The end of 1992 found Love Child touring an album, Witchcraft, which had received decent reviews in their native U.S. but which had, according to Peel received a slamming in Melody Maker, while he himself had found the album to be a touch flat. I agree that it doesn’t hit the heights of the previous year’s double-length extravaganza, Okay? though as ever with Love Child, the high points are very high.
Stumbling Block is one those high points starting out as it does with a blast of guitar which sounds like someone chainsawing the sky wide open - an effect brought about by Alan Licht inserting a metal sheet between his guitar strings. This is followed by an alternate guitar line which sounds like the entire population of Heaven parachuting en masse through the rip in the sky back down to earth. From such stratospheric open dynamics, the track piles forward noisily and relentlessly with Love Child seeming to conjure both the Rapture and the Apocalypse simultaneously.
In counterpoint to this though are Rebecca Odes’s somewhat downbeat lyrics:
Tie my shoes together and tie my hands behind my back....I dig myself into a hole....I’d rather shut the blinds so I can’t see the light at all and more in that vein, as though she was mindful of the fact that Love Child would end the year touring Europe with Codeine and needed a song to reflect their tour mates output. Certainly, the track is sung from the perspective of someone who merely wants to hide away while the world achieves spiritual transcendence/oblivion outside. With her vocals pushed low in the mix, Odes is no match for the guitar pyrotechnics which drive the song on. This mixture of drowsy, somnambulant vocals pulling down the blinds and closing the shutters while a guitar razes everything to the ground formed the basis of one of my favourite early Britpop songs, Resigned by Blur, though it’s fair to say that that track sounds like the clear-up operation after the inferno that is Stumbling Block.
At the 4:20 mark the track begins to burn itself out and it literally ends in a splutter as the energy is finally expended, but it certainly doesn’t sound like a band in its death throes. The night before recording this edition of John Peel’s Music, he had seen a Love Child/Codeine gig and had been so impressed by Love Child’s set and especially Licht’s guitar work that he planned to go back and re-listen to Witchcraft and see whether he had misjudged it. But ultimately, it appears that he didn’t feel that he had. Love Child recorded a Peel Session while they were in the UK in December 1992. Alan Licht spoke positively about it in a 2018 interview with Tone Glow, but it was never broadcast, apparently because no-one remembered that the session had been recorded, least of all Peel. By the new year, Love Child disbanded though Odes and Licht did reunite via Zoom a year or so back to record a cover of The Modern Lovers song, Don’t Let Our Youth Go To Waste.
Lyrics copyright of Rebecca Odes.
Videos courtesy of Thebeardsuk and Persona Non Grata Records.
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