Buried Treasure # 6

REM - Up (Warner Bros, 1998)

Conventional wisdom dictates that REM are a great band who have lost their purpose, and that new album ‘Accelerate’ represents some sort of ‘return to form’. From the two tracks I’ve heard so far, it certainly returns them to sounding like a conventional rock group (albeit one with real energy, a quixotic temperament and artful musicianship). This simplistic assessment is inadequate. It only provides an incomplete, one-sided picture of the group’s period of reconfiguration following the departure of drummer Bill Berry. During this time, they revitalised themselves as a major touring group par excellence but produced a trilogy of albums that disappointed even their most ardent supporters.

‘Up’ was by some distance the bravest of these albums, born out of frustration and fractious relationships within the group, and completely revising the band’s working methods. The problem with the albums that followed it (the impressionistic ‘Reveal’ and the tepid ‘Around The Sun’) was not that they had too much in common with ‘Up’, but rather too little. They sounded over-produced, sentimental, hazy and vague, whilst ‘Up’ sounded skeletal and vulnerable, subtle and mysterious. Indeed it’s hard to believe that the same producer (Pat McCarthy) helmed the controls for all three albums.

‘Up’ is a long album that takes numerous listens to appreciate, and many listeners (fans and critics alike) did not seem to have the necessary patience. Musically, it is a mature work rich in complex feeling and sensations, and lacking immediacy. Whilst there’s no shortage of writing describing ‘Up’ as an incoherent folly, it is now my favourite REM album by a country mile. This is at least in part for personal, subjective reasons, but it’s also because it is an audacious and compelling album that retains the core virtues of REM’s songwriting style, whilst filtering them through very different arrangements and processes. It stands completely apart from the rest of their catalogue and is an album I can return to at any time and still discover new riches and previously concealed brilliance. Playing it last night at home, my flatmate came in and said ‘hang on, that sounds like Michael Stipe’. Having not heard it before, he clearly thought it was a Stipe solo project, so little like REM does it sometimes sound. Actually, it’s anything but that, and in spite of the apparent terse atmosphere during its recordings, successfully combines the distinctive musical personalities of all three of its creators.

When it was released, Michael Stipe came out fighting (in more than one sense), giving a number of his most candid and direct interviews, and expressing his sincere satisfaction with the finished product. Now, the band seem to have almost rejected it – playing few of the songs in live performances and, at least until ‘Accelerate’, self-consciously striving to satisfy Warner Bros. with a modernised ‘Automatic For The People’. There were a handful of moments on ‘Reveal’ that attempted to develop the intricate web of ideas and attention to detail found on ‘Up’, but ‘Around the Sun’ abandoned such concerns, preferring blandly strummed guitars, plodding tempos and woolly atmospherics. Although writers concentrated on the increased prevalence of keyboards, synthesisers and drum programming on ‘Up’, Peter Buck’s guitar remained a crucial presence, his peculiar distortion and simple figures adding much in the way of texture and mood. That he absented himself almost entirely from the worst moments of ‘Around the Sun’ was greatly to that album’s detriment.

Having attempted to demonstrate why it’s unfair to bracket ‘Up’ with ‘Reveal’ and ‘Around the Sun’ in a trilogy of disappointment, it’s now worth considering its own inspired and unique merits further. The group stated their intentions from the outset with the enigmatic ‘Airportman’, Stipe’s voice reduced to a hushed monotone amidst bossa nova drum programming (an insistent rhythm, completely uncharacteristic to the group, that is repeated all over the album) and floating keyboard textures. It’s the most alien, peculiar track that REM have crafted to date and immediately betrays the more European influence that predominates the album (‘Hope’ and ‘Walk Unafraid’ also hint at ‘Krautrock’ acts like Neu! or Harmonia) and provides a coherence that most critics seemed unable to uncover.

