Music Banter - View Single Post - The Bulldog 150
Thread: The Bulldog 150
View Single Post
Old 05-02-2009, 05:08 PM   #210 (permalink)
Bulldog
why bother?
 
Bulldog's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: UK
Posts: 4,840
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by coryallen2 View Post
I envy Bulldogs album reviews also. (I envy Toretordone's)
Believe me, I'm only reasonably coherent with certain genres. This next one should be a bit tricky...

4. Talk Talk - Laughing Stock (1991)

1. Myrrhman
2. Ascension Day
3. After The Flood
4. Taphead
5. New Grass
6. Runeii

First of all, it's worth mentioning that this album features probably my favourite cover artwork. I mean, it's a tree with the birds perched on its branches in the shape of the Earth's continents - what's there not to like!

But let's get things started by saying that Talk Talk's lead singer and guitarist is one of the unsung geniuses of music, and this album is where it shows the most. As their fifth and final album, Talk Talk's Laughing Stock is one of the classic examples of a band completely unrecognisable from its beginnings due to the artistic maturity that prevailed as time went on. From their synth-pop beginnings, which saw them reap the benefits of chart-busters like It's My Life, with their preceding album release (1988's Spirit Of Eden) Talk Talk had, in effectively becoming a vehicle for the creative vision of Hollis and his co-writer, organist Tim Friese-Greene, opted for a much more experimental and left-of-field musical direction. In a nutshell, this was a much more experimental, arty and minimalist post-rock direction than fans and critics alike had become used to. Besides Laughing Stock, Spirit Of Eden is definitely worth a listen too. But for this album, the one which turned out to be Talk Talk's swansong, this artistic direction is explored much more fully and what results is another one of the best and most original albums of all time (not to mention an album that was, along with its predecessor, one of the first mainstream releases to be categorised as post-rock). Picking up where Spirit Of Eden , the recording sessions for this album have taken on a mythical status, with tales of Hollis trying to set the haunting, ethereal mood of the record using candles and incense. It's also worth mentioning that, with the exception of After the Flood, every song was composed by Hollis alone, turning this into something akin to a solo album.

Every track clocks at or over the five minute mark, making for six little treasure troves on music which reveal their full colours more and more as they open up. Myrrhman is one such track and sums up the kinds of musical sentiments you'll find on this album nicely. It's a lo-fi, brooding song which turns the conventional rock-song structural format on its head and features a minimal, religiously-inclined lyric. It's such a gentle and fragile opening to the album, getting by on Hollis' soothing, baritone vocal, his soft and sparingly-used guitar strums and Friese-Greene's atmospheric organ chords during the instrumental break. It passes as gently as a cloud and sets the mood of the album perfectly.

Although that can't exactly be said of the pace and tone. Hot on its heels is the much louder Ascension Day, which tears into the overall sonic picture on the back of some heavy percussion and spiky guitar riffs, in which again Hollis' lyrics, although beautifully-executed again, don't exactly play the largest part. The whole album was recorded live, and this is perhaps where that shows the most obviously (even the string and woodwind sections, which were recorded occasionally throughout the album, were taped live with Talk Talk in the same studio booth). It's a bit of a stormy, slightly surprising moment on an otherwise fairly down-tempo and contemplative record.

After the Flood takes the pace down a few notches, sort of fading into view with its repetitive drumbeat and haunting organ lines which keep it at that slow, evocative kind of tone. By the time Hollis' vocal pops up, the song's already had that hypnotic effect, which only increases as the songs builds towards its first climax, where Hollis sings another abstract verse in "shake my head - turn my face to the floor - dead to respect - to be born - lest we forget who lay". Following is a heavily-distorted guitar break before this brilliant track repeats the lyric prior to fading out, all the while keeping that same pounding, gloriously minimalist rhythm. Bloody fantastic 'song' this.

In the same sort of vein as Myrrhman before it, Taphead is another track so soft and radiantly atmospheric that it takes on such a hauntingly beautiful quality with Friese-Greene's moody harmonium chords and Hollis' soothing almost to the point of being whispered vocal, before more colour and shape is slowly revealed by another distant-sounding, skewed rhythmic backing, all of which fits Hollis' musings on dying "in sin or born again - with will to wind and wander climb" perfectly. Another gloriously atmospheric slice of post-rock.

As is the following, of-epic-length New Grass, which again shows that kind of juxtaposition between the rhythm section's performance and the rest of the music somehow being tied together by the mood of the piece. Where Taphead conjures a picture of the calm after the storm, New Grass takes on the sonic guise of the sun bursting through the clouds, with slightly livelier rhythmic pulse, carefree-sounding guitar licks and higher-pitched organ tones giving off an air of a kind of dreamy optimism. Again, it's full of instrumental breaks with a scarce use of lyrics that helps get the atmosphere and mood of the piece across that much more.

To put the lid on the album is the calm and contemplative Runeii, which kind of eases the record along to its conclusion. It's another show in an instrumental sense of very loose guitar notes, softly-sung vocals and colourful swathes of organ which just sort of rolls in and out of view.

Like the whole album, it's very loosely-structured too. On the whole, Laughing Stock comes across as a studio project into which the most thought and artistic precision went during the recording phase. A lot of this sounds improvised (to these ears anyway), given the jazzy reminiscence of the instrumental breaks which feature in every song. Those and the odd time signatures which are brought to one's attention by the odd rhythms throughout set this miles from conventional rock music. Somehow, an absolute masterpiece of emotion, atmosphere, colour and mood is made from such a minimalist approach to songwriting and recording. It really is quite a bizarre album, and one I've found it hard to put into words why I love it so much. Calling it a hypnotic masterpiece would go some way towards explaining it. Whip out a good book, brew a nice cup of coffee and just listen to this album in the dead of the night from end to end. Unless you really can't stand something you could call post-rock, the chances are that you won't regret it.



Last edited by Bulldog; 05-02-2009 at 05:22 PM.
Bulldog is offline   Reply With Quote