1983 @ 40: FEAST - THE CREATURES

A loud tremulous wail gives way to the whispers of a beach, wind and waves. Wind chimes. A conch shell horn. A vocal that sounds like it hasn't slept in days rises to address someone whose life is draining from them. Has she killed them. Are they at the final stages of a curse? The eerie atmosphere made stranger with the pun of the title Morning Dawning finds its point of optimum effect and establishes a stasis. And then - "the mourning is over. I still can't look into your eyes - the song retreats into the dark of the jungle and disappears.

Inoa'Ole is a chant in round of Hawaiian indigenous voices in warbling tones as glass ringing pierces the sound. When the booming drums enter with Siouxsie's wordless vocal trying more modal figures the chanting subsides but continues. The title line appears infrequently. Like much of this album it's in the atmosphere, a gently called dance on a creepy predawn.

Ice House begins with a vocal over a steady thumped drum. The voice keeps to its original pace as the drumming builds into an even pattern. Images of incest and erotica blur into promises of the preserving powers of ice. The lyric is derived from a John Bowen teleplay which was served up by the BBC in their tradition of horror stories for Christmas. Siouxsie's words are an abstraction rather than a description of the plot and emphasise the unsettling obsessive turn of the plot. The song ends with sounds of munching food.

Dancing on Glass strikes up a brisk 2/4 rhythm. A organ shimmers in the distance. Siouxsie's vocal is the same kind of jazz age swing as the single Right Now. Images of wilful damage and decadence by moonlight as the windows are smashed and their shattered remains danced upon. Again, Budgie's rhythm is unmasked by guitars in this decidedly un-rock outing.

Geko begins with the sounds of the jungle as Siouxsie whispers the opening lines. A marimba clomps the main chord progression in what it the first song on the album to have any kind of riff. Variously screaming, talking or hissing the spoken verses, Siouxsie breaks into the infectious chorus. The atmosphere of humidity and insect bites. The chorus only has to mean its images: Panoramic banana, a passionfruit samba. Pale skin is itching, a tropical fever. This ended the old side one with the closest thing to pop music fun on the whole record.

Side two begins with Sky Train and that begins with very busy drumming which would sound mechanical but is just expertly written and performed to interact with echo. If the idea is to emulate train motion clicking on the tracks its goes beyond the call and delivers an image of an unstoppable Hell Express. Siouxsie wails in multitracked rhapsodies around and through the onslaught.

Festival of Colours begins with more Hawaiian chanting soon descanted by Siouxsie singing in local dialect before switching back to English. The festival is a rite involving the scattering of coloured powder like ochre. While the music, again heavily percussive builds to an enjoyable plateau there are some listeners who might have wondered if it weren't just the musical equivalent of a silde night.

Miss the Girl is a response to J.G. Ballard's novel Crash which described upwardly mobile urbanites who pursue automotive impact as an extension of sexual pleasure. The marimbas strike an ominous figure as Siouxsie's dispassionate vocal sings of violence as a car is pitted against a human body. Not quite as frozen as The Normal's Warm Leatherette (also based on Crash), the track nevertheless explores the effect of witnessing violence though the eyes of one exhausted by it. This might have seemed a strange choice as a single but it is one of the only ones here that has the components of a pop song and is the closest the duo get to sounding like their band of origin, The Banshees. It got to 21 which ain't nothing.

A Strutting Rooster plunges deep into relentless heavy percussion with drums and marimba parts often blending into each other as Siouxsie chants in multitracked harmony. Is it as simple as the sight of a bird or is there the darker suggestion of cockfighting. Ambient effects rise and fall. Marketplace voices as Siouxsie's phrases are played like samples.

Flesh starts with sharp breath which might be sexual or hefty inhalation of lines of drugs. Siouxsie narrates a spoken word description of a high life party as we start to hear the sounds of merriment and socialising. A loud strident chant breaks out like a chorus but isn't placed like one: Piggy squeals and donkey brays at a sober party Doggy barks and horsey neighs try to shock the party. Light marimbas keep time with a barely discernible figure as percussion which sounds random goes in and out of focus. Images of violent cinema in production and editing. The time would be right for the pair to have seen and been affected by Cannibal Holocaust. It reminds me of the Banshees' song Monitor off JuJu with its lines about screen violence and the blurring of audience and onscreen victim. The party sounds swell up and everyone joins in the chant about Piggy squeals until it dissipates as though this was a recording of a drugged up bash gone hellishly wrong.

