Cruel World 2023: Siouxsie, Iggy Pop, Human League, Billy Idol, Gang of Four, Gary Numan, Love and Rockets

CRUEL WORLD 2023

director's cut, Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2023

by Simon Reynolds

The day before Cruel World, the promoters tweeted out a weather advisory: “mostly sunny, high of 79, 100% chance of angst and despair. See you there.” 

In the event, the weather had other ideas. 

But on Saturday a horde of mope-rockers and Goths clad in sun-absorbing black descended upon Brookside at the Rosebowl, Pasadena. 

Quite possibly this was the densest concentration of fishnet in human history.

For many, the main draw was headliner Siouxsie, the Godmother of Goth, playing her first American concert in fifteen years. Indeed, Siouxsie merch was completely sold out by 4pm.  Other attractions for the dark-clad and doom-minded included Love and Rockets, an offshoot of Bauhaus (Goth godfathers and a highlight of 2022’s inaugural Cruel World) and Echo and the Bunnymen, who were originally lined up to play last year.

Cruel World has fun with the idea of misery as a shared alt-rock worldview. The festival’s three stages are named Outsiders, Sad Girls, and Lost Boys. There’s also a dance area, deejayed by someone called Club Doom Dave. Then there’s the name itself, derived from the suicidal kiss-off  “goodbye, cruel world”.

In Goth, the cruelty of the world doesn’t have a political dimension: it’s not a reference to economic inequality or the literally hateful policies being enacted all around this country. “Cruel” is a more timeless existentialist accusation about a sadness inherent to life itself. 

The connection between the bands and their fans was forged during adolescence, that time when sensitive souls start having deep thoughts. Yet most of this largely middle-aged crowd must surely now be well-adjusted and comfortable in their skin (not to mention comfortably off, given ticket prices that range from $159 to $799). Many even brought morose, awkward teenagers of their own.

The key to Goth’s transgenerational appeal is its odd blend of glum and glam. Before the term Goth settled into place, the emerging movement was briefly known as “positive punk.” That might seem an odd adjective given the dark worldview, but the positive part is the element of dress-up and cos-play, the sheer effort that goes into self-beautification. 

It’s a perennially seductive style whose sepulchral glamor appeals as an alternative to mainstream ideals of blondeness and tanned health—especially in SoCal.  The leather caps and steel chains, the heavy black eyeliner and whiteface make-up, the holey fishnets and ratted hair – these also serve as a beacon to fellow misfits, a way off finding your tribe while scaring off the normals. It’s a forbidding look that also suggests the forbidden –  a taste for sin and kink, with a hint of demonic cruelty. 

Yet despite the ungodly appearance, it’s probably the most gentle of youth subcultures: visually, a kick in the eye, but in truth, it’s Goths and their emo descendants who are often victims of violence rather than the other way round.

 Ironically, my favorite garment at Cruel World was a simple T-shirt bearing the slogan “No, I Don’t Want To Hear the New Stuff.” The wearer told me he’d printed it up in a special edition-of-one.

The T-shirt speaks to the expectations of the fans who attends festivals like these that are full of legacy acts.  Our beloved artists like to believe they’ve only got better with age and still have new things to say. But we just want to hear the favorites that remind us of our youth.

Gary Numan didn’t seem to have gotten the memo. Despite making his name with doomy dystopian electropop, he stubbornly treated the audience to a heaping portion of late period stuff: grinding industrial rock from a phase when he appeared to be following the lead of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. Ironically, his earliest work as Tubeway Army featured much better guitar riffs. Numan did play his classic “Cars.” And you have to appreciate the effort he’s putting into looking the same as he did in his heavy-rotation MTV days. 

Not everyone attending Cruel World was a Goth and angst wasn’t the only thing on the menu. Squeeze (a last minute replacement for Adam Ant) sounded as cheery and ebullient as ever. Still boyish-looking at 65, Glenn Tilbrook sang the group’s post-Beatles classics like “Pulling Mussels From A Shell” with ageless sweetness.

Billy Idol is looking a little craggy these days and the rebel-sneer lip doesn’t curl up like it used to. But he was in fine voice and roused the second-stage crowd with hits like “Dancing By Myself” and “Rebel Yell,” interspersed with consummate showman patter. 

ABC and The Human League also come from that early MTV moment of the Second British Invasion, what people in the UK called New Pop: postpunk artists who glossed up and crossed over. Both hail from Sheffield in the north east of England,  an original bastion of Goth, but have no truck with miserabilism, writing songs  (“Tears Are Not Enough” and “Blind Youth” respectively) that are militantly optimistic. 

Then there’s Gang of Four, whose bleakness, inspired by the ravages of capitalism, is quite different from Goth’s, and who offset it with a grim resoluteness. They were as powerful a live band as ever, with singer Jon King exerting himself so vigorously he had to sit on the monitor at the front of stage between songs to catch his breath.

