Instead of the acoustic guitar chord that started Kaleidoscope and let us know that album was not going to be like anything we'd heard from the band, we begin with a heavily chorused multitracked Les Paul rolling out a circular fanfare from a planet without a sun. The bass below it broods with the root notes. And then Siouxsie comes in wailing:
From the cradle bars comes a beckoning voice.
It sends you spinning. You have no choice.
Before we've taken that in the song suddenly gallops. A double tracked acoustic played like its slicing through the light. A brief respite as the electrics drone around the chord and the verse resumes and repeats. Laughter cracking through the walls. Nightmares and shadows. With the second "you have no choice" wailed an octave higher and much louder the two elements collide and the chorus gallops as the chant about a rag doll dance explodes and trails into the title word caterwauling out over the dizzying band. "And don't forget if your elders forget to say their prayers." Her voice raises to a weird anger: "take them by the legs and throw them down the stairs!" like the leader of a child cult.
And something happens that shouldn't work as it's so obvious but it's delivered with such violence that we're carried along. Budgie, who has already been showing us why he's in the band ramps everything up and pummels the toms down and up the guitar fanfare. They're not only falling down the stairs but breaking every bone in their bodies. Then the toys are going beserk and the laught cracks through the walls again. and the chorus rushes and the title wails. Finally the chant is corrupted so that the words rag doll and dance are elongated to twice their size and a chorus of the bewitched responds, "we are entranced" as though they really are as the frenzy of the dark speeds on to a final, "dance dance dance" before the staircase tom toms bang everything to a sudden cut to a black screen. A four minute, thirteen second horror movie and that's only track one.
Into the Light begins with a strange rhythm on the tom toms which is joined by chorused bass and spiky guitar. Sioux's vocal goes from close to very distant and wailing. The sequence of verse and chorus repeats before ending on a swirling chant of the title. Is it a take on near death experiences, perhaps just the states that intoxication can deliver. On one hand its restless rhythm doesn't allow ease but it does get hooky.
Arabian Knights starts with a chugging bass beneath underwater guitar chords and a throbbing drum pattern which builds with each verse. The early verses are almost obscure, the vocals low and processed before the big spooky refrain: "I heard a rumour. What have you done to her?" The falling chorus describes the disappointment of a grown up discovering the reality of a childhood ideal.. A mid section lashes with goading calls adn those giant tom toms. And then everything gets ramped up to eleven for the final verse where the vocals about babymachines and veils and orifices are pushed to centre stage where they can't be ignored and the chugging of the opening bass figure is now a cavalry charge. But the anger must break as the futility of eradicating it sets in and we are left with the call about the rumours which echo on themselves and collapse in an aural confusion.
Halloween races with searing guitar sounds and a forward compulsion. Images of trick or treating and the after dark festivities are not those of costume shops but of the then recently begun slasher series of the same title. But then there's something else going on here. As the song speeds along it creates the sense that the narrator is breaking from their familiar reality and confronting an ugly alienation. What was fun in childhood now seems hollow and meaningless, a ritual long drained of its purpose. There is such a drive to the song and such a strange effect from the nagging guitar riffs that it feels more dramatic than it should be.
Monitor starts with yet another strange rhythm, this time with an eastern influence as the guitars, so distorted they sound like percussion instruments begin a nagging crunch that rises by a semitone at the fourth measure only to return to the tonic for the next. This is it throughout with only changes in the vocal range and bass parts to suggest harmonic development. And that's only for form's sake as the point of the song is something become so repetitive that it spreads out into mundanity. The origin of the lyric that seems to describe a murder or a snuff movie is that a block of flats set up CCTV monitors so that residents could check on what was going on outside and the residents became viewers of this to the cost of their previous television habits, with crimes both petty and grave were followed in real time. Siouxsie wails:
Then the victim stared up
Looked strangely at the screen
As if her pain was our fault
But that's .... entertainment
The old side two begins with a sluggish chorus guitar wash back in 4/4 land minor to dominant, thumping back and forth between them as the pulse thickens and spreads out like tar jelly. A creepy vocal tells of a nightly visitor, perhaps demonic who is narrating a series of violent assaults with the inclusive cry: Fuck the mothers, kill the others. Fuck the others, kill the mothers. Peter Sutcliffe had been arrested only months before the album but his infamy had preceeded this by years in his tabloid persona as the Yorkshire Ripper. The claustrophobic arrangement allows only for a constant abstract narration. Even the outbursts of multitracked overdriven guitars and wailing voices cannot break the membrane and consequently feel like explosions of impotent rage. The night shift sisters are not nurses but sex workers, each a potential victim. Before you know that this song can seem like the aural equivalent of a Count Floyd sketch (apart from the chorus) but once you do the notion will stay with you and the song will sound like a terrifying walk through a lightless brain.
