Sinister: Plastic soul man, plastic soul

[Nick.Dastoor at xxx.uk]

Never got round to pulling this into any kind of coherent whole, but for anyone
who's interested...

'I fought in a war' is the best possible way to start the album.  A song to make
you stare blankly at the wall and feel like something important is happening.
I'm so glad it's not whimsical like previous unaccompanied breathy-vocal album
openers, as it immediately marks the album out as different; the superficial
similarity drawing attention to a change of focus in a more interesting way than
if, say, it had started with a blast of feedback.  The ambiguous, melancholic
tone of the lyric seems to set the agenda for a darker things to come.  To me,
the failure of the album is in failing to fulfil this promise.   Oh, and Thank
you Katy, for making me unable to get Duran Duran's 'Ordinary World' out of my
head whenever I listen to it now.

'The Model'.  *Sigh*.   So many words, such wonderful words, with all those
lyrical and musical twists and turns.   I'll miss it if he never writes songs
like this again.   The kind of lyrics I can't really interpret at all and yet
which make perfect sense all the same.  And the harpischord is just fantastic.
Chris is the real star of this album, I think.

I'd love to meet the people who like 'Beyond the Sunrise'  They must be totally
mad and it's always fun to meet mad people.  Unless you think they're going to
threaten you with violence in which case it's just mildly diverting.  What on
earth is the point of this track?  Its ponderous style and the strained vocals
just don't fit on the album and the whole thing just seems like a horrendously
stylised experiment that should never ever have been included.

Everyone likes Sarah, as someone said. 'Waiting for the moon to rise' is
glorious.  It's more than just pretty.   Unlike some of the songs, the
orchestration doesn't seem at all forced.  The whole thing glides along
wonderfully, evoking a mood I can't put a name to.  Lines like "Cause in my
dreams the things I'm wishing for keep coming true" could be banal in a
different context but they just sound heartbreaking lovely here.   Would have
sounded great as the penultimate track, but you can't have everything.

I suppose 'Don't Leave The Light On Baby' is the heart of the album.  The
defining sound of Stuart getting less wordy and more soulful.  "My baby called
me up to say Don't call me love.  Don't call me / That's not all she said."
That gets me ever time.  Aside from that he lyrics are a *little* too
under-written for this to be the way that I would want the band to go full-time,
but I shouldn't be churlish.  It's a great track.

Hmm... I have real problems with 'The Chalet Lines'.  It's like a trial you have
to go through each time you hear the album.  Does it really tell us anything
about rape?  It just seems to be a succession of cliches about the way women who
have been raped feel in its aftermath.   If it were a woman singing about it
from personal experience, then maybe it would different, but Sensitive Stan as
Stuart is, I just don't think it serves any purpose, which to my mind makes it
gratutitous.  No doubt it's better read as a personal evocation of his own
feelings, but I just end up resenting it for being so... boring.  I don't feel
the emotion that someone else remarked upon at all.  At least it's short.

'Woman's Realm' annoys me.  To me it really sounds like "Here's the obligatory
B&S rave up".  It's *OK*, but something of a lower-grade retread  of 'The Boy
with the Arab Strap' and 'Dirty Dream Number Two'.   The lyrics don't really
grab me at all.  I keep trying to listen to them properly, but they just seem so
underwritten and reliant on B&S-speak, not telling any kind of coherent story.
Although I can't quite follow 'The Model' either, I'm convinced in that song
that Stuart knows exactly what he's on about.  He seems to be coasting on this
one.  To make it worse, the string arrangements and organ line just seem
uninspired and overdone, as they're desperately trying to compensate for the
lyric's lack of direction.    Isobel's verses brighten things a little, but not
enough.

I'm honestly mystified by 'Family Tree'.  The lyric is so *astonishingly*
asinine that I actually get a guilty pleasure from the whole thing.  When it
gets the final lines in which Isobel asserts that she's not here to fool around
by having babies or becoming an accountant, the whole thing takes on an air of
nonsensical menace that's somehow hard to resist.  Quite what she's saying she
*is* here to do is never quite explained.  Maybe I'm being sexist -  the male
rebel without a cause is an enduringly romantic figure.   "We took chemistry,
biology and maths / I want poetry, music and some laughs".  Jesus.  And it's
written by Stuart.  Is he trying to make her look stupid?  I can't believe he
is.  In which case I have to fall back on the theory that he's just  a bit of a
nutter.  Pretty arrangement though.

'There's Too Much Love'.  I can hardly believe that at first I thought of this a
bit like I thought of 'Woman's Realm' .  Now I think it's the most successful
example on the album of the sound the band have attempted to develop.  Done
differently, the lyrics might have fitted a much more minor track, but as it is
they make up a curious kind of personal anthem that hits all the right places.
Who said he can't sing?   It doesn't just end the album on the right note
musically;  it also has the feel of a closing track that's the last word on all
that's gone before.  The con is that to my mind what's gone before *doesn't*
actually lead up to this at all.  The first and last songs frame an album that
was never recorded. Don't get me wrong, it's wonderful to hear these new songs
after so long.  Some of them are going round and round my head.  *But* even more
than TBWTAS, I don't think they hang together as an album.  With the first two
albums, the songs fitted together perfectly in a completely organic way.  Now
that there's so much collaboration and stylistic variety (and the songs are
generally much less folksy, more structured and considered ) the sequencing of
their albums has become really important.  The band don't seem to have come to
terms with this.  Maybe if the album were longer then it would be easier to
accept it as a kind of sprawling treasure trove, but at 40 mins, it seems like
it's over before it's really got going.

For what it's worth, I think the whole thing works better with the running order
I came up with:

1.   I Fought In A War
2.   The Model
3.   The Wrong Girl
4.   Family Tree
5.   Woman's Realm
6.   Beyond The Sunrise
7.   Don't Leave The Light On Baby
8.   The Chalet Lines
9.   Nice Day For A Sulk
10.  Waiting For The Moon To Rise
11.  There's Too Much Love

Still got that awkward 'Chalet Lines' - 'Nice Day for a Sulk / the girl smells
of milk' segue, but what *do* you follow a song about rape with?

That's all...

Nick xx


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