Drifting nearer the dark side, Echo and the Bunnymen have songs about death (“The Cutter”) and despair (“All My Colours”). But they are delivered with such drive and dazzle, the effect is uplifting. On songs like “Rescue,” Ian McCulloch’s sonorous baritone recalls Jim Morrison at his most majestic. Most of the Bunnymen’s songs traffic in windswept romanticism full of elemental imagery (titles like “Seven Seas” and  “The Killing Moon” – the latter prefaced with typical McCulloch swagger as “the greatest song ever written”). But politics figured briefly with “Never Stop,” a song of defiance originally released as a single at the height of Thatcherism. At Cruel World, this was prefaced by caustic comments from McCulloch about the late Conservative Prime Minister and her heartless proposal of a policy of “managed decline” for his once bustling hometown of Liverpool.  The Bunnymen didn’t go in much for stage craft:  there were some thin wisps of dry ice but the video screens were off and there were no back projections;  McCulloch stood stock still throughout. But the songs and the singing were more than enough.

Among the songs the Bunnymen played  was “Lips Like Sugar”, the nearest the band ever came to a hit in America. It’s always struck me as a killer chorus looking for a verse and pre-chorus.  Love and Rockets likewise similarly feel like a great guitarist looking for a matching rhythm section and some decent tunes.  As at last year’s Cruel World Bauhaus performance, Daniel Ash’s gnarly but intricately textured racket was a highlight.  But singers Ash and bassist Daniel J, lack the commanding presence of Peter Murphy. Their T.Rex  aping MTV hit “So Alive” retains its slight charm,  but the cover of  The Temptations’s “Ball of Confusion” remains perplexingly surplus to requirements.  

And then came the promised angst and despair – Cruel Nature struck. Midway through a taut and joyous set by The Human League on one stage and Iggy Pop’s middle-schooler grandson doing a funny little dance during “The Passenger” on another, the show came to an abrupt halt. The audience was instructed to leave the festival site and seek shelter because of an approaching lightning storm. Those nearest the main exit dispersed in orderly fashion and relative good humor, but for those deeper into the Brookside grounds, getting out was a more frustrating and protracted process.

And then the even crueler twist: the threatened bolts of lightning, the thunder, rain and pea-sized hailstones, never reached Pasadena.

To their and the artists's credit, Cruel World managed to reschedule the performances of Iggy Pop and Siouxsie for the following night. But this was scant consolation for those already flying or driving long distance journeys back to their hometowns across the country. Indeed, the fact that Siouxsie and Iggy would now be able to play longer sets arguably just added salt to the wound.

 “Déjà vu, baby!”  Iggy’s dazed-and-amazed greeting to the crowd acknowledged the Groundhog Day vibe of us all reassembling at the same place the next day.   

I first saw Iggy live in 1988 and he seemed venerable even then, a rock’n’roll survivor, albeit with implausibly limitless reserves of energy.  35 years later, he’s still ridiculously dynamic for a 76-year-old. Bounding around the stage with a disconcerting lope that suggests something’s off with his hip, he simultaneously owns his ancientness and defies it. His shirtless physique is fascinating in its combination of muscle and wrinkle. The skin looks like a topographical map of the Rockies. It’s like Iggy’s been carved into rock’s equivalent of Rushmore – and then broke loose to keep on marauding stages across the world.  

It’s clear that he’s not doing it for the money, but for the sheer joy of it. Iggy also understands the strength of his own material, sticking largely to Stooges and early solo highpoints.  

He can’t quite summon the lung-power for the cyclone-howl that splits apart the original “TV Eye”, so during that section sticks the microphone into his waistband where it pokes out suggestively. 

But for the most part, ably supported by his band, Iggy powers through deathless classics like “Raw Power,”  “Gimme Danger” , “Sick of You”, “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, “Search and Destroy”.   Clearly, a man determined to rock until he drops.

Dusk descends and finally the Goddess of Goth takes the stage. Siouxsie relives the trauma of the previous night,  joking that she told the fire department that the lightning was “just part of our fuckin’ light show.” 

Initially cloaked in a Medieval-looking hood, she’s wearing a silver jump-suit that shimmers in the light. Her voice has grown deeper with the decades but this lends her singing even more baleful authority, evoking some kind of vengeful spirit of matriarchy. 

 The set starts with “Nightshift” and “Arabian Knights”, both from Juju, the 1981 album that is Goth’s Rosetta Stone.  Two further Juju songs, “Sin In My Heart”, for which Siouxsie straps on a guitar, and “Spellbound”, are played later, underscoring the genre-foundational nature of the record. 

It’s Siouxsie without the Banshees – guitarist John McGeoch is dead, drummer Budgie is now Siouxsie’s ex-spouse, and who knows if bassist and band co-founder Steve Severin was invited or consulted? But the Banshees-surrogates onstage do a fine job duplicating the glassy guitar, the pummel-drone of the bass, and the tumbly-tribal rhythms. 

But then Siouxsie repeats the Numan Error. Instead of using her extended set time to disinter classics from A Kiss in the Dreamhouse or play the Goth National Anthem “Fireworks,” she plays no less than four songs from the solo album Mantaray. There’s a tune off the Batman Returns soundtrack and a pair of duds from 1986’s sparkless Tinderbox. 

One unusual choice that entrances is “But Not Them” from her percussion-and-voice side project The Creatures.  It’s noticeable that the video projections oscillate in quality and imagination in parallel with the tunes – “Christine” comes with a mesmerizing psychedelic kaleidoscope, whereas Batman tune “Face To Face” clunkily deploys cat’s eyes. 

Siouxsie’s return was a qualified triumph: there was a touch too much turgid dirge in the setlist, and as her energy levels flagged, the voice grew unwieldy and the enchantress-style arm movements started to seem perfunctory. 