Everywhere there is a vivid attention to detail and meticulous concentration on how the songs sound. ‘Suspicion’ rests on a melody so subtle it is almost backgrounded, and many found the rudimentary drum machine uncomfortable (as if it was something REM shouldn’t be doing in the sudden absence of a drummer!). Yet, there’s the lingering melancholy of Barrett Martin’s Vibraphone (also playing a pivotal role on the sublime ‘Diminished’), and the way the song suddenly lifts towards the end, Stipe’s voice shedding some of its restraint and reaching a new level. The group pitted the sea-shanty melody of ‘The Apologist’ against an intriguing concoction of brushed drums, heavily distorted, swelling guitars and more familiar arpeggios. It sounded like a stark, industrial refashioning of their tendency towards gothic balladry.

Beneath all this fascinating weirdness, there were also plenty of more familiar elements. The irresistibly saccharine Brian Wilson stylings Mike Mills brought to ‘At My Most Beautiful’ and ‘Parakeet’ made the former cute and charming, the latter hypnotic and immersing. The use of pedal steel guitar had previously made the likes of ‘Country Feedback’ overwhelming and haunting, and, for these ears at least, imbued the emotional trial of ‘Diminished’ with a similarly devastating impact. Initially, I found ‘Daysleeper’ the most typical and characteristic song on the album (and the only obvious choice of first single), but what interests me about it now is the way the group merge their familiar acoustic tropes with sampled sounds and noises that really capture both the otherness and frustrations of nocturnal living.

Lyrically, ‘Up’ found Michael Stipe grappling, in frequently fascinating ways, for new techniques and means of self-expression. Sometimes he even seemed to be battling against himself. For a lyricist who frequently prefers stream-of-consciousness, surrealism and absurdity, he can often be disarmingly direct. ‘Losing My Religion’ may have become an anthemic powerhouse, but if one actually focuses on the lyric (one of the clearest encapsulations of unrequited infatuation I’ve ever heard), it becomes almost unbearably intense. A number of the songs on ‘Up’ (‘At My Most Beautiful’, ‘Diminished’, ‘Walk Unafraid’, ‘Falls To Climb’, ‘The Apologist’ and ‘You’re In The Air’) really flesh out this confessional approach. The setting of these very human and candid words (‘I want you naked, I want you wild’, ‘Hold my love me or leave me high’, ‘someone has to take the fall, why not me?’, ‘I will give my best today’ etc) to music that often feels stark and cold (in a positive way) gives ‘Up’ a disorientating and unsettling air of menace with its emotional clarity. Yet on ‘Why Not Smile’, the sentiment is so direct as to sound trite, Stipe enhancing the sense of irony by delivering the song in a flat monotone. It seems to be poking fun out of conventional love songs, yet the accompanying harmony is so straightforward and pretty that it could be one of those love songs – it’s very similar to the technique used so masterfully by Stephin Merritt in his various guises. Then there’s the unexpected interjection of the unlisted ‘I’m Not Over You’, just Stipe alone with an acoustic guitar, as pure and exposed as he’s ever sounded. The desperate loneliness of ‘Sad Professor’, brilliantly enhanced by Peter Buck’s unexpected bursts of guitar noise and the delicate underpinning percussion, even saw Stipe writing in character, something he doesn’t seem to have done much before or since.

I was only 17 when ‘Up’ was released, and only a handful of the tracks struck an emotional chord at the time (perhaps the most obvious examples). Yet as I’ve grown older, I’ve found the songs acquire a new and more direct personal resonance. ‘Daysleeper’ suddenly assumed a very obvious importance during the year I spent working night shifts for a television company, whilst ‘Walk Unafraid’ strikes me more as I become more accustomed to addressing some of the more personal aspects of my life publicly. It’s always gratifying to find an album that can follow and track you through the various stages of your life (as can Teenage Fanclub’s ‘Grand Prix’ for me), and I strongly suspect I will be drawing new insight and resonance from ‘Up’ for many years to come. Beyond that though, it’s such an unusual and mesmerising creation, in many ways as unforgiving as Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ (I actually much prefer it to that album, but we’re on controversial ground here). Yet whilst Radiohead followed ‘Kid A’ with very successful juxtapositions of preoccupations old and new (best realised on the alchemical ‘In Rainbows’), REM failed to live up to that challenge. It's possible that this was because 'Up' sold respectably, but nowhere near enough to recoup Warners' 80 million dollar investment! Ironically, in addressing more commercial concerns, the group only served to diminish their audience further. I hope ‘Accelerate’ restores some faith in the group, but it also saddens me that they couldn’t take some of the very promising new adventures from ‘Up’ to their logical conclusion.

