Oh my. Mother Nature. What a cruel mistress. Not some tie dyed, head scarfed gentle lover of all but a harsh, ever changing thing of exquisite beauty and infinite pain. Equally capable of rampant destruction as tender embraces. Poison, lava, fangs juxtaposed with sweet scents, soft petals.
This record has no right to be so good. It's a concept album. In the nicest possible way, it's a record by middle aged men. I know we are post everything but c'mon, middle aged men making a concept album. Alarm bells should be ringing here. Middle aged men shouldn't make such thrilling music. That's what young people do. That's the preserve of youth surely, making music sound like the dizzying descent of a free fall from a great height and the sudden weightlessness of the parachute saviour.
John Robb is music journalist amongst other things. This record, along with the band's previous album shows the power of listening on creativity. Influences are worn on sleeves and meld with the band's own style to become something new. There's echos of 'Flowers of Romance' PIL, rockabilly, some of the more autre element of the grunge sound, dub, gothic majesty and loads, loads more. I don't usually like records that knowingly recycle a style or a sound, but there's something about certain bands that transcends this. The earnest care of Belle and Sebastian, crafting unfashionable little slices of 60s soul for example. I think it's about intent and honesty. This isn't the sounds the membranes think WE want to here. It's the sound THEY want to make and thus, it transcends any limitations of 'it sounds like X or Y' and stands proud on its own strange feet.
It swirls and jabs, it caresses and it pummels. There's humour. There's bleak nihilistic emptiness . There's wit and humanity. There's the cold hard truth. It's grounded in Lancashire seaside towns and launched into space. It's the everyday and the sheer wonder of what lies beneath. The world seen through everyday eyes and the world seen through a microscope.
It keeps going. A brutally long record that exhausts and invigorates at once.
And it has a choir. A fucking choir. They say comparisons to other bands is lazy music writing, but then they also say writing about music is like dancing about architecture so fuck it reader, here goes - imagine if the John Spencer Blues explosion and Alan Ginsberg did a record after being locked in a nuclear bunker for 10 years with only some old Victorian prints of nature and a choir to keep them sane and you might be quarter of the way to understanding it.
The lyrics, pull you into the specific, the finite, the physical. The music and the choir release you into the abstract, the sensual, the spirit. The two elements jar, sometimes resolving blissfully, sometimes stuck in conflict. The tide ebbs and flows, the sun rises and falls, death surrounds you, decay and destruction is our legacy but fucking hell. People. This.
People just trying, despite all their limitations and all our thick tongued inadequate words to touch the sky. To say something true. Is true even the right word. I don't know.
Punk isn't three chords, it isn't mohawks or spitting or Sid and Nancy or the mythos of 1977 (or the pathetic I wastherefirstism of 'it was all over by then') it's the music of people who give what they have to it, the bodies, their souls and their minds ((c)Iggy)
It's the sheer audacious freedom of this music.
God love the Membranes.
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