But with a glorious rendition of of “Happy House” and the stunning encores “Spellbound” and “Israel”, the idol earned her ovation.     

Goth

 VARIOUS ARTISTS

A Life Less Lived: The Gothic Box (Rhino)

director's cut, Blender 2006

by Simon Reynolds

That maniacal cackling is the gleeful sound of a genre having the last laugh. Mocked by most the minute it crawled from its crypt at the dawn of the Eighties, Goth has proved to be one of the wilder success stories of postpunk culture. In its purest form, the scene thrives as a globe-spanning underground. But more remarkable than its sheer subcultural staying power is the extent to which Goth’s tentacles have wormed their way into the mainstream. You can see and hear its imprint on modern metal, from the campy horror romps of Avenged Sevenfold to the wintry worldview of AFI (who who named their fan club The Despair Faction and appear on this four-disc box set covering the Cure’s “Hanging Garden”). Goth’s genes are equally discernible in emo’s eyeliner misery boys such as My Chemical Romance and Panic! At the Disco, with their “any color so long as it’s black” clothing and vocal echoes of mope-rocker supreme Robert Smith. But the genre’s impact has spread far beyond music, touching everything from film (Tim Burton’s entire oeuvre, practically) to fiction, fashion, and art.

What is the secret of Goth’s persistence? Maybe it’s the way the Goth look fuses glamour and being an outsider, just as the scene’s tribalism reconciles the desire to be apart with the longing for community. Goth’s perennial allure also has a lot to do with the way the epic music and tortured lyrics give majesty to moroseness, elevating and ennobling adolescent angst. Above all, Goth is dead sexy, something this box set foregrounds with its kinky leather-and-laces packaging, modeled on a Gothette’s black bodice or thigh-length boot. Raven-haired and pallid, Goth’s ideal of erotic beauty is different to the mainstream’s (blonde, glowingly healthy, vivacious) and offers an empowering alternative for girls into being enigmatic and unapproachable while looking to keep all the fun aspects of self-beautification and adornment.

That scary-seductive she-Goth look was invented by Siouxsie Sioux (with a little help from Morticia Adams). Siouxsie & the Banshees 1981 album Juju, represented on this box by its tumultuous single “Spellbound”, set the sonic template for the Goth explosion that followed two years later. But one thing A Life Less Lived makes abundantly clear is that the most adventurous Goth music was made in the genre’s emergent phase, before it became a codified style--before it was even called Goth in fact. It’s startling to hear how wide-open this proto-Goth sound actually was, from the doom-funk stampede of Killing Joke’s “Tomorrow’s World” to the dub reggae infused clangour and cavernous hollows of Bauhuaus’ 1979 debut single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” which appears here in video form on the set’s DVD disc. Even the later “She’s In Parties” has a discernible loping skank feel amid its metallic noise, then enters a full-on dub coda of ambushing volleys of studio-warped noise and deep rumbling bass

What united the Goth bands was a common ancestry in glam rock. Bauhaus and the Banshees covered T. Rex tunes and you can hear blatant traces of David Bowie’s mannered delivery in Bauhaus’ singer Peter Murphy and in Gavin Friday, frontman of Virgin Prunes (represented here by “Pagan Lovesong”). More than Bowie or Bolan, though, it was Alice Cooper who was the true ungodly godfather of Goth, his grisly theatrics and black humor blazing the trail for the likes of Christian Death and Specimen. A more highbrow, self-consciously poetic take on the blasphemy/debauchery combo came from The Birthday Party, whose “Mutiny In Heaven” is a grotesquely gripping sound-painting daubed with guitars that sound like they’re covered in sores and boils, the garishly vivid illustration to singer Nick Cave’s imagery of junkie squalor and “rats in paradise”.

Like many of the groups who inspired Goth, the Birthday Party fiercely resisted being tarred with its brush. Then and now, the problem with Goth is that a lot of it was simply defective as rock music, or, if not actively bad, then desperately ordinary beneath its glad rags of otherworldly mystery and underworldly menace. The most glaring deficiencies typically lay in the vocal department (singers tending toward operatic portentousness or cadaverous dirge-droning) and the rhythm section (the drummers either mustering a stiff plod or attempting a “tribal” feel by overdoing the tom-tom rolls). Some groups, like Sisters of Mercy and Alien Sex Fiend, dispensed with human-powered beats altogether in favour of drum machines. Others were so lacking in rhythmic feel or flair--the null trudge of Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, the numb trance of Danse Society’s disco-Goth--they might as well have been using mechanical beats.

A Life Less Lived is undone by its own conscientious attempt to be fully representative of its genre. What would normally be a virtue becomes a liability, because Goth has always generated as much sonic evidence for the prosecution as for the defence. Perhaps that’s why the selection is bolstered by some unlikely inclusions, like Echo & the Bunnymen’s “All My Colours” (doomily intoned but hardly Goth) and Jesus & Mary Chain’s “Fall” (which seemingly qualifies because it’s from an album entitled Darklands). When three of the best tracks—by Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten, and Skinny Puppy—come from a genre, industrial, that’s adjacent to Goth but very much a separate entity…. well, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that there’s simply not enough good-to-great Goth out there to fill up four CDs.

apropos of nothing, honest...

