As with the previous Moonshake track to be played by Peel, Sweetheart was one of “hers”, so consequently it takes on strange, mysterious, disarming textures. Just like Little Thing, it feels like what we’re hearing are the mechanics of music making - here evidenced both by Miguel Moreland’s clattering drumwork and kronky guitars which sound like they’re trying to hawk up a lungful of phlegm - while, tantalisingly heard in the background, we can make out the performance of Margaret Fiedler’s subdued vocal. Her performance walks the line between sex kitten and femme fatale, but it was too quiet for me to be able to make out whether her character was giving a come on or a kiss off. The high, fluting backing vocals suggest the former, but the stabs of acid jazz brass suggest the latter. It may be hard to pin down but it all sounds seductively brilliant.
Indeed, as the blog heads into the home strait of Peel’s 1992 shows, and I reflect on one of the long forgotten aims of this blog to buy as many of the records that caught my ear as possible, I find myself pondering that the Eva Luna album may be one of the few from Peel’s 1992 playlists that I would actually want to own. Discogs UK dealers may be having turkey for Christmas after all.
Having recently brought you tracks which deal with depression/isolation and suicide, it’s a relief to be able to lighten the mood with some Haitian party music courtesy of Coupé Cloue. I don’t think the childhood memory of the song’s title suggests anything too traumatic, though full translations will be gratefully received.
After a couple of recent instances where my teenaged affection for Therapy? wan’t strong enough to include tracks of theirs played by John Peel across the autumn/winter of 1992 on this blog, it comes as something of a relief to be able to embrace Perversonality like a newly met, long-lost friend. If that analogy sounds like an oxymoron, I should explain that I had never heard Perversonality before hearing it on this edition of John Peel’s Music but straightaway it reminded me of exactly why I liked Therapy? back in the day.
All the elements of classic Therapy? are there: strong opening guitar line, funky bass, drumming which feels like a character in its own right, Andy Cairns with another cosplaying serial killer style vocal, lyrical themes of emotional conflict Love you and I hate you in the same breath etc, only for a definitive verdict to be arrived at by the 2:10 mark and which heralds a rapidly building sense of anguish/mania; the aural equivalent of someone prepping themselves for a suicide attempt. This is followed by a burst of guitar which sounds like emergency room procedures desperately trying to bring the victim back to life, only to level off and guide the listener safely through to a sampled testimony from what sounds like a support group meeting for emotionally vulnerable people. Therapy?’s use of samples was always one of their most fascinatingly striking qualities because, as is the case here, it helped to ground their songs into some kind of relatable reality. The sample used here feels perfectly in sync with a track whose object of affection and disgust appears to be Cairns himself. People often got hurt, rejected and damaged within the narrative of Therapy?’s songs, and that damage was often turned inward.
It’s naughty of me to describe Cairns’s vocal style as cosplaying. Regardless of whether he sang from experience or as a persona, his voice was the sound of scars which were either inflicted on other people’s bodies or his own psyche. For a brief period, Therapy?’s music helped me to both land and absorb my own blows, trivial though they were. Perversonality is the first track of theirs that I’ve heard in a long time which reminds me of how valuable that was for me.
This was a knife-edge, borderline inclusion and I can well imagine that if I ever had put it onto a metaphorical mixtape, I’d be impatient with it 9 plays out of every 10. Not to mention the fact that the title is spelled incorrectly - but I’ll have to go along with their foolishness this time, I guess.
Whether they wanted the label or not, New York band Codeine were the anointed kings of slowcore in the early 1990s, a fact which John Peel would wryly reference when cueing Realize up on this programme. What seems to be apparent is that Codeine were pretty faithful to the tenets of slowcore during their 5 year career. Not that they lacked range, they could do loud and they could do strange, but they never really did fast. This meant that they provided a valuable offshoot to the prevailing sound of American rock music in the early 1990s: all the angst and introspection of grunge but without the harsh, abrasiveness of Nirvana et al. This really was music for people who kept the curtains drawn against the afternoon sun all day, every day. There’s no rage here, only melancholy mixed with fear, exhaustion and fragility. If you sprinkle some sugar and food colouring on it, you’ve virtually got twee pop. For myself, I can only take it in small doses and that’s still the case even after listening to - and enjoying in parts - Codeine’s debut album, Frigid Stars LP (1990), which FACT Magazine, the same people who felt that Selected Ambient Works 85-92 was the best album of the 90s, also found space to include on their list. It was placed at 97th on their list which is where I would put it if someone held a gun to my head and told me to compile a list of what I felt the best albums of the 90s were but ensuring that I put Frigid Stars LP on there somewhere. I’d likely have it between Left of the Middle by Natalie Imbruglia and One Love by Delakota.
