If the debut Crocodiles was a brash, rushing diary of lifestyle it also showed that the band knew its craft and if you get hear nothing else from it you will hear dynamics. A reduced verse here or a piano there, you only knew that the next time that chorus came around it was not going to be identical to the last one. This is intensified for Heaven Up Here and while the extended instrumentation is largely absent the guitar layering and arrangements are consistently stunning. This has gone down in band history as guitarist Will Sargent's album as he is credited with rousing the band into rehearsals and arrangements so that the next album would not be a replay of the first. This saves the album. The songs are good and the production is astute but the sheer vision of the arrangements and discipline in their playing lift this mixed set into a unified experience.
Show of Strength starts like surf rock with swinging drums and twin clean guitars playing a vaguely Arabic scale. The vocals come in over this with a familiar style of a single short melodic phrase with slight variations before the chorus rips the carpet out from under its feet with a key change and extra force. The recovery bars following are thickened with an ebow on the lower strings before the next verse which adds a jangling clean guitar in one channel and scratchy rhtyhm in the other. After the next chorus the guitars all but disappear until come in again with two versions of the scratchy rhythm. Full band for the next chorus and then a big mix of ebow and heavily distorted menacing guitar phrases. Only then do we notice McCulloch's vocal melody has changed and the ebow is howling like a banshee in the distance. And then the band fades while the vocals persist, front and centre: "Hey, I came in right on cue. One is me and one is you." Intimidating confidence has led to a precarious state in which the social gambler doesn't dare let the front down for fear of collapse. And then as the band vanishes there is only the voice in the head, repeating the phrase. It's only a movie. It's only me.
Restless warped voices, rustling and a thick electric buzz and then we're suddenly into the verse with an urgent rhythm and near whispered vocal. A skeletal guitar riff under it changes into a high whining ring as McCulloch goes up an octave. Finally, the chorus breaks out in full voice: "This is the one for the money, this is the one for the trees, this is the one called Heaven and this is the one for me." Chancing against the norms and the taboos but in this case it's not always for coolness' sake; there is a distinct sense of animal gratification here and it's at odds with the rational ovbservation. "They've got it and I had some. I couldn't handle it ... but I had some." Do it to say you've done it. This might burn off with the passing of youth but this expression of that urgent trophyism is quietly unsettling. The blend in the title of jolly old team spirit and the pursuit of cool just adds to that.
Over the Wall starts with a busy ground of percussion and guitar before a guitar/synth riff enters, gigantic and distant. A few muttered lines over apparently random snare hits before the explosion into the chorus which trails into a machine gun like chopping high on the fretboard. The next chorus ends in a thicked version of the opening groove with a heavier pattern on the tom toms, a quote from Walking in the Rain while indistinct voice speak from a burial under the mix. The toms transfer to the snare, more gunnning guitar before it settles into a lone guitar riffing. When the band comes back in it is with force that begins to dissipate almost immediately with more quotes from teen anthems growing more roomy and delayed. "Hold me tight .... to the logical limit." Collapse into a drum machine version of the opening rhythm and synthesised winds. The unspoken solutions to problems are obscured by local one of addiction or affliction and finally because they are inaudible. Walking in the rain to get rid of but then celebrate his misery. The later near quote of a pop song is less self-aware. Around those please and above the muttering below the mix are guitar motifs that are almost pop song quotes but nothing quite connects. The clarity begins and returns with the epic riff of the chorus and the rallying cry of the title that is accompanied by the caveat: "watch us fall". The logical limit?
It Was a Pleasure comes up as a strangled funk workout as McCulloch, so compressed and processed it sounds like someone else, details a list of behavioural traits and characteristics of two players in a relationship that keep them from enjoying their time. It's static and repetitious just like the problem and ends with the Kafkaesque: "Failure to do so will result in the failure." Frustration in a groove number. Dancing really is like standing still only faster.
A Promise starts with a two chord grind that the band had made their own from the off. McCulloch comes in in high register. Promises made and dispensed leading to a big chant of the title wet with reverb as a light ringing guitar figure. There's light on the waves as they sail off with bright singing of self-delusion.
The old side two begins with the title track. More funky chopped guitar and whammy bar riffs. Drinking and partying and more drinking. BIg yelling choruses and troubled verses, breaks into shining clean guitar riffs. Imprecations to the forces of alcohol and burning intoxication. Dr Faustus is assured that he is better in hell than in this swirling, sickening "heaven". Bass workouts and more funky dances before the last word, "sip" leaves us standing tiptoed on the edge of a cliff with only the reverb trail to cushion the fall.
Another two chord grind. McCulloch comes in like Bowie singing Brel, husky and desperate. A deep synth flute is the first of the non rock instruments on the album. "My life's the disease." A sudden change to a kind of robot staccato and the vocals are alienated with backwards echo and chorusing, from beyond the hole in the earth: "If you get yours from heaven don't waste it." Fade.