BONUS GOTHERY

Siouxsie and the Banshees

The Scream: The Deluxe Edition

Polydor/Universal

Uncut, 2005

by Simon Reynolds

Knowing Siouxsie as Godmother of Goth, it’s easy to forget that the Banshees were originally regarded as exemplary postpunk vanguardists. Laceratingly angular, The Scream reminds you what an inclement listen the group was at the start.  

Sure, there’s a couple of Scream tunes as catchy as “Hong Kong Garden” (which appears twice here on the alternate-versions-crammed second disc of BBC session and demos). “Mirage” is a cousin to “Public Image,” while the buzzsaw chord-drive of “Nicotine Stain” faintly resembles The Undertones, of all people. But one’s first and lasting impression of Scream is shaped by the album’s being book-ended by its least conventional tunes. Glinting and fractured, the opener “Pure” is an “instrumental” in the sense that Siouxsie’s voice is just an abstract, sculpted texture swooping across the stereo-field. Switching between serrated starkness and sax-laced grandeur, the final track “Switch” is closer to a song  but as structurally unorthodox as Roxy Music’s “If There Is Something”.

Glam’s an obvious reference point for the Banshees, but The Scream also draws from the moment when psychedelia turned dark: “Helter Skelter” is covered (surely as much for the Manson connection as for Beatles-love), guitarist John McKay’s flange resembles a Cold Wave update of  1967-style phasing, and the stringent stridency of Siouxsie’s singing channels Grace Slick. In songs like the autism-inspired “Jigsaw Feeling,” there’s even a vibe of mental disintegration that recalls bad trippy Jefferson Airplane tunes like “Two Heads.” Another crack-up song, “Suburban Relapse” always makes me think of that middle-aged housewife in every neighbourhood with badly applied make-up and a scary lost look in her eyes. Siouxsie’s suspicion not just of domesticity but of that other female cage, the body, comes through in the fear-of-flesh anthem “Metal Postcard,” whose exaltation of the inorganic and indestructible (“metal is tough, metal will sheen… metal will rule in my master-scheme”) seems at odds with the song’s inspiration, the anti-fascist collage artist John Heartfield.

Scream is another Banshees altogether from the lush seductions of Kaleidoscope and Dreamhouse.  McKay and drummer Kenny Morris infamously quit the group on the eve of the band’s first headlining tour, and their replacements--John McGeoch and Budgie--were far more musically proficient. Yet The Scream, along with early singles such as  ‘Staircase Mystery” and "Playground Twist" and the best bits of Join Hands, does momentarily make you wonder about the alternate-universe path the original Banshees might have pursued if they’d stayed together and stayed monochrome ‘n’ minimal.

The Creatures, Boomerang - Melody Maker, November 11, 1989

4AD - THE DOZEN

eMusic, 2006

INTRO

4AD was founded by Ivo Watts-Russell and Peter Kent in 1979 as an offshoot of the independent label Beggars Banquet. But it soon became its own entity, with a sensibility rooted in the adventurous, open-ended spirit and sonics of 1979, but tilted towards the darker, more existentialist side of post-punk- (Joy Division and the Banshees, rather than the politically militant Gang of Four). Crucial to 4AD’s burgeoning mystique was the lush andenigmatic artwork of Vaughan Oliver, whose role in establishing the label’s identity was as important as Peter Saville’s at Factory. 4AD’s earliest acts were proto-Goth outfits like Bauhaus and The Birthday Party, but the label really blossomed circa 1983 with a sound you could call, not unkindly, Goth-lite: delicately textured and gentler on the ear than the harsh ‘n’ hammy horror-show that Goth proper had degenerated to. 4AD will be forever identified with its signature Goth-lite group the Cocteau Twins, but other key signings of this period include Dead Can Dance and Xmal Deutschland.  Just as the “4AD sound” was getting perilously close to formula, the label reinvented itself in the late Eighties, catching a wave of arty-but-raw, rootsy-but-weird rock coming out of America: the brilliant New England outfits Throwing Muses and Pixies. In the Nineties, the label diversified again, signing shoegazers like Lush while keeping an eye out for American talent like Nick Drake-like melancholics the Red House Painters. The label faded from earshot for much of the Nineties but has recently resurged with critically acclaimed acts like TV on the Radio, Piano Magic, and living legend Scott Walker.

MODERN ENGLISH

After the Snow

1982

Many British groups in the early Eighties struggled to shake off Joy Division’s influence. The cold marble beauty of their sound and the mature majesty it lent to adolescent despair proved so compellingly original it practically condemned a generation to non-originality. Following their Closer-damaged 1981 debut Mesh and Lace, Modern English stepped boldly into the light with a sound that found the interzone between Joy Division-style severity and Orchestral Manoevures in the Dark winsomeness.  The tom-tom churning drums frequently infringe Steven Morris trademark patterns and the bass drones melodiously a la Peter Hook, but the sparkling guitars and soaring synths could be Tears for Fears or Depeche Mode. The bouncy gloom of a tune like the oh-so ironically titled “Life in the Gladhouse” is perfect for Goths who want to dance but keep their deep’n’mysterious cool intact. The sighing chorus “oh me, oh my” verges on comical but the great rolling beat banishes any reservations. Indeed throughout it’s the lithe exuberance of the rhythm section (drummer Richard Brown and bassist Mick Conroy) that makes After the Snow such a  winning slab of Goth-lite. That, and artful arrangements and mad-catchy tunes, such as MTV perennial and wedding-song fave “I Melt With You”.

