Album Review: Scalaland's "Breathing Down the Neck of Meaning"
Scalaland. Sca-la-land. What a name! "Breathing Down the Neck of Meaning". What a title! What does it mean? You're asking the wrong question. This record isn't about meaning. It has no time for explanations. Its too busy dealing with immortal truths. Its getting on with the business of putting women on pedestals and resisting looking up their skirts.
Snow White Lies drops us into the bleached whites and perfect blues of Cafe Del Mar, with Roberts' hesitant, achingly romantic voice whispering literate bitterness through a cloud of blue Gitane smoke. There's a glass of something red and inexpensive on the table in front of him and Richard Klein's "Cigarettes are Sublime", it's spine broken, fanning beside it, prose prone. The music swells, fat as a spinning top, and some of the delayed guitar Angelo used to play in the Blue Aeroplanes drifts past. Female vocals (from the immaculately named Sally Ballet) coo and cajole as Roberts berates a "smalltown Beatrice" for thinking "cruelty's an alibi". Of course, there is no woman here at all - Roberts is too Romantic (big R) to get bogged down in specifics. Its the idea that's the thing, or the ideal. This woman may be written in smoke but she's as real as any of the pouting, unknowable girls that fire the imagination of arty, angsty songwriters. Bryan Ferry and David Sylvian, certainly. Lloyd Cole, of course. Even the Momus of Closer to You has glimpsed them in art galleries and flitting past high windows.
What strikes you throughout the record is the resistance between Robert's cafe Lothario and the leisurely swell of Richard Bell's music. All is benign here, you are set adrift on tranquil seas. The choppiness is all in the words and the spat vocal delivery. Burn The Witch has the sort of layered perfection of post-Roxy Bryan Ferry, the sort of albums that Ferry doesn't have to be awakened to make (not a diss, incidentally - I love the glittering somnambulism of those later albums). The lyrics about "cunning little vixens" and a "scheming little bitch" sit uneasily with the hippo in a mud flat sensuousness of the music.
With Shots - its opening verse featuring the line "I walk through the valley of the shadow of your smile" - and the fact that this record wasn't made on the continent becomes a mystery. It should have been authored by beetle-browed Norwegians who are handsome and don't know it. This is arch, mittleuropa pop: full of mysterious, impossibly othered women, always a filter-tip away. It reminds me of Fra Lippo Lippi or The Lucy Show, one of those serious, polo-neck wearing bands half-remembered from the 80's. What saves it, as always is the silly sophistication of the words, clearly written by someone who not only loves pop but worries about what pop is for and what it can do. This album was made in 1995, when it was still possible to be bothered about that sort of thing. The care and attention applied here would be unthinkable now. We live in a world where the CEO of Spotify elects to try and tell musicians how to make music to more readily fit his interest in taking and giving it away for free. The idea of music as a refuge for lunatics and outsiders and Romantic fools looking on at a world they never made died with the twentieth century. As did pop music. Here Scalaland are sliding under a stone door and not bothering to go back for their hat...
Global Village Idiot Blues features a Momus song title and a Bowie chord progression and a tasteful guitar solo with faux clarinet backing. It is charming, like a quieter late Bowie ballad. Born and Raised and Failing, with its walking bass and rim-shots is dinner jazz! Can I get a flat white with this? It is sophistication on a budget - sharing a musical kinship with "Captain of her Heart"s Double. Again that's not intended as an insult - I love Double's doleful pop hit, but not enough to investigate any of their other songs. I'm quite happy with that: "Brother Louie" by Modern Talking is a superlative pop song. Do I want to hear anything else by Modern Talking? The fuck I do.
My favourite song on the record has the dullest title. Coincidence or causality? After all, this album features a song called "Insomnia Mon Amour", which should get a blue riband or something, but the song is not a fave, despite Roberts' spirited rock guitar. Whereas "Softly Softly" is a thing of wondrous, shimmering beauty, with Roberts' most storm-tossed poetry: "These stupid fucking things remind me of you, they stick in my head like hope and glue" and one of my favourite lines from anywhere: "Ah, what a summer that was, it was just like Christmas." It is woozy, floating and smotheringly sad, and features the worlds loneliest guitar. The line "The surviving half of a double act" hits me in the gut and lodges like shrapnel. I am reminded of the band Animals That Swim in a way I can't quite put my finger on. It certainly doesn't sound like Animals That Swim, but there is a quality - the sadness, the faded glamour of their better songs. This song is mostly spoken word and in Roberts quiet, precise voice, the lyrics approach the state of poetry, inching along the Parnassian slopes searching for a foothold.
This record has made me feel happy and wistful and mournful and so very, very old. It has reminded me of a lot of bands that I used to love and the sort of bands that were possible in the past and the sort of bands that I wanted to be in. I was young when this record came out. I assumed I'd be a pop star of some description at some point. I was thin. I had big black hair. I wrote pretentious lyrics and could sing a bit. It was obvious.
And then I wasn't a pop star. When this record came out I hadn't yet moved to London. I was living in a shared house and working for an insurance company. Hearing this record then would have inspired me. It would have told me that it was doable. That there were other people who thought that Europe was sexy and cool and that all the best girls pouted while they smoked while they were completely unattainable. This is the soundtrack to my youth I never heard. Now I listen to it and it sounds like a piece of history, an approach to writing that nobody uses anymore. I see visions of pale, slope shouldered young men making a coffee in a cafe last all afternoon, scribbling furiously into notebooks and scoring through everything they'd written. The screeds of useless words noted down but never spoken. The furtive glances, the missed opportunities, the hours of brooding, of watching old films, of wearing big old coats. It was equal parts nonsense and magnificence. And that's as good a description of this record as any.