A heavy and relentless Steve Morris style tom tom pattern joined only by pan pipes. McCulloch sings in a weary mid voice that he is flying and won't come down again. All his colours turn to clouds. The guitar comes in after this, acoustic, strummed chords as the pipes soar above it, descending through a mournful minor mode. An echoey chant of zimnbo sound like a ritual. Verse two sings of cards played with difficulty and then a box that burns nicely. The sparseness is enriched by a lonely ebow line as McCulloch wails into his own fade about the nicely burning box as the zimbo chant rises until everything fades to silence. McCulloch, a difficult interview at the best of times, took pains to explain that this song refered to holding on to things, people or ideas, etc. beyond their passing. For me, it is so heavily melancholy that, whether it's correct or not, I think of the then recently disceased Ian Curtis. The setting has such a Joy Division like beauty and finality to it. If it was good enough for the Cure to write Primary, and U2 to do A Day Without Me, among a mass of undeclared tributes, I can indulge myself with this one, too.
No Dark Things starts with Chordy grind with clean guitar chords and a slightly Arabic low string guitar riff. McCulloch sings mid voice. Images of ritual cleansing left open and vague. A choppy kind of anti funk guitar break. Then McCulloch in operatic wail, perhaps in the voice of the cleanser, with the darkly funny line: "You must learn to distinguish error from my bait." Another guitar chord break but it turns into s chord grind, again clean and shiny tone. More novice from the adept about a member of their own or just someone trying it out who is no longer buying it. "We have no dark things .. just some heads and a wish. Something to scream about." The phrase no dark things in increased echo repeats into the busy and bright working band like a chant less believed than trusted.
Turquoise Days begins with a subdued grind and fragmented lines of strange reassurance. We've got a problem but come on over. This is a bookend verse which repeats after a long litany of clarification. "It's not for love. it's not for war. Just hands clasped together." But that takes a strange turn when god and guns are inserted and "it's not" becomes "if not for" and what began as certainty changes into force based on a vague conviction. It's like the mutations of a virus as it attacks its host gradually adding pain and debilitation until all that is clearly felt is response as anger or violence. Then the bookend returns with its odd mix of decadent abandon and willing self-deception. Along the way we get a decent Bunnymen verse with central section's burgeoning force, enlivening and operatic vocals. The full band plus more guitars in glorious takeoff.
All I Want fades in with a gallop of twin skeletal guitar rhythms, marimba and bass and drums in lockstep. As the pattern proceeds we get to know that this creates a kindo f pulse by which the song grows from a thin core and blows out into a bulge for the entire time, no solos or sections beyond changes from verse to chorus and an overall broadening. Whatever life the narrator has led it has come to something out of a Samuel Beckett monologue with sparse statements that seem to stack into little towers of a series of days grown frail and affectless. The chorus "All I love is all I love. All I want is all I want" roars but we soon return to a skittish catalogue of simply described moments. In the end: "Got the hands to hold the key." The track skitters off into the dark.
Not with a bang but with a whimper, as The Hollow Men says at the end about the end. The more I hear this whole album the more it makes me think that it's a more concentrated and serious look at the youth abandon of Crocodiles. The same writers have noticed more around the events and figures, things in the shadows, harmonics of worry in the inspirational accounts. While the terror of The Cure's Faith, the horror of The Banshee's JuJu are replaced by a brighter musical pallet the concerns are kindred. If you didn't pick up the words of this record there is a chance that you might take it for pop on the serious side rather than a gloom fest but a little close listening reveals that the setting might be shiny but the gems are rough and speckled.
It's also worth noting that listening now in 2021 that Heaven Up Here at 40 years old strikes first as a rock album without a sliver of masculine posturing; there is nothing of the stadium about this frequently mighty and charging music. A lot of the guitar tones are clean and McCulloch's giant voice, while it can rasp, never breaks into the Paul Rogers/strutting scream. There's plenty of sex in the lines and sounds but none of it is boastful or laddish. 1981 was a year when the notion of anti-rock was continuing its spread across independent music, whether it was called new wave or post punk, and its practitioners were either abandoning it for a cock-free pop (not a slur, btw) outright noise or, like here, finding means of using the old vocabulary for new poetry. Add the gloom of the nuclear threat, the darkness of Thatcher and Reagan politics, and you have a kind of self-examination that feels necessary rather than narcissistic: if we are the omega generation then who are we?
To listen to Heaven Up Here forty years later it first of all does sound like rock and rock that could fill a stadium and it might strike the new listener at how the subjects of the songs are not more hedonistic but questioning of that as a musical value. In my work from home routine for the past year and a half I have found how useful genres like vaporwave or darkwave are for providing a audio background that is neither too anodyne for enjoyment nor obnoxiously brash. YOutube videos of enless dark drones are given static artworks of memento mori images and in many cases the more obviously fabricated the better as they only need to remind rather than suggest. This music works very well but it is the very kind of thing I would have scoffed at if it was suggested in 1981 that it was the future of darkly motivated rock music. But here in the list so far and with more to come I am revisiting music that is both its own kind of rock music and a curative antedote to the cock rock of the decade it had just escaped. And after decades of ironic (and some not so ironic) returns to the worst impulses this can again sound fresh and simply given.
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