 

DIF JUZ

Extractions

1985

Far from 4AD’s most famous or celebrated band, instrumental quartet Dif Juz were nonetheless reputedly the Cocteau Twins’ favorite group. Indeed Robin Guthrie produced this, their sole full-length excursion.  Soaked in reverb and echoplex (the group were huge dub fans but thankfully never stray into the faux-skank zone), Dif Juz’s dual guitar interplay resembles an out-of-focus Television or Durutti Column heard from the bottom of a lake. Impressionistic and rhapsodic, the plangent ripples and frenetic flurries scattered by guitarist brothers Dave and Alan Curtis dominate the proceedings, but Harold Budd-like piano peeks through on “Love Insane” (along with an offkey Elizabeth Fraser from the Cocteaus) while Richie Thomas’ saxophone on tunes like “Crosswinds” recalls the serene fjord-scapes of ECM artists like Jan Garbarek. Listen expecting shapely song-structures or clearly signposted melodic pathways, and you’ll be frustrated. But if you surrender to the be-here-now meander of it all, the spangled eddies and lustrous whorls of the Dif Juz sound will carry you up and away.

THIS MORTAL COIL

Filigree & Shadow

1986

With This Mortal Coil, 4AD boss Ivo pioneered a format since adopted by the likes of U.N.K.L.E.--the non-musician with loads of ideas surrounded by a floating pool of musicians and guest collaborators who help realise his vision. In this case, the project largely involved cover versions of obscure Ivo favorites and is perhaps best understand as a form of rock criticism and an act of canon-making. In the mid-Eighties, the choices Ivo made were striking: then largely forgotten post-psychedelic minstrels like Roy Harper, Big Star’s Chris Bell and Alex Chilton, Tim Buckley, Tom Rapp. While the first This Mortal Coil album, 1984’s It’ll End In Tears, features the project’s single most successful reinterpretation (Liz Fraser’s awesome and damn near original-eclipsing version of Buckley’s “Song to the Siren”) Filigree & Shadow has the edge over the debut. Two more Buckley tunes (“I Must Have Been Blind” and “Morning Glory”) are joined by Gene Clark’s “Strength of Strings” and a version of Pearls Before Swine’s “The Jeweller”.  The stand-out remakes aren’t from the singer-songwriter era, though, but postpunk: a clangorous treatment of Talking Heads’ “Drugs” and a version of “Alone” even more glacial and gripping than Colin Newman’s original on his post-Wire solo debut A-Z. Ivo’s overt over-arching concept for This Mortal Coil was a twin celebration of “the beauty of despair” and the timelessness of song. But one also suspects a secret semi-conscious motivation: claiming for 4AD the kind of maverick stature held by Elektra Records in its heyday.

 

HAROLD BUDD ELIZABETH FRASER ROBIN GUTHRIE SIMON RAYMONDE

The Moon and the Melodies

1986

 

No one would claim this is Harold Budd’s finest half-hour (that would be his Brian Eno Ambient Series collaboration The Plateaux of Mirror), nor that it’s the Cocteau Twins’ peak achievement (too many contenders to list). But it is a captivating cul de sac off  the beaten track of both artists’ trajectories. And an apt pairing, given their idyllicism and mutual ardour for effects-saturated texture. Cocteau soundboys Guthrie and Raymonde do a good job standing in for Eno on “Memory Gongs”, cloaking Budd’s piano in a mist of reverb to create an effect like the autumn dawn-mist slowly rising. The instrumentals are nice but inevitably the most breathtaking moments come when Liz Fraser’s voice enters the soundscape. All updrafts, currents, tides and breakers, “Ooze Out and Away, Onehow” is a mermaid torch song, while the shatteringly lovely “Eyes Are Mosaics” would be regarded as a Cocteau Twins classic if it had appeared on one of their “proper” albums.

 

DEAD CAN DANCE

Within the Realm of a Dying Sun

1987

Dead Can Dance’s motto could be “anywhere but here, anywhen but now.”  At once somber and ornamental, their music forges links between Medievalism (DCD’s sound often recalls liturgical music designed for the reverberant spaces of cathedrals) and the non-West (you can hear threads of Middle Eastern, African, and Oriental music in their tapestry of exotica).  This Australian duo is also something of a split personality group. Lisa Gerrard’s voice is a thing of wonder in both senses of the word: awe is her primary emotion, awe is what her piercing ululations strike in the listener. Brendan Perry is closer to the mold of the troubled troubadours that inspired This Mortal Coil, figures like Tim Rose and Scott Walker. This means that his rather portentous lyrics (song titles like “In The Wake of Adversity”) sometimes weigh down his undeniably mellifluous singing. On Within the Realm, the split personality was splayed across the two separate sides of the original vinyl album. Side One frontloads Perry’s doomy ballads and gloomy instrumentals, while the reverse is devoted to Gerrard’s devotionals, like the dervish-whirling “Cantara”. Her singing is so bliss-rich that “In the Dawn of the Iconoclast” was sampled for the Ecstasy anthem “Papua New Guina” by the Future Sound of London.  Later in the group’s career, DCD would cross over to a mass audience of the sort of people that listen to New Age, Gregorian chants, and--euuch--Enya. But Within catches them at the perfect median point between the crypt and the chill-out zone.

