NOTHING THAT CONCERNS YOU

The rise of the internet has, of course, allowed geeks of every stripe to pursue their inner geekdom.  And, let’s face it – everyone’s a geek.  In my own pursuit of post-punk geekiness, I’ve noticed these past many years that almost any article written about The Sound will include a declaration of surprise and disgust by the author that this band was pretty obscure, even by post-punk standards. 

“Why weren’t they as big as U2?!”  sad little people pound out on their keyboards.  “Or the Cure?!  Or Joy Division?!  Or goddamn Echo and the goddamn Bunnymen?!”

So I will now answer that question.  You ready?  You sitting down?  Have you taken your heart meds?......

They were fairly pedestrian.

Look, they had good songs, and they made good albums, but they had a schizo manic-depressive, suicidal lead singer/guitarist/lyricist, for christ’s sake, and yet about 75% of their music was ridiculously……. polite.  Sure, they had songs with grit and bite and tension, but those songs were not the majority of their oeuvre.

Let us look……

JEOPARDY – good songs hampered by small budget production.  A thin, tinny sound.  Lots of energy, not much nuance.

FROM THE LION’S MOUTH – a great leap forward in sound and, again, very good songs, but this is where the lack of musical tension starts to become apparent.  Some of the songs have it, while others seem overly concerned with giving each instrument its space and creating no real musical friction.

ALL FALL DOWN – deliberately created as the “difficult” album because the record company wanted hit singles.  Now, these songs might be considered difficult if you’re Taylor Swift or Mantovani, but if you’re a UK post-punk band from the mid 80s, they’re fairly pedestrian.  Again, they’re good tunes, but if this is the heaviest stuff you’ve got then no one has any right to complain about not being as big as Joy Division.

SHOCK OF DAYLIGHT/HEADS AND HEARTS – some weaker stuff on these two releases, and also a return of the poppier sound (which they never really moved that far away from to begin with).  Not a crime by any means as, again, some of these songs are quite awesome, but what was the point of making the difficult album again?

THUNDER UP – a pretty impressive last release.  The strong writing continues, as does (unfortunately) the production and arranging that levels everything out.

Their myriad live releases were all very energetic, and they cut loose more on stage than they did in the studio, but even these releases seem a  little ordinary and MOR when compared to their contemporaries.

I liked these guys enough to collect all their releases and listen to them often enough to form an opinion, but I’m just sayin’, there’s a reason they’re as culty a cult band as they are.  They had some pretty stiff competition between ’79 and ’87.  They could run with the pack, but they were never gonna be alpha dog.