Siouxsie and Budgie last recorded under the Creatures name two years before with the EP Wild Things. Made as a kind of holiday project the set had turned out good enough to release and when the Banshees next took a break Siouxsie and Budgie set to again. Throwing the dart at a map and travelling to where it hit, Hawaii. They used the freshness of the unfamiliar locale to make field recordings and construct songs around rhythms and chanting provided by The Lamalani Hula Academy Hawaiian Chanters. 

Budgie's drum setup was not a kit but a collection of percussion instruments that were played separately in arrangements that frequently had him composing and playing with far greater sophistication than he was able as the Banshees' drummer. There are no high hats or cymbals or snare drums here. This guitar, bass and keyboard free record is an extension to the path away from conventional rock music that the Banshees had already been treading, at least experimentally, since the Kaleidoscope LP, Budgie's first record with the band as one of its most creative additions.

For her part Siouxsie continues to write like the lyricist of the Banshees but takes things a little further toward chanting and vocal motif, enjoying the luxury afforded by the creative detour this recording offered. As her voice must stand in for what the music abandoned (rock instruments) she is more on attention here than any time since the first Creatures release. So, you still get blank faced descriptions of darkness and violence but here it can as easily sound like a whisper as much as a scream.

The Creatures have proved to be one of the rare out of band experiences that worked and kept working in exploratory mode as the Banshees of the late '80s and '90s moved steadily toward the middle. There is a clear sense on this record that they both felt relief at being able to avoid the pressures of expectations that would meet every Banshees album thereafter. The results might have the unfortunate effect of allowing auld post-punkers like me use of this record as evidence that we, alone among all generations, had the coolest and most sustained resistance to the cock rock overground. But the other side of that is that this energetic and invigorating music is there for the discovery of anyone of any vintage to use as a spur to their own creativity. Creativity is what this album is made of and adventure is how it sounds. The rest is up to the listener.

Listening notes. I still have my vinyl copy of Feast but it was so used and beaten by my younger self that I went back to the CD A Bestiary of The Creatures which compiles the first EP and the songs from the single Right Now. It's a great package with a strong remaster and comes with my earnest recommendation. 

1983 @ 40: FILTH - SWANS

Swans were a problem from the start. 

Filth starts, continues and ends with a one approach: pulverise, repeat. There are basses, electric guitars, drums and vocals but not a crumb of rock music. There are chants where choruses would be but it isn't glam, either. So what does it sound like? Construction works across the road. Hammering, screaming drills and saws, yelling, the motion of powerful things that make other things move or shatter. Two sides of an LP or a seemingly endless grind of industry and tormenting cries for about forty-five minutes.

Who'd want to listen to that? Well, a lot of it has to do with when it was made. It's the early '80s and the music still rising from the ashes of punk is proving more progressive than the likes of ELP ever were. And transgressive. These songs are about domination, abuse, rape, subjugation and more. This music, highly disciplined for all its apparent chaos, is meant to feel like that. The band name was chosen from an observation that swans showed magnificent  outward beauty that concealed a brutal temprament. By extension, lift the veneer of civilisation and you'll find the same thing with humans. 

There are no explanations of any of this on the album art, you just have to find it out for yourself. If you can make it through the first track with its ugly, gurgling basses and thrashing drums almost drowning out the vocal that issues instructions for living as an unfeeling macho with the final twist of "come back for more!" Blackout confuses the meanings of a loss of power with a drugged loss of consciousness. Weakling, which sounds like a sheet metal processing plant, continues: "I don't feel pain. I never escape. I'm under the bed. I'm licking the floor." The surrounding whines and groans bash away until the victim narrator can only bellow, "this isn't real ... not ... real ... not ... real ... not ... real..." As twisted as The Birthday Party ever got there was usually some scrap of conventional musicality to help the medicine go down. Swans who apocryphally threatened a punter with violence for dancing to them, were good at making it clear that they were not going to come to you but the other way around. 

This is a rare case where comparisons with their peers works, simply because it was a time when a band like this had peers that also defied labelling. Swans got a fair few labels slapped on them: no wave, industrial, gothic, noise, dark romantic, and so on but all of that just peeled off. Like The Birthday Party, Throbbing Gristle, Foetus and so on, Swans were best described as their own thing. This was important at a time when post punk was showing clear signs of morphing into conventionality. It wasn't important to take an objectionable stance as a protest, though, it was important because there was still too much to say that needed to be said without compromise. Acts like these were never going to have massive global followings so it was crucial to keep the message clear of unnecessary sweeteners.