Unsatisfactory Overview

Morrissey - Greatest Hits

The Press Release for this compilation (the first release under Morrissey’s new contract with Decca) boldly states that ‘Greatest Hits spans Morrissey’s twenty year career as a solo artist’. In a sense, it’s not a lie – there are two tracks from solo debut ‘Viva Hate’ and plenty from his most recent album ‘Ringleader of The Tormentors’, in addition to the obligatory two brand new tracks. What this doesn’t quite reveal though is the album’s considerable bias in favour of recent material – all the singles from ‘You Are The Quarry’ and ‘Ringleader…’ are present, the bulk of them sequenced next to each other in the first half of the album. The ‘Ringleader…’ singles particularly emphasise the more generic, plodding rock into which Morrissey’s group can sometimes lapse. With only one disc, and just fifteen tracks, this leaves very little space to explore the rest of Morrissey’s patchy, but frequently inspired solo catalogue.

Perhaps it’s arguable that his earlier career has been compiled and collected before – with World of Morrissey and The Best of Morrissey, although neither of these compilations were entirely comprehensive either. I suspect that the real reasons for the poor selection are rather more prosaic – it’s likely that Decca got a good deal from Sanctuary on the licensing for the recent singles, but buying up the bulk of the back catalogue from a variety of other labels would have proved too costly. The early tracks they have opted for seem to have been chosen purely on the basis of chart position – how else to explain the inclusion of ‘Last Of The Famous International Playboys’ over ‘Piccadilly Palare’ or ‘November Spawned A Monster’?

What a tremendous shame this is – as this was a golden opportunity for a two disc, comprehensive overview of Morrissey’s solo work. Most disappointing is the compilation’s total failure to rehabilitate the reputation of the more than adequate albums Morrissey released during his supposed ‘wilderness years’. There is nothing at all from either ‘Southpaw Grammar’ or ‘Maladjusted’ – both ‘The Boy Racer’ and ‘Satan Rejected My Soul’ were punchy, infectious singles worthy of reappraisal. ‘Maladjusted’ also contained the quite wonderful ‘Trouble Loves Me’, a swooning ballad and favourite of recent live sets. That this selection also completely passes by ‘Your Arsenal’ and ‘Kill Uncle’ is more surprising – the latter is admittedly Moz’s least successful album, but the former was a critical and commercial success.

It doesn’t help that Moz has not always been entirely shrewd with his choice of singles. Many of the finest tracks on his best works (this is particularly true of 1994’s exquisite ‘Vauxhall and I’) have been album tracks. So, there’s no room for, say, ‘Now My Heart Is Full’, ‘Reader Meet Author’ or even ‘The National Front Disco’ (an excellent song which, unlike the nasty ‘Bengali In Platforms’, does withstand the allegations of racism). Similarly, who wouldn’t take the audacious and ambitious ‘Dear God, Please Help Me’ or ‘At Last I Am Born’ over any of the singles from ‘Ringleader…’ (with the exception of ‘You Have Killed Me’, which has one of his most memorable melodies).

On the plus side, ‘Suedehead’ and ‘Everyday Is Like Sunday’ still sound fantastic in spite of their 80s production values, and the two new tracks return Morrissey to the punchy, muscular production of Jerry Finn. ‘All You Need Is Me’ is familiarly self-aggrandising, but the self-mocking ‘That’s How People Grow Up’ makes grim fun of a succession of unrequited love affairs and develops the more confessional side of Morrissey’s work..It’s also worth remembering that ‘…Quarry’ was a bold comeback statement – ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ and ‘The First of The Gang To Die’ are both insistent and pugnacious.

Anyone who already owns ‘…Quarry’ and ‘Ringleader…’ is unlikely to invest either time or money in this release, possibly downloading whatever they are missing in isolation. It’s hard to see what purpose this disc fulfils other than biding time before Decca drop the new Morrissey album in the Autumn, and giving him something to promote with his week of shows at London’s Roundhouse (not that mere self-promotion isn’t enough, as his belligerent litigation against the NME currently suggests). Hopefully the sets for these shows will venture further away from his most recent output.

