Rothko 'n' roll

 

"So if A.R. Kane were late Matisse (oceanic mysticism, blocs of garish colour) and MBV shift between action-painting chaos and Klee naivete, then Seefeel induce the same kind of serene exaltation of the soul as Rothko's lambent, blurry canvases....

" 'Signals' is Seefeel at their most radical and radiant. Fuzzy harmonics, like a harp played underwater, simply hang tremulously in the air: this really is Rothko'n'roll."

Funnily enough, Rothko is invoked in another album review in the very same Melody Maker issue (October 23 1993), in this amusing assessment of Cocteau Twins's Four Calendar Cafe by Simon Price. 

As indeed is Matisse. 

Rothko and Matisse are deployed as favorable reference point in my Seefeel review. Whereas Pricey thinks R + M are "merely Interior Decor" that compares unfavorably with Proper Artists like Dali, Picasso, Munch, and Gilbert & George.  Pricey further avers that the Cocteaus, at their least, veer perilously near to background-sound prettiness (alt-rock slow jams aka Goth-lite as seduction soundtrack). 

The Quique review incidentally is one of the very first - possibly the first - times I used "post-rock", albeit adjectivally rather than as a genre-tagging noun. A few weeks later it'll crop up in a feature on Insides. 

Along with the diss to Rothko and Matisse, I take exception to Simon's claim that you only need two Cocteaus albums. You need Head Over Heels and Bluebell Knoll but you'd also want the Harold Budd collaboration and you definitely have to have some of the EPs - Sunburst and Snowblind, The Spanglemaker, Love's Easy Tears. So that's effectively four album's worth of material that is the core canon, the imperishable essentials. 

I used to be quite ill-disposed to Treasure but I've come round to it a bit. It inches into the Zone of Fruitless Intensification (in their case, the Zone of Froufrou Intensification) but there's some great songs like "Lorelei". 

That stretch of  Tiny Dynamine  - Echoes In A Shallow Bay - Aikea-Guinea - Victorialand is where I lost track of them at the time for a while. Subsequent attempts to give that mid-period patch a relisten, I tend to glaze out. 

You know, I don't think I have ever listened to Four Calendar Cafe. 

Heaven or Las Vegas is where I got off the bus. Funnily, it appears to be many Americans's entry point (at least judging by my students). 

As for the early phase before I got on the bus - Lullabies and Garlands and Peppermint Pig - they just seem too much in the shadow of the Banshees. 

Cocteaus, of course, were the biggest influence on Mark Clifford.