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Exploring the Back Catalogue: First Impressions, Self-Titled

The general vibe about this album from other people had been fairly negative – including from my husband, who sampled it in a record shop when it came out but decided he didn’t like the sound. But you know what, I’ve just given it a spin and I like it.

Just clarifying – looking at what’s been written out there, on Reddit and forums and in the music press, I get the general impression that quite a few of the original fans (or at least the most vocal ones) were never really happy again post-Wish (or some of them, post-Pornography). The extra-whiny complaining began with Wild Mood Swings, and never really ended. Sometimes I think that it’s common for people get stuck in a perceived golden musical age of their own teenage years, possibly because that’s when everything is fresh, and a lot of neural connections are being made, and people go through a lot of feelings. Once you’ve grown up, you may not be quite so easy to move or inspire again, particularly if there’s a tendency to nostalgia, and a dissatisfaction with the present in general. And the problem may actually be that, and not the music.

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: Wish Wrap-Up

MANIPULATION, ANYONE? Unlike most of the other tracks on this album, Wendy Time is not a lovely track to listen to, but if you’re writing a tune about shameless manipulation and terrible pick-up lines, you probably don’t want a lovely tune – but one that reflects the nausea-inducing scenario related. And in that sense, the tune really fits, its unpleasantness and discord appropriate for the topic. Although this is not a song I’d go out of my way to listen to for its aesthetic appeal, I do applaud its inclusion on this album for thematic reasons.

There’s a whole swag of love-gone-wrong songs on Wish – and here’s one situation that could head that way but never does, because it’s nipped in the bud by the target of the manipulation, who is wise to it – which has me cheering, because so many people fall for this sort of thing.

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: Wish, Love Gone Wrong & Love Gone Right

LOVE GONE WRONG, LET ME COUNT THE WAYS (finale) Cut is a jagged sort of number, a lament for a dying relationship.

Sometimes it’s like that and there’s nothing you can do – Sensate Focus won’t fix this and psychotherapy doesn’t look good here either; along with other tools they’re better at preventing this kind of disconnection that trying to fix something that’s broken into two separate pieces.  Sometimes something is just dead, and all you can do is write a dirge.  The sad thing here is that the death of the thing is so lopsided, as it so often is – with one party checked out, and the other wishing it wasn’t so.  All that you can do then is to remember that there’s lots of other people you can connect with – and that thinking you’re never going to feel again like you felt about the person who checked out is a bit of a grass-is-greener thing, and a bit like when you’ve had a big lunch and you can’t imagine ever feeling hungry again – because you will.

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: Wish, Toxic Families & Mass Communication Bards

The problem is that we’re not doing enough meaningful interaction — and that our social groups have become too large for our brains.  We’re evolutionarily set up for small-tribe living, and we’re actually living in complex societies with millions of people in them now.  It’s impossible to have working relationships with a million other people — your brain can handle interacting regularly with a “tribe” of maybe 100-200 people in a meaningful way, at a stretch.  More than that, and it gets stressful.  In cities, people tend to avoid each other; and one of our modern dilemmas is that we’re the loneliest we’ve ever been, even though surrounded by an ocean of other humans — too many humans.

And many of us aren’t connecting with each other as much as we were necessarily connecting when we were hunter-gatherers, or even agricultural villagers.  In recent decades, with increasing job insecurity in the West and many people forced to up and move many times to pursue the next job, we’re getting socially dislocated many times over, and a good support network necessarily becomes harder to maintain.

People who are into sports or religion generally get little plug-in communities when they relocate; but if you’re not into those things, or you’re introverted, or have social anxieties, or your daytime job puts a hundred people into your face every day and you can’t face going to choir group or Scottish Highland dancing or the photography club or whatever else you might be interested in on a weeknight after that because all you want to do is be on your own and read a book, then you may end up having few social contacts that aren’t around your work…

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: Wish, Triggers & Ye Olde Venerated Man-Baby Philosophers

I’m really enjoying our new acquisition Wish, on multiple levels – musically there’s so much on there that’s lovely, and even the stuff that’s not I think is the way it is to reinforce the story told by the lyrics – e.g. Wendy Time isn’t exactly a beautiful song, but the quacking Donald-Duck type guitars and the dissonance and ner-ner-ness of the thing just goes with the portrait of an insufferable attempt at manipulation, which the narrator is wise to, which in turn makes me go, “Hooray!” because how many people fall for that, not just once but repeatedly…

It’s mostly like aromatherapy for your ears (not roses or geranium, and nothing fake with phthalates from the chemistry lab either, more like sandalwood and boronia), while the lyrics to most of the songs are written with great care, go well as stand-alone poetry, and make you think. If there’s a main theme, I think it’s interpersonal relationships and the human condition…but I would think that – it’s like, “What do you see?”

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: KMKMKM Fine Lens

Note: Post in early development and needed as spaceholder to keep things chronological!

Today I’m going to start a fine-lens look at Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, including the lyrics, which I forgot to get around to on the original forum thread because Wish arrived in our remote rural mailbox and I got highly enthused from the first listen. So, there will be a few well-deserved extra entries on that in this curation of my open journal Exploring the Back Catalogue, before I return to the “reprints” and additional commentary on Wish, and then continue with the in my view excellent self-titled album, which was next in the mailbox and which I got partly through before transferring the whole shebang onto my blog!

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Modern Fairytales: Rock’n’Roll & Space Aliens

The aliens decide that Wednesday morning is a good time to visit Roger’s house, since it coincides with his regular slot of life modelling for the community fine arts group. Besides, it’s likely he will follow it up as usual with lunch out and then the weekly Wednesday afternoon meeting of the local branch of the International Society for Echinoderm Appreciation, which holds regular coastal excursions in good weather, and aquarium workshops in inclement weather. This gives our aliens plenty of time for another little field trip.

Beaming in, they find themselves in the living room: Sofas, coffee table, bookshelves, comfortable armchairs – one of them with a book on the armrest and an ottoman drawn up. On closer examination, the book turns out to be a heavily annotated copy of Lol Tolhurst’s autobiography – lots of underlining, question marks, sets of multiple exclamation marks, additional information, cartoons of pigs with wings, and recurring doodles of an enigmatic figure with black spiky hair.

This is very interesting, but not the main thing they have come to see, for these aliens are music enthusiasts through and through, and have already had a great time with Reeves’ guitar collection and Jason’s drum kit. They look for and rapidly locate Roger’s music room, ooohing and aaahing over the grand piano, the Medieval pipe organ and the quality range of electronic keyboards assembled.

Our aliens discover that keyboards suit their anatomical idiosyncrasies far better than guitars do (though not quite as well as drums)…

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: HOTD Wrap-Up

JAWS If you want to know what the musical theme was about, read the previous instalment. With this present instalment, I’m wrapping up my look at The Head On The Door.

What’s that doing here??? That’s not The Cure!

Today, the microscope is back out and we’re looking at the lyrics for Push.

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Exploring the Back Catalogue: HOTD & Powderkegs

ONCE UPON A POWDERKEG It’s so much more pleasant to write about music you love than about music that leaves you lukewarm or that you have issues with, but when you’re going through anyone’s back catalogue, unless you have extremely wide tastes and don’t get analytical with lyrics, you’re likely to find a mix of both. This is just like the Smorgasbord Analogy I wrote about on Exploring “Join the Dots”. No one person can or should be expected to eat and enjoy every dish that’s on offer at a buffet.