Buried Tresure # 3: The Boo Radleys - C'Mon Kids

(I had intended to write many more of these columns than I’ve managed so far….)

Why has everyone now forgotten all about The Boo Radleys? Of all the 60s-inspired bands lumped together spuriously as ‘Britpop’ in the mid-90s, they were the most concerned with filtering those classic influences through a more radical and inventive prism. The most obvious selection here would be ‘Giant Steps’, the audaciously titled critical favourite, although nobody seems to remember just how adventurous and exciting even that album was. Perhaps it’s simply that we had to put up with months of Chris Evans starting off our days in the most horrific way imaginable with ‘Wake Up Boo!’, that incessantly chirpy and relentlessly upbeat freak hit. Yet the album from which it came contained plenty of inspiration, and some more melancholy and reflective moments too. The consensus appears to be that, afterwards, they fell into terminal decline.

Well, it’s true that ‘C’Mon Kids’ did not repeat its predecessor’s surprising sales figures. But there was no ‘Wake Up Boo’, or even an ‘It’s Lulu’ on this defiant and maverick collection. It veered all over the place in miscreant and deviant style, with no respect whatsoever for taste or decency, but it also retained the key juxtaposition of Martin Carr’s melodic sensibility and Sice’s rampant bellow that made the group so elemental and inspired. Neither has repeated this invention in their subsequent solo work, for the process of collaboration and combination was integral to the group’s success. Carr wrote the songs, Sice delivered and interpreted them.

Perhaps the epitome of this approach appeared with this album’s opening title, a screech of vicious noise accompanied by some thrilling, life-affirming lyrics (‘f*ck the ones, who tell you that life, is merely a time before dying’). It’s one of the best pop songs to crystallise that drive and hunger for something new which exists naturally in youth, but often seems to erode with the onset of jaded thought and cynicism. Sice’s voice never sounded more rampant, and Carr’s guitar squalls are both visceral and engaging.

The rest of the album proved increasingly unpredictable though, and any attempt to second-guess the groups’s preoccupations or modus operandi would always be thwarted. From the bass-directed groove of ‘Melodies For The Deaf’ and the hazy dub of ‘Fortunate Sons’ to the extrapolated psychedelia of ‘Ride The Tiger’ and effortless melodicism of ‘New Brighton Promenade’, the album may have had something for everyone, but it also had plenty to irritate less open-minded listeners.

It’s hard to imagine any of the Britpop also-rans producing a song as bizarre and disconcerting as ‘Meltin’s Worm’ or a song as deeply melancholy and affecting as the wonderful ‘Everything Is Sorrow’ (‘…and you know you shouldn’t have another cigarette/But nothing else makes much sense, nothing else can recompense’). The Boo Radleys were a group that could cover all bases, from the resonant and emotional to the surreal and adventurous. They could deploy the resources of the studio to their maximum potential, and indeed, ‘C’Mon Kids’ is a record in thrall to the joy of noise and confusion.

Rather shockingly, second hand copies of it now seem to be going on Amazon for a mere 25p (could an album be more undervalued?) and a greatest hits compilation seems to have slipped out earlier this year without any publicity or recognition whatsoever. What a great shame that this most unusual and inventive of bands seem to have been reduced to a mere footnote in a history of 90s pop written by the tiresome victors (The Verve, Oasis etc).

Buried Treasure #2

Mark Hollis - Mark Hollis (Polydor, 1998)

For all the critical rehabilitation of Talk Talk’s extraordinary ‘Spirit of Eden’ and ‘Laughing Stock’ albums over the last ten years, it’s still surprisingly difficult to find incisive writing on Mark Hollis’ debut, and so far only, solo work. It took several years for Hollis to muster the inspiration to record again after ‘Laughing Stock’, by which time Talk Talk had effectively disintegrated. It’s clear that the recording processes for both ‘Spirit..’ and ‘Laughing Stock’ were protracted and both physically and emotionally draining, leaving the group with little coherence or resolve. The results of course speak for themselves – both records are unique musical statements, completely unlike anything else in the British rock canon, with an originality, force and power few artists can muster.

