After Cascade, Green Fingers gives us a weird sounding recorder with a figure somewhere between Green Man folk and Arabic modes. A Raga-rock guitar figure starts and Siouxsie enters with a a bright vocal about a woman who can make anything grow. The story of it was inspired by an episode of the Rod Serling run Night Gallery about a woman who avenges herself against a greedy land developer using magic. Like Cascade and most of this record the feel is psychedelia but this is not prancing around the lilies summer of love psych-rock but something more born of the horrors of the late cold war which was still feeling like seconds to midnight: less Woodstock than Xtro.
Obsession uses the delay with only the slightest original attack on a relentless guitar figure, slicing out a two chord toll as Siouxsie's building series of impressions and almost diaristic lists of the actions of someone increasingly surrendering to their idolisation and impulses. There's a break in the middle where the arrangement blooms into an aching string section figure. But this just winds back down to the pressing whispers, grinding and tolling bells of the stalking horror scenario.
For contrast She's a Carnival bursts right in with a descending guitar chord figure that brings back earlier incarnations of the band with a punkier sound. The vocals come in about what might be a carnival curio or a dazzling scenester with Syd Barrett style melodies and harmonies. The song creates a whirlwind of tone, clashing the tuneful sweetness with the razor wire of the band and then finishes with an accelerating circus organ.
Circle appropriately starts off with a hard looping synth figure. Siouxsie comes in with tales of circular behaviour like child abuse, teenage pregnancy as the drums slap in with a punishing waltz time rhythm. Everything keeps going round like a wormy cat chasing its tale. Cycle of life, yes, but it's happening in the gutters and the clubs and the subways and the darkness.
Side two starts with Melt, an expansive 6/8 swing with cymbals and mandolins. Another sex song but this ethereal call and response number leaves out the eels in the chest for cuffs and pain and no one's talking about safe words. The falsetto repetitions of Siouxsie's mezzo lead add to the breathiness of a situation that suggests penthouse apartments and soft lights and secret rooms with hooks in the walls. Even the arrangement with its booming splendour feels like it cost Andorra's national debt. Decadence costs more than money, here, though, and seldom more beautifully.
Painted Bird takes its cue from Jerzy Kosinski's grim novel of World War II Poland of the same title but spreading out the imagery to include any attack on beauty from motives of impotent anger. The lines about losing our sorrow. This gets a little lost in the rock-non-rock arrangement. Perhaps the idea was to get people to read it (assuming they could get through it). It's the closest this album gets to filler but it does fill in the best way.
Cocoon takes into Siouxsie's head from deep in an acid trip and we go in to the sexy bomp of a fretless bass riff. Warm sheets melt and writhing worms as a tide of tinkling, whispering and wobbling rises and falls around her. At one point the forces gather for the lucid declaration: "Waiting to loose the bandages. Waiting for new appendages." Cronenberg much? More than anything the band did Cocoon sounds more like the Siouxsie/Budgie side hustle The Creatures with its un-rock swing and absence of guitar chords and great waves of atmosphere.
Slowdive closes things with a squeaky start on the strings that cries down into a big bamming 4/4 slam. Siouxsie continues the jazziness of her vocals on most of the album. Her own backing vocals join her for the chant of the title but most of this is a delirious confusion of dancing and sex with a rhythm section and screeching strings sounding like an old bed in carnal motion as well as the building tension of attraction and fulfilment. It fades because no one wants it to stop.
With cover art straight out of the kind of Klimt picture posted on numberless student walls at the time, and a determined push the confounding of the physical world with shifting abstraction, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse remains one of the band's most powerful statements and caps off all the development from The Scream in the punk days to there in the precarious early '80s when the tension from waiting for the air raid sirens found its way onto the dancefloor and into the bedroom. The Dreamhouse of the title referred to a Hollywood brothel where clients could pay for time with lookalikes. A kiss there would be deliciously forbidden but also resonate with exploitation and the worst of human motives.
Psychedelia was lifting out of the history books in the early '80s. This was a generation who turned on its mainstream with a fistful of punk. Before that they were the ones who bypassed the Buck's Fizzes and Eagles by raiding the op shops for Syd Barrett, Jeff Beck era Yardbirds, Magical Mystery Tour Beatles, Satanic Majesty Stones. They bought or taped the Nuggets and Pebbles compilations which lightened the task of finding the Green Fuzz single at flea markets. They reached further back and rediscovered the power of baroque concertos and further back still with the modality of renaissance madrigals and medieval monks. Reissues of early Pink Floyd and Syd's solo albums as well as the Doors' back catalogue flooded the senses with everything that the twelve-bar boogie white boy blues had pasted over. By the time post punk took on enough form to call it that, there was a music underground that was pushing upwards.
Some of these songs began life in the Ju Ju sessions but between that album and this came the single Fireworks with its real cello section playing the riff in a song that is sometimes violent and sometimes more basely sexual. By the time this album was in the works the near industrial live sound of Ju Ju was upgraded to using the London Symphony Orchestra as session players. And if that weren't sufficiently of the time that rejected the thrusting rock that filled stadiums there is a major wind back on conventional rock arrangement (not an abandonment but the statement is clear) and Siouxsie's vocals are often as far back in the mix as the stranger of major player songs from the late '60s like Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby Standing in the Shadow or Over Under Sideways Down. The chosen tonalities stray well from the normal diatonic and embrace the modes of the dark ages or just progressions thrown together as a kind of anti-craft.
It's because of this, the mix of innovation and call backs from centuries before that this solidly psychedelic record does not just sound like a rehash of Piper at the Gates of Dawn or Strange Days. It's confusion of sex and horror, beauty and cruelty, now and then that makes this album great. I know I harp on this but here we have a textbook example of why sounding determinedly of your time is the best thing to do. Think on't: take those Rococo trills out of Mozart; you'd still have genius but you'd miss the trills.
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