Realize was intended to be part of Codeine’s follow-up album to Frigid Stars LP, but in 1992 there seemed to be something in the air which stopped bands from successfully recording sophomore efforts after making their names with commercially or critically successful debut albums. British rock fans of a certain musical persuasion will be able to tell you the story - like an old folk tale passed down these last 29 years - of how Blur tried and failed to record a follow up to their Top 10 debut album, Leisure, and nearly suffered a premature dissolution as well as squandering EMI’s time and budget. Well, through an odyssey of studios dotted around America’s East Coast and on a tighter budget than Blur’s, Codeine went through the same fruitlessly, abortive process thanks to a mixture of bad luck, bad decisions, perfectionism and technical incompatibility between the sounds they heard in their heads and the sounds the studios actually made. However, unlike Blur, who went back to the drawing board, resurrected the best of the content they had tried to record in 1992 and supplemented it with newly written songs to produce Modern Life is Rubbish in 1993, Codeine did have enough completed material from the sessions to put them into an EP which they titled Barely Real and which featured Realize as both its opening track and breakout single release.
With its unchanging tempo, Realize feels like a first draft idea, but what the band achieve successfully with it is to filter through the track a tangible sense of ennui and drift that, for all my carping about it, successfully draws the listener in to its unhappy mood. I can sense just how comforting the wash of John Engle’s guitar and the gentle implorations of Stephen Immerwahr’s vocal must have been to listeners who either found the weight of the world too heavy to bear most days or as implied by the line, Look at me just with your eyes were desperately, shyly trying to catch the attention of the love of their life. People needed the protection which a track like Realize offered. It would have been churlish to deny it to them back then, and equally churlish to deny it to them now.
Video courtesy of tommygunx. Lyrics are copyright of their authors.
Having started 1992 by releasing one of the year’s most striking 12-inch singles, Richard D. James ended the year by releasing his debut album. Seven years in the making, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 was a collection of ambient electronica tracks recorded by James, predominantly live and in many instances, on nothing more complex than a cassette. It took the ambient templates set down by the likes of Brian Eno and incorporated loose elements of acid house and techno - arguably the two key non-verbal musical genres to emerge over the period 1985-92 - with a subtlety and immense technical precision which helped birth a new sub-genre: Intelligent Dance Music (IDM). Having listened to the album for the first time yesterday, I found myself reflecting that the tone of the album sounded familiar, mainly because so many other artists jumped in on the sound in the intervening years. For a viewpoint on why Selected Ambient Works 85-92 was regarded as a gamechanger on its release, I recommend reading factmag.com’s selection of the 100 best albums of the 1990s, not least because in their view, it was the best album of the decade.
On its own, Schottkey 7th Path is a pleasant, contemplative piece of music. It conjures a dubby, slightly jungalist vibe and on a mixtape, would represent a welcome moment of breathing space. Heard in context of the album, it sits between We Are the Music Makers, another track which showed just what an influence Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory had on dance musicians. and Ptolemy. These are two of the more upbeat tracks on the album and both invite the listener to lose themselves in the collective consciousness of the crowd. Schottkey 7th Path provides the lifeline to one’s individuality among the masses. It’s an aural Blue Room for trippers to decompress before throwing oneself back onto the dancefloor. If I ever find myself back in a job where I have to commute into the city and charge around in the pursuit of a living, I may make this part of the breakfast time playlist. A moment of individual calm before submersion into the motorway or train carriage.
