's frequent springs to the height of his treble stave is like Syd Barrett without the affectation. "Your father made foetuses with flesh licking ladies ... smelling of semen all under the garden was all that you were needing ..." And through the album's obligatory Anne Frank reference we get to the coda: "Goldaline my dear we will fold and freeze together far away from here there is sun and spring and green forever but now we move to feel
for ourselves inside some strangers stomach place your body here let your skin begin to blend itself with mine." Holy fuck! But somehow this album continues to comfort me. I have absolutely no idea why.
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