Snow White Lies drops us into the bleached whites and perfect blues of Cafe Del Mar, with Roberts' hesitant, achingly romantic voice whispering literate bitterness through a cloud of blue Gitane smoke. There's a glass of something red and inexpensive on the table in front of him and Richard Klein's "Cigarettes are Sublime", it's spine broken, fanning beside it, prose prone. The music swells, fat as a spinning top, and some of the delayed guitar Angelo used to play in the Blue Aeroplanes drifts past. Female vocals (from the immaculately named Sally Ballet) coo and cajole as Roberts berates a "smalltown Beatrice" for thinking "cruelty's an alibi". Of course, there is no woman here at all - Roberts is too Romantic (big R) to get bogged down in specifics. Its the idea that's the thing, or the ideal. This woman may be written in smoke but she's as real as any of the pouting, unknowable girls that fire the imagination of arty, angsty songwriters. Bryan Ferry and David Sylvian, certainly. Lloyd Cole, of course. Even the Momus of Closer to You has glimpsed them in art galleries and flitting past high windows.
What strikes you throughout the record is the resistance between Robert's cafe Lothario and the leisurely swell of Richard Bell's music. All is benign here, you are set adrift on tranquil seas. The choppiness is all in the words and the spat vocal delivery. Burn The Witch has the sort of layered perfection of post-Roxy Bryan Ferry, the sort of albums that Ferry doesn't have to be awakened to make (not a diss, incidentally - I love the glittering somnambulism of those later albums). The lyrics about "cunning little vixens" and a "scheming little bitch" sit uneasily with the hippo in a mud flat sensuousness of the music.
With Shots - its opening verse featuring the line "I walk through the valley of the shadow of your smile" - and the fact that this record wasn't made on the continent becomes a mystery. It should have been authored by beetle-browed Norwegians who are handsome and don't know it. This is arch, mittleuropa pop: full of mysterious, impossibly othered women, always a filter-tip away. It reminds me of Fra Lippo Lippi or The Lucy Show, one of those serious, polo-neck wearing bands half-remembered from the 80's. What saves it, as always is the silly sophistication of the words, clearly written by someone who not only loves pop but worries about what pop is for and what it can do. This album was made in 1995, when it was still possible to be bothered about that sort of thing. The care and attention applied here would be unthinkable now. We live in a world where the CEO of Spotify elects to try and tell musicians how to make music to more readily fit his interest in taking and giving it away for free. The idea of music as a refuge for lunatics and outsiders and Romantic fools looking on at a world they never made died with the twentieth century. As did pop music. Here Scalaland are sliding under a stone door and not bothering to go back for their hat...
Global Village Idiot Blues features a Momus song title and a Bowie chord progression and a tasteful guitar solo with faux clarinet backing. It is charming, like a quieter late Bowie ballad. Born and Raised and Failing, with its walking bass and rim-shots is dinner jazz! Can I get a flat white with this? It is sophistication on a budget - sharing a musical kinship with "Captain of her Heart"s Double. Again that's not intended as an insult - I love Double's doleful pop hit, but not enough to investigate any of their other songs. I'm quite happy with that: "Brother Louie" by Modern Talking is a superlative pop song. Do I want to hear anything else by Modern Talking? The fuck I do.
My favourite song on the record has the dullest title. Coincidence or causality? After all, this album features a song called "Insomnia Mon Amour", which should get a blue riband or something, but the song is not a fave, despite Roberts' spirited rock guitar. Whereas "Softly Softly" is a thing of wondrous, shimmering beauty, with Roberts' most storm-tossed poetry: "These stupid fucking things remind me of you, they stick in my head like hope and glue" and one of my favourite lines from anywhere: "Ah, what a summer that was, it was just like Christmas." It is woozy, floating and smotheringly sad, and features the worlds loneliest guitar. The line "The surviving half of a double act" hits me in the gut and lodges like shrapnel. I am reminded of the band Animals That Swim in a way I can't quite put my finger on. It certainly doesn't sound like Animals That Swim, but there is a quality - the sadness, the faded glamour of their better songs. This song is mostly spoken word and in Roberts quiet, precise voice, the lyrics approach the state of poetry, inching along the Parnassian slopes searching for a foothold.
This record has made me feel happy and wistful and mournful and so very, very old. It has reminded me of a lot of bands that I used to love and the sort of bands that were possible in the past and the sort of bands that I wanted to be in. I was young when this record came out. I assumed I'd be a pop star of some description at some point. I was thin. I had big black hair. I wrote pretentious lyrics and could sing a bit. It was obvious.
And then I wasn't a pop star. When this record came out I hadn't yet moved to London. I was living in a shared house and working for an insurance company. Hearing this record then would have inspired me. It would have told me that it was doable. That there were other people who thought that Europe was sexy and cool and that all the best girls pouted while they smoked while they were completely unattainable. This is the soundtrack to my youth I never heard. Now I listen to it and it sounds like a piece of history, an approach to writing that nobody uses anymore. I see visions of pale, slope shouldered young men making a coffee in a cafe last all afternoon, scribbling furiously into notebooks and scoring through everything they'd written. The screeds of useless words noted down but never spoken. The furtive glances, the missed opportunities, the hours of brooding, of watching old films, of wearing big old coats. It was equal parts nonsense and magnificence. And that's as good a description of this record as any.
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