 

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Lonely Is An Eyesore

1987

 

A prodigious feat of self-celebration from a label then at its zenith of eminence, this compilation of new tracks specially recorded by the 4AD roster came sumptuously packaged in a lavish-looking cardboard case with a three-way folding inner sleeve. Sonic contents wise, it’s a curate’s egg, ranging from the slight to the sublime. Colourbox’s “Hot Doggie” is  brash but empty dance-rock decorated with movie soundbites, while “Cut the Tree” is a typical slice of The Wolfgang Press’s brand of failed pretentiousness. But Cocteau Twins’ radiant “Crushed”  is one of their best songs ever and  “No Motion” is Dif Juz at their most dynamic,  crashing chords scattering shards of dazzle hither and thither. Best of all is “Fish” by Throwing Muses, one of the truly unique groups of the late Eighties. David Narcizo’s martial but static drums, the gyrating rhythm guitar chords of Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donelly, and Leslie Langston’s sidling bass create a strange feeling of suspended motion last heard in rock on Led Zep’s “Four Sticks”, while Hersh sings in a voice midway between a Stevie Nicks croon and a Gaelic pagan ululation. One of her more opaque verses--“lonely is as lonely does/lonely is an eyesore/the feeling describes itself”--provides the compilation’s name.

 

 

COCTEAU TWINS

Blue Bell Knoll

1988

 

It’s so hard to pick a Cocteau Twins album as the One. Head over Heels is their early classic, and EPs like Sunburst and Snowblind, The Spangle Maker and Love’s Easy Tears are mid-period highs. Still, Blue Bell Knoll is their most flawless and sustained record. You can hear a smidgeon of Kate Bush on the title track opener, but Fraser soon sheds all ancestral traces to assert her candidacy as one of the five or six most original vocalists of the rock era. Likewise the group, having started out as a sort of soft-core Siouxsie & the Banshees, now mature into a sound without parallel or peer. Lindsay Buckingham to Liz’s Nicks, spangle-maker Robin Guthrie drapes his lover in iridescent canopies of guitarstuff. Fraser’s sculpted gush of liquidized language is almost entirely indecipherable but always sounds rich in private, non-verbalisable meaning.  Sometimes these sweet nothings seem like songs for swooning lovers, sometimes they seem literally like baby-talk, making you imagine an Eskimo mother chirruping to her newborn. The Cocteaus struggled after this album:  when you’ve made songs as sublime as “Carolyn Fingers,” ‘Cico Buff” and “Ella Megablast Burls Forever”  what do you do for an encore? They made a mistaken pop-wards move, Fraser singing first in better enunciated gibberish and then in distinctly plain English. She said so much more when you couldn’t understand a word.

 

 

PIXIES

Doolittle

1989

 

Combining the raw power of The Stooges with a penchant for all-American grotesquerie reminiscent of David Lynch, Pixies seem like an unlikely match for 4AD . But they were an arty group. Singer and main songwriter Black Francis cited the Surrealists as his big crush, and gave them the nod in Doolittle’s opener “Debaser”, the lines “Slicing up eyeballs” and “I am un chien Andalusia” paying homage to the Luis Bunuel film. Given his Charismatic Pentecostal background, it makes sense that Pixies music would be a valve for Francis to vent all his repressions in a "stream of unconsciousness" (as he put it).  The title Doolittle, from the children’s books about the doctor who learns to talk to the animals, suggests the Freudian notion of man as “the sick animal”, sick precisely because he cannot accept his own bestialism. Hence the gorgeously fatalistic “This Monkey’s Gone To Heaven”, “I Bleed” and “Hey,” which bore witness to Francis’ grim fascination with the bare necessities and base fatuities that comprise the biological facts of life to which “we’re chained” -- sex, birth, excretion, death . Others like the rampant “Tame” and heavy-breathing “Dead” revel in the carnal nitty-gritty. Following hard on the heels of the group’s rabid opening salvo Come On Pilgrim and ragged classic Surfer Rosa, this album was Pixies’ peak. After this they veered off into a lighter-and-cuter pop direction, as if scared by the dark voids they’d glimpsed on Doolittle.

 

HIS NAME IS ALIVE

Livonia

1990

 

Where Pixies and Throwing Muses brought something new to 4AD, His Name Is Alive seem transparently to be that rare thing: the American 4AD obsessive, purposefully endeavoring to make music to caress Ivo’s ear-drums.  His Name Is Alive is essentially a solitary obsessive, Warren Defever, drawing on a fluctuating cast of

accomplices to help realise the noises in his head.  Those sounds have a spidery exquisiteness that couldn’t be further from the late Eighties/early Nineties Amerindie norm. The vibe of Livonia (which sounds like a fantastical imaginary land but is named after Defever’s hometown in Michigan) is very much the reclusive studio-whiz alone with his sound-warping boxes. If the effect is sometimes overly precious and forced in its faux-mystery, the culprit is often singer Karin Oliver, who sometimes entrances but often merely grates with her wavery shrillness. Still, Defever’s menagerie of strange processed noises and aberrant guitar parts generally keeps things diverting.

