Sonic Youth - 'Daydream Nation'
1988

It's a lot more listenable than Bad Moon Rising or Confusion Is Sex. If their previous two albums, EVOL and Sister can be thought of as a progressive learning process in how to write actual, listenable and even catchy songs while being artsy and postmodern and dissonant, this is the final exam. Part of the trick is that they make sure they play a nice, jangly, even jaunty chord progression with energetic drumming backing it up for a reasonable period of time before dedicating the middle section of most songs to jamming egg cutlets under their strings, or whatever it is that Moore and Ranaldo do to their guitars to make those odd noises. Or they turn in a pretty arpeggiated section with neat spacey tones and layers after beating their humbuckers with chopsticks. Either way, there's always something in there on each song that rewards you for listening to the noise sections. It's pretty much the pattern for all future mainline Sonic Youth releases, right up until the present day, and it's a good way to go about putting together an album. It takes avant garde post-rock, punk and noise roots and welds them together into something that's actually huge and gorgeous and even exultant at its best, rather than simply odd and risky for epileptics.

All in all, it's amazing how little the band has changed since this album - it has pretty much the same mix of pretty, sublime, pretty sublime and plain annoying moments as nearly every album since (your mileage will vary). I'd submit that, since the late 80s the Sonics have been in as much of a holding pattern as, say, post-1916 Motorhead, but who will listen to me? On the one hand, hipsters will shoot me down because I am a metalhead, on the other hand metalheads will ignore me because everyone else who rates this album disses metal and being able to play guitar solos. Oh dear.

To sum up, a good blend of the elitist and the populist strands of Sonic Youth's sound. An immediate, persuasive album that sums up a whole vein of 80s alternative rock but sounds fresh and timeless at the same time. And a great soundtrack for a cyberpunk movie they'll never make.

The Tea Party -'The Edges Of Twilight'
1995

Rating - 10/A

This is one of those absolutely perfect albums that most artists record only about once in their careers - which makes it even more amazing that The Tea Party did so at least twice - their major label debut, Splendor Solis, is similarly flawless, and almost did so again with their third album, Transmission which boldly took their sound into new territory. After that, they pulled back, perhaps alarmed at their own growth and fearful of burnout, perhaps in response to the normalising effect imposed by the collective conservatism of record labels and the larger buying public, and released a string of pleasant, mostly amiable but unadventurous albums before calling it quits last year (2006, if you need to ask). Tchah.

Having chronicled their sad decline, or rather plateau-ing out, I shall now proceed to heap accolades and encomiums on the album presently under consideration. First of all, of course, you want to know: what do they sound like? Well, it's basically brash, chest-thumping classic blues-rock, which was already rather quaint in the mid-90s, but the good lads of TTP had a couple of aces up their sleeve.

For starters, they also had a fetish for the east-meets-west flavour of Led Zep's Kashmir, and spent time learning about the special and exotic instuments and scales that actual eastern music of maily the mid-eastern variety uses instead of endlessly ripping off Kashmir itself. This translates into a variety of eastern motifs and ideas apart from the stacatto-riff thing and the snakecharmer thing, although both are on display here, too. It also means there's all kinds of exotic instruments being played here - 32, the official count goes.

Secondly, while main man Jeff Martin has more than a trace of the swaggering, cocky Jim Morrison/Robbie Plant type rock star persona (he even sounds like Jim Morrison, although he writes marginally more mature poetry, erm, lyrics), he's also picked up cues from the romanticism, despair and so on of various post-punk acts like Joy Division, The Cure and Echo & The Bunnymen, even if this isn't immediately evident.

Having said all that, the emotionally intense, romantic and mystical nature of the band's lyrics and sound (music matches lyric perfectly here) isn't everyone's cup of tea. It even seems a trifle overwrought at times to me, lately - a lighter touch at times, a trace of humour would be nice. But that isn't what TTP do, and if you're willing to accept that, you're in for a great ride.