Filth offers nothing by way of sweetening. The drumming is 4/4 with few embellishments that might make it personable. The guitar is playing intervals but the effect is more of sheets of noise responding like one of the components of an assembly line. The basses (usually two at once) are the closest the band get to riffing but the figures are short and as perfectly repeated as possible. The vocals are the same kind of haranguing bellow with the only variation being that some tracks feature a delivery more like natural speech. You wouldn't call it singing. Its character is more like commands or taunts. There is no melody. In case you do get too much into it there are even moments that rob you of finding pleasure in it like the sudden stop in Freak which waits for a little too long to resume (and that's the shortest track). There is differentiation between tracks but it's from this one having a riff like structure and the next one being more of a storm. 

If that suggests chaos to you then you should know that every track on this album sounds like the result of immense preparation and perfection. This is not the work of whimsical free jazz jammers. The tracks are statements with lines in plain language packed tightly into musical presentations that admit of no distractions like melody or groove. If you aren't familiar with this record (or anything by Swans for the next five or so studio releases) you might conceivably be thinking of early Hunters and Collectors but, as harsh as that could get it still followed conventional rock formatting with riffs and melodic vocals (however primal they could get). This record and its immediate successors was directly reflective of the band's live performances and is effectively presented as a set in polished form. As such, it is executed to the same level of intimidating commitment to form. Seldom has a band from a rock context been so toughly military.

It's worth a note to describe the arc of the band from this point to now as it's illustrative of that commitment in whatever form they chose. After the first few releases (they have brought out a lot of live records) and some portents of future directions with instrumentation like brass sections or piano, that Swans changed tack several times. A lot of this had to do with the recruitment of Jarboe who brought her hefty musicality into the storm and stress bedrock, adding a classicism that, by its jarring opposition, could prove effectively eerie. Towards the end of the '80s with albums like Children of God and White Light at the Edge of Infinity the band became almost unrecognisably melodic and lyrical. This reached its head with the very smooth Burning World before roughing back down for the final two albums, by which time they were falling back on over a decade's worth of praxis and experimentation. After a long hiatus, Gira gathered different musicians (but included stalwart Norman Westberg on guitar who debuted on Filth) and released albums with mammoth tracks that harked back to the hammering early days but extended the range. 

I only saw Swans once, back in 2011. They played at Melbourne's Forum with the inspired choice of The Necks as support. The set was long and began with an unattended feedback drone that lasted for about ten minutes before anyone got to the stage. The rest of it was powerful and loud enough to be the first concert of my life that made me use earbuds. The audience was very mixed generation and I recall the alarming sight of a guy who looked about twenty loping in a kind of dance right beside one of the big bass bins that might have been doing as much to make him move as his own muscles. At one point Gira bellowed the phrase, "Jesus come down!" three times. It was so loud it felt like it was pushing all the air out of the room. The Forum is a magnificent building used for music as well as a cinema (it's original purpose) but during the '90s for a few years it was a Christian revival centre when last a phrase like that would have been heard within its walls. A friend who was there spoke for me when he said that, although he couldn't remember the details of much of the songs it was the best gig he'd ever been to. After that I got more of the early Swans records in a way that I'd only just appreciated before.

Swans are an experience rather than a songbook, however many songs from their later years are genuinely memorable. To hear them again is to recall or be informed that movements that challenge and change norms can seem to bloom brightest when threatened with absorption or defeat. If the drive behind this music was from the same kind of ultra-masculine machismo that they appear to oppose then it's also worth noting that the thing that the passing years leaves is the opposition.

1983@40 : SWEET DREAMS (ARE MADE OF THIS) - EURYTHMICS

It must have been January that I heard it because I know I first saw the video in February. The song has a quiet epic feel to it, opposing tinkly electronics with atmospheric grunts and a big vocal with a varying delay and reverb. Over a drum machine kick the soundscape is restless and prying like a audience of town gossips witnessing an orgy. The vocal melody, supported by distant, sweet backing vocals, is central and modal, now plunging into the lower register now squeezing into psychedelic dissonance in the higher. Love is a Stranger, it's like addiction, a kidnapper, a seducer, or anything that takes and changes you, assuming different forms with their own effects until you, too, are transformed. The video is highly cinematic from the time that all of them were but this one delivered a kind of career building canniness that many were not. The duo both appear in various roles and costumes but the focus is on the cool beauty of singer Annie Lennox as she first sings to camera from the back of a limousine in a flouncy wig then in more of a dominatrix in a white tiled room that could be a bathroom or torture chamber, then as something more like herself with short Bowie hair, slowly removing leather gloves, androgynous in a pinstripe suit, writhing in a mass of 35 mm film. Finally, as the Thinner White Duke, she moves robotically in mirror shades beside the Chauffeur Dave Stewart, and stares down the lens.