 

ULTRAVIVID SCENE

Joy 1967-1990

1990

 

Signing New York indie rocker Kurt Ralske was another example of 4AD stretching beyond its usual parameters. His music as Ultra Vivid Scene had far more in common with the Sixties-referencing meta-rock of the Jesus & Mary Chain and Spacemen 3 than with the Cocteaus or Dead Can Dance. Like the Spacemen especially, Ralske’s songs play clever games with the language of love, drugs, and religion, equating them as expressions of a human ache to fill the hole at the heart of being with a holy absolute--the sweetest girl, the perfect prescription, God’s grace.  At its least, it’s like Matthew Sweet with hipper reference points, both musically (Velvet Underground, Suicide) and philosophically (Barthes, Bataille). But at its most--“Guilty Pleasure”, “Extra Ordinary”--it’s reminiscent of Prince in his neo-psychedelic mode.  The opening triptych of “It Happens Every Time”, “Staring At the Sun” and “Three Stars” makes for an irresistible salvo of swashbuckling psych, while “Special One,” featuring Pixie Kim Deal’s wonderfully carefree backing vocals, feels as euphoric as mainlining helium.

 

PALE SAINTS

The Comforts of Madness

1990

 

Shoegaze was an obvious fit for 4AD--after all, many of these British bands were inspired by the label’s groups, especially Cocteau Twins and AR Kane.  If Lush were 4AD’s shoegaze-as-pop gambit, Pale Saints were the artier proposition, making music that was dense, at times overwrought, but always interesting. The name “Pale Saints” fits them to a tee. Ian Masters’ blanched vocals have a pure-of-spirit, devotional quality, resurrecting that monk-like quasi-Gregorian chant style introduced by British psychedelic groups like Tintern Abbey. Riddled with imagery of nature and the elements, songs like “Language of Flowers” hark back to the Romantic poets Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. “Sea of Sound” sounds like the missing link between Neu!’s “See Land” and Flying Saucer Attack’s Distance, conjuring mind eye’s images of a pink-and-gold cirrus-streaked skyline at dusk. “A Deep Sleep For Steven” is a cavern of a ballad, its walls daubed with mercury-splash guitar and echoing to the rumble of drums from some remote interior cavity. And “Little Hammer” is a delightful neo-psychedelic oddity, the sepia-tinted melancholy of what sounds like a ghost-town’s out-of-tune piano (but is more likely a hammered dulcimer) offset by incongruously vivacious percussion.

 

SCOTT WALKER

The Drift

2006

 

Ivo first approached his hero Scott Walker back in the mid-Eighties, asking him to sing on the second This Mortal Coil album Filigree & Shadow. Nothing came of it, but perseverance obviously pays off eventually, because twenty years later 4AD got to release the legendary balladeer’s comeback album The Drift. Walker’s four astonishing solo albums of the late Sixties showed that he was a kind of cinematographer of sound, using intricately detailed orchestration, opaque-but-vivid lyrics, and his elegantly anguished voice to paint the kind of motion pictures that scar your memory and fill the subsequent days with a vague feeling of disquiet. With The Drift, the 63 year old Walker clearly aimed to make a work on a par with the great European modernists of film, such as Ingmar Bergman. Accordingly the themes are heavy (songs about the gruesome execution by mob of Mussolini and his lover, about twilight-era Elvis conversing with his dead twin Jesse) while the execution is challenging for artist and listener alike, involving bizarre gambits like pounding sides of dead meat for percussion, horns that caw bleakly like crows, harrowingly atonal string parts, and, on “The Escape”, eruptions of hair-raising demonic laughter. The lyrics that issue from Walker’s peerless mouth--“the slimy stars,” “nose holes caked in black cocaine”--evoke atmospheres of grotesquerie and malaise. The Drift makes Radiohead’s Kid A look like a walk in an extremely sunny park. It is a powerful album, albeit one that is easier to admire than to love. The Drift may not get that many repeat plays but, like one of those great European modernist films, it’s something you’ll want to experience at least once. 

Birthday Party / Nick Cave and the Bad Seed

[from a guidebook to alternative rock, 1995]

Emerging, like some hideous butterfly, from the Bowie-damaged New Wave chrysalis of The Boys Next Door, the Birthday Party were the most abandoned, sensorily deranged Dionysian rock'n'rollers since The Stooges.  But although Nick Cave's self-confessed ur-Text was Funhouse, his grandiose delivery and baroque lyrics were actually closer to Iggy's own model, Jim Morrison.  Like Jimbo, Cave had poetic ambitions that eventually blossomed in his Southern Gothic novel And The Ass Saw The Angel.

The first B. Party LP (actually a compilation of single and EP material, later reissued as Heehaw) sees the band shaking off quirk-out influences like Pere Ubu and Captain Beefheart and getting ever more primal. An  awesomely original sound'n'vison takes shape in macabre ditties like 'Happy Birthday', 'The Friend Catcher' and especially 'The Hair Shirt', where Cave's grotesque vocals are doused in Rowland S. Howard's brimstone gtr.  After this debut, The Birthday Party left Australia for London, pilgrims in search of infernal post-punk clamor.  But instead of kindred extremists, they found the irony-clad poseurs of early '80s New Pop (ABC, Human League etc) with their synths, suits and string sections.  Doubly exiled, The Birthday boys soon gathered around them a cult of those disenchanted by the new regime of health and positivity.  Against this squeaky-clean backdrop, their marauding music shone like a murky beacon of obsession, sickness and debauchery.