Fire In The Head, Coming Home and Walk With Me are all huge, bombastic rockers but with their own touches of subtlety - the acoustic passage that Coming Home builds from and its strummed verses, for instance. Classic rock-worthy arena filling swagger meets eastern melodicism and romantic lyricism. Pretty heady stuff. The Bazaar has a riff that sounds perfect for strolling through a rollicking, crowded bazaar and the choruses take the song back into dark romantic territory. Turn The Lamp Down Low, Shadows On The Mountainside and Drawing Down The Moon take bluesy motifs and infuse them with a variety of moods and characters. Shadows On The Mountainside is perhaps the most transcendentally contemplative number here, while Drawing Down The Moon roars with desperate romance. Man, that word romance keeps getting used in this review in various forms. It's hard to avoid it though, and if you know this band, you'll have to agree.

Among the slower numbers, The Badger is a gorgeous, folksy instrumental. Correspondences layers pianos, strings and other less-identifiable things, all contributing to truly gorgeous melodies and a brilliant mood - wistful at first and ardent in the climatic end section. Speaking of sections, Sister Awake stands as the very centerpiece of this album. Constructed with a complexity that is outright proggy, it moves from quieter passages through a rapid fire percussive break into a heavier passage, containing one of the most memorable and brilliant sets of changes I've ever heard. This song alone raises the album to stellar heights. It helps that the other material isn't that much worse. Silence is less stunning, but has a similar variety of moods, all perfectly combined.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: The swagger of classic rock, combined with eastern intrigue and bluesy grace. Near-perfect songwriting, great melodies everywhere, huge riffs when required, a brilliantly dark and inviting album that actually lives up to all of its considerable ambition.

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - 'Tender Prey'
1988

Rating - 8/B

Tender Prey was Nick Cave's 5th album with The Bad Seeds, his solo-career backing band, the last of his 1980s albums - he took a break to write his (rather good) novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel soon after - and the last album written and recorded while living in Berlin. It showcases an artist who has moved consistently in a more diverse direction since the punkish caterwauling of his first band, The Birthday Party, and the equally disturbing but slower and more stripped-down sounds of his earliest work with The Bad Seeds. The accesible elements - real melodies, discernable song structures and reasonably palatable singing - are well matched with a broad palette of sounds that draws from blues, folk and avant-garde influences to create a shifting, but instantly recognisable backdrop for Cave's dark tales of love, lust, murder and religion. I think it presents Cave as a consolidated and fully-formed entity - elements of his past work are combined in a manner that would more or less represent the direction in which he moved for the next decade or so. More importantly, it's a pretty strong album with no really weak or unapproachable material on it.

The centerpiece, and opener, of this whole experience is of course The Mercy Seat. A dark, haunting narrative spat out in the persona of a convicted murdered on death row, awaiting his turn in the electric chair's 'mercy seat', it bristles with fury and desperation, Biblical imagery, and evokes defiance and resignation in equal measure. Musically, the song rides on a throbbing, dynamic Bad Seeds backing, complete with German noise-master Blixa Bargeld conjuring an unholy tempest on guitar, augmented with dramatic strings. The song is really long, but its sprawling length is kept taut with an unbroken intensity of delivery, which just the right amount of counter-weighing melody and regret, and it never seems over-extended. It's a strong, compelling lyrical statement and the music matches the mood perfectly. Perhaps no one other than Nick Cave could conceive of or pull off a song like this, and it deserves its place as a perennial feature on his live setlists.

The other material rarely reaches The Mercy Seat's apocalyptic heights, but it's not just filler, either. Deanna sounds vaguely like a doo-wop or early garage rock song, but played with a psychotic verve than no actual 50s or early 60s artists were allowed to portray on record. The lyrics are about the protagonist imploring his lover to join him in killing spree in a fast car - classic Nick Cave stuff. It's also bloody catchy. Sugar Sugar Sugar works on similar lines musically, but is less concise.

Up Jumped The Devil is an archetypal hard-luck story that begins with the narrator's mother dying in the course of a messy and bloody delivery, and ends at the gallows pole, with that mean old devil watching in delight all along the way. A chilling song, shot through with black humour and built on a lurching, brooding musical base that turns a rather melodious and almost pretty piano motif to dark purpose. The group vocals on the choruses add to the folk-gone-psycho feel. It's all so melodic and genuinely hooky under the darkness and doom, which is the hallmark of the best Cave material, if you ask me. City Of Refuge builds a vaguely gospel/bluesy feel into another frantic, desperate hard-luck tale on similar lines, though equally compelling in its own right. Sunday's Slave again revolves around a pulsing rhythm and decidedly melodic piano lines while Cave weaves a dark fable based around days of the week and what sounds to me like a rather negative attitude towards the priestly class. I could be wrong of course - Cave's religious views are especially opaque to me. He sure likes his Biblical imagery though.

