There is the gentle, haunting, beauty of Changing Stations, and the darker side of pop on Point You. Twilight is positively high-end 80s pop, whilst Sweet Life Longer, a love song in folky waltz time, has an Everything But The Girl indie sound, and New Love Here is pure pop. You can’t truly re-define anything without being able to do the thing you want to re-define. The other themes on this compilation may be like abstract art, but this theme shows that you can only truly subvert and create once you’ve mastered the rules of a genre, and there are so many songs here that could easily have been mainstream hits in the 80s. The vocals are less anguished, but still the twinge of melancholy, within the jangly pop guitar. There are hints of Associates and Talk Talk. There are cleaner, straighter songs like No Perfect Stranger and Others, with its bouncy beat and rhythm guitar, and the vocals have a tinge of new romantic. Volume Two is entitled Rose Petal Knot, and showcases the poppier side of the band. The first theme ends with the wonderfully scratching and mixed-up blues, Knives Replace Air that twists in prog and blues to create something new.
They need to be spoken.Ītmospheric is probably too lazy and easy a word to describe many of the songs here, like True Colour, with its almost ghostly shouting and eerie play between bass and organ, but it is a word that best describes them.
His voice, like the lyrics declare, is croaking and breaking due to grief, at times the words are vomited out, as though the words themselves are causing the distress and need to be released into the air.
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There are melancholic guitars on Voice From The Tracks, with Bates’ distinctive voice, full of mourning and loss. There are crazed saxophone solos that appear and disappear like nagging nightmare memories, as on Fixation, whilst Faceless could be Joy Division on a depressed day. Likewise, Half Light is a coruscating voice over barbed wire guitar and ominous chords, whilst September Hills starts like a version of the Final Countdown by The Smiths, but turns into a rumbling poetic beauty. This is the Stooges meets Gang Of Four and Japan. The vocals sometimes sound torn out of a recalcitrant brain through a visceral vocal cord, whilst the music unsettles and pounds along. Rock may not be the first thought that comes to mind with EIG but the first song on the compilation, Looking Daggers, begins like a standard rock tune, with distorted razor guitar, and thumping bass line, but it’s not quite right, it’s jagged, off-kilter. That gamut of directions starts with Disc One: Looking Daggers (Rock and Rhythmic).
Just the two of us would play it, write it… we’d just make music for the joy of it, and for no other reason above that… Cherry Red…saw straight away what the fuck we were doing, (they) loved the whole sprawling mess aesthetic we were wrapped up in, seeing it as being totally valid… and, most importantly for us, they loved the whole gamut of directions that we were simultaneously exploding out into at one and the same time.’ It’s the sudden stumbling over a golden shimmer in a coal-blacked face and a piece of poetry forged from dull comprehensive school academia.īates says, ‘It’s entitled Skeletal Framework because when we set out that was pretty much how we saw ourselves and what we were doing: the two of us were that framework, the bones, the heart, the soul of it. However, dig deeper and there is a beauty here the beauty of coal dust and slag heaps. Sure, some of the songs create a sense of existentialist dread, as though the world at any moment may fall apart, but then we were living under Thatcher and the bomb back then. What you get for your money is over 5 and a half hours of music but, cleverly, knowing that no fan, however huge, is going to listen to it in one sitting, it has been split across the discs into 5 themes, curated by Bates and compatriot EIG, Pete Becker.įormed in Nuneaton at the beginning of the 80s, EIG are often thought of as the classic miserabilist shoe-gazing indie act but listening to the music now, that stereotype is far from the truth and, for a duo, they have an astonishingly wide musical palette. This one comes in a nicely presented box with a booklet featuring notes on every song by one half of EIG, Martyn Bates. Spread over 5 CDs, Skeletal Framework continues Cherry Red’s recent sumptuous CD boxset releases. We now get the complete Cherry Red recordings. Eyeless in Gaza’s complete Cherry Red recordings.Ĭherry Red have been spoiling Eyeless In Gaza fans recently, with their 2014 Original Albums Collection and 2016’s Picture The Day (A Career Retrospective), which we reviewed here.
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