 Abjection--the base materiality of fleshly existence-- figures vividly in Cave's lyrics for Prayers On Fire and Junkyard, as a source of both voluptuous allure and skin-scrawling revulsion.  On Prayers, Tracy Pew's scabrous bass is the obscenely throbbing heart of the Birthday Party's itchy, twitchy music of disequilibrium and malaise; he provides both motor and melody in the lust-stricken bacchanal "Zoo-Music Girl", the Artaud-meets-Screaming-Jay-Hawkins paroxysms of "A Dead Song" and the spasming swamp-funk of "King Ink".  Where Prayers is idiosyncratic and eclectic, Junkyard is more homogenous, closer to the live BP's dense frenzy (as heard on *It's Still Living* and *Drunk On The Pope's Blood*). Some tracks are a bit of a turgid slog. Still, 'Big Jesus Trash-Can" and "6 Inch Gold Blade" have a rollicking jazz-punk swing, and the album starts and ends with two absolute BP pinnacles: "She's Hit", where cadaverous guitars frame Cave's grisly gynocidal lyrics ("there is woman-pie in here"), and "Junkyard", whose downward-spiralling noise and opiate imagery ("garbage in honey's sack") seethe and roil like rock's own death throes. Amazingly, the Birthday Party staggered on through two more EP's.  Possibly their finest hour, The Bad Seed is a concentrated spurt of refined dementia, and wickedly witty to boot--from the "fingers down the throat of love" chorus of 'Fears Of Gun' to the Disney-on-bad-acid talking trees of 'Deep In The Woods'.  The patchier '*Mutiny* peaks with the Faulkner-esque psychodrama 'Swampland' and the verminously detail-infested soundscape of 'Mutiny In Heaven'.

After Mutiny, the Party broke up. Rowland S. Howard joined Crime and the City Solution, swathing surrogate-Cave figure Simon Bonney's boomy baritone and moody lyrics with decidedly Doors-y atmospherics; later Howard formed These Immortal Souls, whose ghost-town dereliction paved the way for the country-blues despondency of Mazzy Star.  Nick Cave assembled the Bad Seeds (whose core remains Einsturzende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld on guitar and keyboardist Barry Adamson) for the splendid From Her To Eternity.  Framed in cinematic but still rough-hewn arrangements, Cave staked out some of the themes that would occupy the rest of his career: amorous murder (the title track, "Well Of Misery"), the Artist abandoned or misunderstood by his audience ("A Box For Black Paul", "Avalanche") and Elvis (a cover of "In The Ghetto").  The Firstborn Is Dead plunges deeper into Americana: the 'talking blues' Elvis-myth of "Tupelo", the murder ballad 'Say Goodbye To The Little Girl Tree', homages to Dylan and "Blind Lemon Jefferson", and so on. But Cave's hammy delivery and use of Old Testament lingo make this LP a bit hokey.  Still, the mock-ethnological sleevenotes are a hoot: "The Black Crow King" is the tale of "a king surrounded by followers who have learned to imitate him"--a sly dig at Cave's Goth cult.

1986's all-covers album Kicking Against The Pricks not only recharged Cave's aesthetic battery, it sets the terms of the remainder of his career. Subsequent albums merely juggle different ratios of the three styles on offer here: blues, C&W noir, and what Cave called "entertainment music, although some might call it corn".  A masterful feat of canon-formation and career-realignment, Kicking repositions Cave as showman not shaman. He convincingly brings out a latent dimension of tragic pathos in such '60s melodrama as Gene Pitney's "Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart", Glen Campbell/Jimmy Webb's "By The Time I Get To Phoenix", and even The New Seekers' "The Carnival Is Over".  Later in '86, and clearly on a creative roll, Cave & Co came up with a terrific bunch of original songs in similarly epic vein for Your Funeral...  My Trial.  On the shimmering majesty of the title track, Cave rivals the ruined grandeur of the anti-hero persona patented by folk-blues singer Tim Rose (whose "Long Time Man" is covered here).  Only an acrid strain of misogny (the Biblical rape fantasy of "Hard On For Love", the inner sleeve's Madonna/Whore imagery) mars a masterpiece.

Tender Prey's 'The Mercy Seat' is Cave's last towering moment.  As in 'Long Time Man', he plays a wife-killing convict, his ruminations and no-regrets gusted along by a Velvets wall-of-noise. The rest of the LP is a grab-bag of mostly ill-conceived essays in genres like gospel, garage punk and '70s soul. Tender Prey sets the tone--bitty, dwindling-for what has so far proved to be Cave's artistic twilight.  The Good Son wanders into Neil Diamond terrain (the cover depicts Cave at the grand piano, surrounded by l'il red-headed girls). Some swear by the MOR balladry of "The Ship Song"; most find it a crock of schlock.  Henry's Dream is rawer, but a bore. Let Love In rallies musically (the Bad Seeds' arrangements are deft, humorous, almost poppy), but on the story-telling front it's Cave-by-rote, in-a-rut.  Back in '88, the singer declared: "lyrically, thematically, my work is still chained to the same bowl of vomit". But once upon at time, at least, that puke tasted fresh.