Among the slower songs, Watching Alice is an especially lovely ballad-like song, although the lyrics confound you here - they seem to be about an especially mournful voyeur. Or is it a metaphor for the alienation and isolation within a once-close relationship? Either way, it's haunting. Mercy weaves togeher arresting but somewhat opaque lyrical images, a vaguely Eastern touch and desprate pleas for mercy. It's a subjective thing, but it works less well for me than the almost Leonard Cohen-ish (though, always, less urbane and more morbid) Slowly Goes The Night. Maybe it's only because the latter song has xylophone on it to make it more special, or because the choruses on the former just feel too monotonous and whiney to me. Genralised pleas for mercy just don't fit Cave's unique blend of piss-and-vinegar and doomed romanticism at this moment.

New Morning seems to end the album on a positive note, and I'm not sure whether it's intended as a genuine respite from the darkness elsewhere (although this song is more of a light-after-the-terrible-night message than an unalloyed ode to joy and hope) or some sort of ironic gesture. Anyway it serves as a lightening factor and a good way to end the album, unless you have the Video Mix of The Mercy Seat on your version, which is an even better way to end the album.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Folk, blues, and other rootsy influences combine with apocalyptic stomp and swagger and Cave's growing melodicity. Everything's dark and doom-laden, although musical variety, touches of black humour and an ambiguous gesture of hope keep things diverse. Easily one of the peaks of Cave's first decade as a solo artist.

Joy Division - 'Closer'
1980

Rating - A/10
Aw, man. Even if this album hadn't more or less coincided with frontman Ian Curtis' suicide so closely, it would still be one of the most downright depressing and beautiful things in the rock canon. It's even more cold, dissociated and yet desperate than their debut, Unknown Pleasures (which I will also review at some point). The band's schizophrenic mix of jaunty and dominating bass grooves, melodic and often poppy keyboards, guitar turmoil and Ian Curtis' detatched, despairing vocals and lyrics can sear their way into your consciousness with rather deleterious effects if you're not careful. The mood never lets up, and I can't blame the surviving members for swinging more towards the pop end of things in their next avatar, New Order. Anything to get that darkness behind. This is the sound of terminal alienation, which is not a healthy staple diet for any boy or girl.

All of which might sound like I'm an emotionally vulnerable listener panning this album for being too dark. That's not true, and quite apart from my personal fortitude, this album has enough compelling music and unforgettable songwriting to make it a worthwhile listen.

The epic opening track, The Atrocity Exhibition sets the pace. Titled after an equally disturbing JG Ballard novel, it's a chilling portrait of atrocity-as-spectacle via the Nazi death camps. The music is spare and precise, and the almost robotic groove and roiling guitar point the way to industrial music. Isolation juxtaposes driving bass and jaunty keyboards with a haunting journey into Curtis' state of isolation. Passover is plodding and desperate, while Colony is disturbingly pacey. Means To An End is another epic-feeling track with a chilling message of betrayal. Things get more groovy, and the melody is back, for Twenty-Four Hours which sees Curtis trying to find his destiny 'before it gets too late'. That melodic sense just kills on tracks like this. The Eternal and Decades are cold elegies to a broken spirit. The gentle piano work on the former, placed against a plodding, definite rhythm is a great aural portrait of a state of mind and Curtis' vocals are unforgettably vulnerable, and relatively unmasked by the distancing veneer of monotony he often resorts to. Decades has those almost pop-friendly keyboards and upbeat rhythms in places again, sounding very elgiac however, and ends the album fittingly, with a cold knife through your heart.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: With its precise, spare soundscapes and layerings of unsettling groove and melody, this is THE party album for your suicide salon. If you're beyond teen-Goth angst, it's simply a very beautiful and haunting album with enough musical merit and truly expressive lyrics to justify more than a few listens. Just don't listen to it all alone, with the lights off.