Those major Talk Talk albums existed largely as seamless pieces of music, and made more sense as complete works than as a sequence of songs. They also displayed a steadfast lack of respect for genre boundaries, melding elements of contemporary composition with rock and improvised jazz. Recorded with large groups of musicians in unconventional groupings, they were meticulously arranged, with as much attention paid to silences as the sudden bursts of savage noise. In light of this, it’s tempting to portray Hollis’ solo work as simply an extension of this approach to writing and recording.

Yet there’s a crucial and fundamental difference that sets ‘Mark Hollis’ apart from all of Talk Talk’s output. If anything, this is a more schematic and theorised work, recorded entirely on acoustic instruments. As a result, there are no electric guitars, only upright bass, drums mostly delicately brushed rather than hit, and the overall sound is consistently dignified and restrained. Hollis had already explored a range of avenues in jazz and rock forms, but had now also discovered Eastern European folk music. Explaining his approach to this album on its release in 1998, he stated that he was searching for the common elements between chamber music, jazz and folk. It was also Hollis’ first work without the input of Tim Friese-Greene, instead collaborating with arrangers Phil Ramacon and Dominic Miller.

The result of this questing is a stark minimalism that defies musical convention or easy classification. Sometimes there is genuinely nothing here (opening track ‘The Colour Of Spring’ begins with 19 seconds of considered silence), and Hollis’ voice, increasingly elusive, drifts in and out of focus. The music is hushed, but extraordinary, and it remains staggering how much feeling and texture Hollis and his musicians could wrench from as few notes as possible. Hollis’ famous quotation from this period sums it all up brilliantly: "Before you play two notes learn how to play one note - and don't play one note unless you've got a reason to play it." There’s a palpable sense across the whole album that every beat and every sound have been placed in order to be meaningful. This is most notable from the deployment of reed and wind instruments – Flute, Cor anglais, Bassoon and Clarinet, which all serve to layer texture and enhance mood, in unshowy arrangements that reject the temptations of virtuosity.

Hollis is credited with production duties himself, but engineer Phill Brown must surely be the unsung hero of this project. The naturalistic, elemental sound at least gives the impression of a chamber ensemble interacting (although I have no idea whether or not the music was recorded ‘as live’), and there’s no attempt to manipulate or disguise the natural timbre of the instruments. Very few albums recorded in the '90s sounded this pure or convincing. There’s a beauty and clarity to the piano and vocal opener ‘The Colour Of Spring’ that is only deceptively simple, and the lengthy ‘A Life (1895-1915)’ is characterised by subtle and controlled shifts in texture and dynamics.

Hollis’ lyrics are frequently still derided as oblique or frustrating, and whilst it’s true that a literal meaning is not always immediately clear, there’s an elegant flow to the language that complements the music and also contributes to the languid, profoundly reflective atmosphere. The words frequently sound beautiful. The title of ‘The Colour Of Spring’ harks back to the earlier Talk Talk album of the same name, but the Talk Talk of the mid-80s would never have written or recorded anything this quietly intense: ‘And yet I’ll gaze/The colour of spring/Immerse in that one moment/Left in love with everything/Soar the bridges/That I burnt before/One song among us all’. Elsewhere, the lyrics sometimes seem like strands of disconnected words or phrases, but one of Hollis’ great gifts as a writer is to make plangent melancholy by undercutting expectations, such as on ‘A New Jerusalem’, where he sings, so softly its almost inaudible, ‘Summer unwinds/But no longer kind’. The fragmented nature of the language reflects the unusual ebb and flow of the music – with no obvious verses or choruses, these are free flowing songs that follow their own uniquely questing path. By varying the volume and lucidity of his singing, Hollis effectively subsumes his voice completely within the music – rather than something added as a hook or an afterthought, the vocals are an intrinsic part of these arrangements.

In the nine years since this album’s release, little has been heard from Hollis and it is unclear whether or not he plans to record again, although his former Talk Talk colleague Paul Webb was instrumental in the success of Beth Gibbons’ excellent ‘Out Of Season’ album. Hollis is a singular talent with a clear and uncompromising vision, but there’s the increasing sense that this melancholy, haunting work is the last we may hear from him.