"The one who insists he was first in the line is the last to remember her name."
Before you have the time to wonder if they've blown it all on the first song, Pretty in Pink bams in with a mix of powerchords and clean jangle. Caroline goes about her life used and abused by a string of boys who joke about her after using her. This social hell is ameliorated by her fantasy life which keeps her thinking she's actually popular and universally loved. The fast rolling verses tell of this queasy disconnect as she moves from one encounter to the next, gathering a kind of sniggering ridicule from the boys. Then choruses open this up with great power as a two-note figure insists itself against the thunder of the bass and drums.
This harrangue of socio-sexual life is one of the songs of the year. Sung through a grimace at the centre of the storm of rock music that is both conventional (chord progression) and convention baiting (arrangement and production). I had the single with the picture sleeve featuring stills of the band in what looks like a gothic film set, a man at a darkened window, a fireplace, chequered floor tiles and so on. That seemed perfect. Not that the song was gothic, it was firmly set in a current first world urban environment, but that it was cinematic. The stills look like they're from a video from the time but I don't remember one and can't find one now that isnt related to the John Hughes movie which was five years after and point missing, according to Richard Butler. Nevertheless, the song and its presentation struck me as heavily cinematic. The song was a renewed kitchen sink film in miniature, a kind of Up the Junction for the Britain of Thatcher, a social lassez faire wherein the wolves always win. The abrupt gear change at the end features a spoken coda. It's more fragments and begins, "Caroline lies on the table screaming..." Seldom has a rock song embraced both pop sweetness and snarling indictments in the same spot.
I Just Wanna Sleep With You is more of the same sneering delivery of images as in the previous two numbers but here there is a deliberate paring of melody to one iteration of the title in the chorus, the rest is declaimed in a kind of mock wonder or worldly snarl. But to keep the value up it's as different from the last one as the last one was from the opener. The whole band work through the verses and choruses with some bright descending guitar figures but the song is in 2/4 which prevents any monotony from continuous mid paced common time. Also, when rock bands use 2/4 it's usually with a big emphasis on the second of the bar but this is just played as though it's a normal rock song and the effect is of a griming down of what is often a jazzy or bright time signature. After a brief sax outro the song fades rapidly as if to tell us it has done what it came to do, as businesslike as the world of its lyric.
The whole band starts on a smooth rolling wave of sound and Butler comes in with a weary tone. The chorus tightens up with a strident four on the floor and relaxes again for the verses wavelike wash. A cocktail smooth sax solo doesn't feel out of place as it riffs on the verse melody and then over a suddenly thin chorus progressoin before the whole band returns to the swirling motion. The final chorus is bolstered by a hevily processed bass before a hard finish. "There's demonstrations and demonstrations ..." It's a kind of protest fatigue being described at a time when the phenomenon if not the term was taxing anyone affected by Thatcherism's steady demolition of ordinary life. Are we witnessing the birth, or at least the gestation of the yuppy? "Talk about yourself again. Talk about the rain again. No tears, no colours..."
Mr Jones flies into its distorted guitar assault which sounds like the kind of two chord machine that Joy Division was getting into between the first and second albums. Butler's entrance makes it Psychedlic Furs. A Dylanesque harrangue> Mr Jones, the kind of middle class everyman whose bowler hatted blandness in public is matched by a starched perversion behind the door of his home and castle. It's none too nice in there but it is the way of the future. Just a heads up. The bitchiness of the riff shrieking out with high fret guitar and screaming sax above the factory perfect rhythm track tells everyone who hears it to try and make sure Mr Jones never votes again.
The old side two begins for the first time on the album with a song similar to the previous one. A big tom tom thumping bash of a band rhythm. It's a kind of nastier Pretty in Pink with its two note chorus riff and plain one line chorus: "Into you like a train". If anything it's the reverse shot of that earlier song with Caroline's lovers rasping disclaiming any deep involvement to the point where he outright states: "if you believe that anyone like me within a song would try and change it all then you have been put on".
It Goes On starts loud with a crunching wah wah chord riff over the storming band. A distant high guitar line sounds more epic and somehow there's no contradiction. There's a surpising middle bit made of bass and drums for bars and bars bvefore the wah wah guitar joins and the sax skrunks until everything soars for the chorus before one last verse and chorus and end. The lyric tells of a numbing swirl of hedonism spinning to the point where pain and joy are indistiguishable and routine and the wheel of it rolls on continually, forceful yet greatly less impassioned than the song that describes it.
So Run Down begins with a swinging 6/8 on the tom toms which at first sounds like an irregular signature. The band's entrance makes sense of it. Butler's vocal yells out more of the same frenzied young life of a lot of the songs on this set but there's a persistent and troubling spectre of the media recording it and plyain git back as marketing. It's over vbefore it begins but that's the point. One last roll on the toms and out.
All of this and Nothing begins with cool water acoustic guitars playing an arpeggio with a sax wailing in the distant reverb. and a chiunky bass offering ground. This fades. A rude chorused guitar riff starts the vocal section as Butler lists a series of images from a life. Pictures, notes, memories. Someone's gone. For good or just somewhere else? No telling that but the chorus' line that "you didn't leave me anything that I can understand" is a tidy and troubling way of putting how profoundly disturbing sudden departures can be. The acoustic opening returns and plays on until joined by that picked bass and then the main electric riff on guitar with punctuating sax gives it context. But then the full band version of that gentle, pensive opening just gets thicker and more complicated until there's nothing left but to fade it.
The closing song, She is Mine, comes it with an easy beat and a bright riff. Butler's vocal is soft and rueful as he reflects on a relationship that might only have been an encounter. He's apologetic to the point where he's ashamed but, seeing the same kind of peopl he is around him just keep playing it the same way there's not that much to regret beyond what might, by regretting itself, lift him from it. The chorus has a countermelody with lines that answer the lead vocal and it is there where the title is heard, partly ironic, partly longing. A hard stop with a lingering ring of a clean guitar chord. End.
This is the sound of a band that understands that its rapid fame might be fleeting. Everything is tighter and the production sound is a very respectable straddling of radiophonic and post punk force. More than that they (perhaps they and their producer) have learned the power of making each song its own world. Same players. Very similar subject matter each time. However, nothing that follows the one before sounds like it. The debut gave us a mass of potential but too little sense of event, too many of the songs shared too much and it began to sound like an over earnest recording of their live set. Talk Talk Talk sees them leaner but richer, giving just the right amojunt of distinction to each statement to let us know they want us to listen. But that's just the attitude. The music itself is honed and so strongly arranged that it feels like the vagueness of the first one was shyness and this is what they really were like. The Pyschedelic Furs would stick out the decade with a string of decent hits, enough for a filler-free compilation but this is where they made an album of the kind that all that boomer audience and industry never gave the milieu credit for, they made a monument that sounded like its times but still sings true.
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