When I head this on the radio it sounded like it was being told reverse shot, by the victim or affected, not the perp. I never heard it that way after seeing the clip. That effect is what sealed the deal on the Eurythmics, state ambiguity in no uncertain terms and keep the pop hooks coming. It was at the end of a relatively short road but one that had already involved a few drastic changes. As The Tourists, Stewart and Lennox were part of a '60s influenced power pop unit with a few respectable chart toppers to their name. Sensing the change in the wind they left to form the duo with this name but basically the same sound but with more quirk. By the time this album came around, they were possessed of their own recording studio and banks of new electronics. Their debut In the Garden sounds very old hat by comparison.

So, I'm spending a lot of time on this song on an album that contains ten. Well, for starters, as songs go, the rest of the first side is filler. Well, that's how it sounds until you listen to the next side and understand that that was where they kept the real songs. Alternatively, the first side is for dancing and the other one for listening. But we can't have everything in formula, can we, because side two begins with one of the most durable dance numbers from its era.

Sweet Dreams begins with one of the hookiest synth riffs in all pop music. You could play it on guitar but it would only sound right through the envelopes and filters of a fat toned '80s keyboard. The vocals, Lennox on thick self-harmonies but a strong stern lead line out the front really just repeats a chorus verse and kind of middle eight from go to whoa. It's a little like the person who lived through Love is a Stranger, older and worn, giving advice to a younger potential victim. "Some of them wat to use you. Some of them want to be used by you,"  as well as, "hold your head up (moving on).."

The video is far more conventional for its time. Lennox in full Bowie in a suit mode sings to camera as though delivering a business presentation while Stewart types at a computer as though playing the riff. When the instrumental comes up they frolic in a pasture with cellos and cows (hey, it was the '80s, man!). Repeat. It's not the invention of this but its confidence that grabbed everyone who saw it and then heard it on the dancefloor or the radio and fancied they heard more depth and variation in the lyrics than the song has. That, too, feels intentional. The song clocks in at about three and a half minutes, still on the longer side of the average top 40 number and most of it repeats the first thirty seconds mechanically.

This LP was released with a cousin video for the dawning of the age of home video with these clips and some live performances. That wasn't entirely revolutionary; Blondie had done it a few years earlier with videodiscs, but this time it was in a format that everybody had. Unlike the second bite of power pop previously, this one was made to sell and dominate. 

And that's why you get real songs on side two. Jennifer starts with the sounds of the seaside. The synths kick in  but you're not meant to dance along to this eerie ballad about a suicide. It could be a ghost story but it doesn't have to be. What it is is a mix of beautiful and unsettling. I miss that about early '80s pop, that it could completely ditch the boy/girl narrative and step quietly down the dark stairs with horror movie musical boxes tinkling away among the cobwebs.

This is the House is a kind of Talking Heads vignette about a burnt down house that starts with a few lines in Spanish. Somebody told Me is a fullthroated vocal workout over a soul brass riff on the lower end of the keyboards. This City Never Sleeps is a sombre reflection on a culture of isolation and resistance to stimulus. Brooding and deliberate, it steps on to the fade before a brief backwards message (from Dave Stewart, not Satan). Big and sad but it can afford to be at the end of this album that blends fun times steppin' out with the same kind of spooky big town songs on The Tourists deep cuts. 

Sweet Dreams is what happens when a reinvention is both calculated and fully embraced as a new strategy into a careerist lifestyle. The Eurythmics, from this point on, were free to dictate what they released, its musical style, video representation and what it was about. See also 1981's Dare from the Human League where the decision to join instead of futilely resist proved to be the right one. 

After this The Eurythmics could earn a living and be courted by a fickle music press on MTV or on the stage of a stadium. And if  they developed very, very little in the years that followed they were consistent and, most poignantly of all, prepared for a future that bands around them who stuck to their own cred rather than look beyond the old tribal ways and were surprised by the slowly exploding failure that changes in the environment, market, youth culture, etc. were to deliver to them. 

This album heard again now only approaches ineffectuality in that its pre-EDM dance numbers sound neo-retro-new-old rather than compelling in themselves. The singles that start each side are still immediate and strong. For a singles band that fit perfectly into the new multimedia demands of their era without hesitation, they endure.