In between other things, I’ll be sharing my views on the music of Siouxsie and the Banshees, including the Creatures and Glove side projects. As with the other catalogues I’ve reviewed, I’ll be looking at the original album releases as opposed to the bonus-track laden reissues (not that those bonus tracks aren’t without merit).
Released: November, 1978
Lineup: Siouxsie Sioux (vox), Steve Severin (bass), John McKay (guitars), Kenny Morris (drums)
Tracklist Side 1:
Pure
Jigsaw Feeling
Overground
Carcass
Helter Skelter
Tracklist Side 2:
Mirage
Metal Postcard
Nicotine Stain
Suburban Relapse
Switch
Recorded after the release of debut single, Hong Kong Garden, and also produced by Steve Lilywhite. One of the first salvos of the post-punk era, The Scream contains elements of punk and glam, and with elements of the macabre, it set the stage for what became goth. And did so a year before Bauhaus hit the stands with Bela Lugosi’s Dead.
In terms of subject matter, the lyrics run from the mundane (Nicotine Stain) to, indeed, the macabre (Carcass, Suburban Relapse). I first got into the Banshees in ‘81 or ‘82 and started collecting their singles and having friends tape their albums. I’m sure I had this on a cassette with the second LP, Join Hands, on the other side. I listened to their music a lot, but the full albums I found really difficult to get into. Listening to this one now, I find it almost comforting in its familiarity, but surprising at the same time. The buried saxophones in Suburban Relapse and Switch feel lifted from a Roxy Music song (which kind of makes sense – Sioux and Severin, the band’s only stable members from start to finish, met at a Roxy gig in ‘75). Kenny Morris’ spacious drumming leaves so much room for the other members to thrive as well. I think Severin is underrated as a bassist, possibly because he makes the rhythms feel so obvious.
In between there’s the almost obviously punk cover of the Beatles’ Helter Skelter and the almost Can-like Metal Postcard. I’ve always found the English version of Metal Postcard a little strange, because the version I had, and played steadily for several years, was the German-language 45 (Mittageisen) released the following year.
Overground and Suburban Relapse are both about the trades between outward normality and an interior that doesn’t match expectations. This acknowledgement of the human balancing act was one of those things that fueled the goth aesthetic. Jigsaw Feeling almost foregoes the outward normality and addresses the splits inside, “One day I’m feeling total / the next I’m split in two.”
The album’s opening track, Pure, fades in with a slow build of bass, then guitar, then a wordless moan from Siouxsie that sounds as though it’s coming from down a long hallway. Jigsaw Feeling comes in with bass triplets and a single repeated guitar chord for the first 40 seconds. Combined with the almost two minutes of Pure, it’s two and half minutes before the album’s first words, ‘Send me forwards, say my feelings.’ A bold move for a debut album. David Bowie didn’t try the same trick until StationToStation, 12 years into his career.
By the time the album concludes with the 7-minute Switch, an indictment of science, medicine and religion for the ways in which they direct and confuse and experiment with no real understanding of how people work, the listener has been on a journey. A deeper lyrical analysis might reveal an inner-directed childhood point of view in some tracks followed by the more adult concerns (infused with that childhood confusion) found in the last three tracks.
Next up: Join Hands
The Belew lyric Facts of Life, which closed out side A is another false start on this album. (Does one even know if this album was sequenced for LP release? Not I.) It’s musically interesting, but lyrically weak. The foolish aphorisms that don’t lead anywhere lead us to believe that Belew was just noodling some more, while giving the illusion of some kind of profundity. ‘Like Abraham and Ishmael fighting over sand/Doesn’t mean you should, just because you can/That is a fact of life…Nobody knows what happens when you die/Believe what you want, it doesn’t mean you’re right/That is a fact of life.’ I think the conclusion the lyrics draw in each verse isn’t supported by the arguments – at a poetic level, it would be more satisfying if he’d left the title phrase out of the sung lyric.
While half the album’s running time is spent exploring themes they addressed in the mid-1970s – FraKctured and LTIA IV, this makes an odd kind of sense. Fripp and company are holding on and expanding the original genius KC brought to the musical landscape. Those things that are in a sense at the heart of KC from the start. Listening more closely to FraKctured, it has in its arpeggios some almost Mike Rutherford-like passages before delving back into the noise. It’s a very curious mix of things.
The instrumental B’Boom follows. After a short introduction, percussionists Bruford and Mastelotto go head to head. This is the first time KC had had two percussionists since that brief period around the recording of Larks’ Tongues In Aspic and this kind of interplay in Crimson got lost again after this album until Fripp regrouped with three drummers in the front line. The song, at least in its title, brings us back to a long improv performed on the LTIA Tour at the Zoom Club called Z’Zoom. (Note that the Zoom Club gig also included two more improvisations: Zoom and Zoom Zoom which together run for over an hour. The band might be referring back to them in the tracks Vrooom and Vrooom Vrooom. I might have to delve back into that recording.)
Joe Jots 