Sin in My Heart is a constant gallop and shouted lyric consisting mostly of the tiel. This seems to be about BDSM and is told from the female perspective, a scream of contempt and fulfilment. Head Cut is a series of images of something that might be a mask or the head of a murder victim told by the murderer surrounded by slamming percussion and slashing guitars. Both of these songs have the feel of songs that were taken as good diea starters, packed into arrangements and left that way without the development that might have turned them into stronger songs.
A creepy echoing feedback rises over a brooding bass pulse. Siouxsie comes in with a whisper about a succubus infesting a victim and draining his energy and life. While the surface is about a demon it is no stretch to imagine this as a narcissistic partner, substance abusing parent, or any of the interpersonal horrors the world throws upon us. The whole band is working this theme and keeps a high tension almost unberable with the steady pulse. Siouxsie gets a little more powerful with every verse until the solid steel wails that are great cries of something between agony and triumph. And then moment by moment things start to break away. The stuttered feedback guitar wanders and the drums get fractured and jungle like and the great bass begins to pound as the narrator can only yell or whisper to listen. Finally at a crashing violent climax the battle is over and the voice returns to a mocking calm: she's your little voodoo dolly. Dark. Cut to end titles. The movie is over and like a lot of '80s horror tales, the sequel is set up with the quiet resurgence of the monster.
Kaleidoscope had been a successful experiment. There was an openness to the arrangement approach to go along with a shift from the song structures of the first two records. Acoustic guitars, reed instruments and a decidedly non-synthpop use of electronics. Like most of their post punk peers they had turned down the volume and turned up the atmosphere. Ju Ju is effectively a failure to develop from that point. Its attack is to return to the big dark sounds from before and work on that, like the last one didn't matter or never happened.
Part of the problem here (I hasten to add that this is my problem) is that these songs were almost entirely aired as part of live sets on tour. Voodoo Dolly benefits greatly from sounding live in the studio but that's not my point. What I mean is that, as with all rock musicians, if soemone discovers a guitar pedal they will use it for the next month or so unceasingly, playing everything through it as though it were THE tonal breakthrough. When they put the pedal away after that flurry it might end up at the bottom of the case. Same goes for playing techniques and anything that can be filed under fads. Ju Ju sounds like it was done with all the fads in place and ready to filter every song. It sounds like it was rehearsed and recorded rather than composed and arranged and crafted. One or two songs with unconventional rhythmic treatment is remarkable for a rock album but when so many are repeated rather than built upon it feels like the flavour of the month.
If you ask almost any indy musician these days about what they want in a good album a lot of them will find a way of saying uniformity. There is an affectation (running for over a decade) that an album should sound like it was recorded in one time with one musical vision. The problem is that most of these just end up fatiguing the ear with the same structures, playing and even song length. While the wildness of Voodoo Dolly differs strongly from the formality of Spellbound they both present their ideas with great force but when you get to the underdeveloped ones like Head Cut or Halloween they sound like filler, only thinly veiled by their similarity to the tracks surrounding them. The shame of it is that Ju Ju has so much in the way of good ideas but so little attention was given to forming how they might be best applied to create a big dark masterpiece. Of the four so far in the career of the band this is the album where I'll skip tracks. It's the only one that feels padded.
I wonder what a new, young listener thinks of the theatrics of Voodoo Dolly or Night Shift. Would they wonder how something so strongly stated it sounds like theatre restaurant was ever taken seriously. Well, recall that we'd just been through a decade that painted denialist smiles on everything while the movies were tearing them off and everyone just old enough to make records were catching up with the latter. So the Banshees, The Cure and soon Bauhaus were yodelling on about vampires, funerals and crying and it felt like a way of coping with a nuclear annhilation threat that was warming up all over again and seemed minutes away every day. These proto goths weren't into escapism but abstraction. The Voodoo Dolly could easily be about alcoholism or abusive relationships. Writing about a real life monster was a way of dealing with his nightmarish crimes. Siouxsie's Neffertiti eyes and spiky black hive weren't showbiz persona but what she wore on the High Street. I think that's something to miss: is it really more genuine of a '90s hard rocker to scream primally because his jeans werer bought threadbare? He would have worn those on the street, too. Maybe what I'm missing about the era of Ju Ju is the way that personal style declared an allegiance to the freedom of the margins rather than sought approval of a stadium. Did that look like a kid in a Witch's hat playing trick or treat? Yeah, but so what, it felt like you weren't letting the times push you around so much.
Following the footsteps of a rag doll dance we are entranced.
Entranced entranced entranced and dance dance dance.
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