Laughing Stock

Some listeners are moved to apoplexy by what they see as Talk Talk’s bottomless pretensions. They may have had a point with 1989’s [sic] Spirit of Eden, a baffling collection of unglued fragments. This time, though, the group have got their hooks firmly into a genuine new direction.

This violently uncommercial record operates in places rock and pop have mostly abandoned, though writer/vocalist Mark Hollis’s interest in Miles Davis’s collaborations with Gil Evans is a helpful clue. Largely cut loose from conventional melodies and chord-patterns, the music uses hazy, impressionistic layers of instrumentation to build moods of suppressed euphoria or probing melancholy. ‘Ascension Day’ is the most ‘rock’ thing here, though just as it builds up to a clashing crescendo of raw guitars, it’s abruptly cut off in favour of the peaceful, mystical surge of ‘After The Flood’. This eerie and meditative music demands a bit of effort, after which it can grow rapidly into obsession.

Review by Adam Sweeting

Mark Hollis

From 1980s synth-pop with Talk Talk, Mark Hollis is now a solo artist of rare contemplation… It’s all gone quiet over here. Mark Hollis has made an album that is not that far away from silence. Hollis, as one of the guiding spirits of Talk Talk, took his band through a strange metamorphosis, from brash eighties synth pop that made them contemporaries and possible rivals of the likes of Tears For Fears, to the lush, immaculate and perfectly detailed colourbook that was Spirit of Eden. Now he’s come up with a record that’s barely there at all. But what there is of it is wonderful.

Not that everyone shares my opinion. When I put it on in my office, my co-workers started throwing first abuse and then Rice Krispie squares at me. This is not a record to play to a room full of people. They’ll take it personally. It’s a record to so contemplative and slow-moving that an audience of more than one seems somehow inappropriate. It would be a bit like going to see that actress who lay around in a box in a London gallery for days on end last year. Very challenging and all that, but the whole notion struck me as futile and embarrassing. Now try to imagine something similar except actually a good idea. That’s Mark Hollis for you.

Looking down the list of musicians it surprises me that there are so many instruments on here. Most of the time Mark Hollis sounds as if it was recorded on a single microphone at the far end of a large, empty room. Where are the bassoons? What’s this about a cor anglais? Even on ‘The Daily Planet,’ which positively rocks out compared to the rest of the album, the players seem to be competing to see who can make the least noise, with the harmonica man the undisputed loser.

As any minimalist can tell you, the less that’s on offer, the more attention you pay to it. Which is why most minimalist music sounds so rotten – it’s not worse than other music, you’re just listening more carefully. Mark Hollis is rare in that it repays the effort. In style it’s very similar to John Cale’s The Academy in Peril and Scott Walker’s Tilt - both of them brilliant pieces of work. Hollis’s album is warmer but no less austere. Sung in his weak, plaintive voice, the words are so far stretched out that they lose any meaning of their own, which is probably for the best as reading the lyric sheet will make you wince.

But then Hollis isn’t writing poetry, he is (thank Christ) writing songs, yet even so you start to wonder if the songs weren’t written so much as they wondered along looking for a big white space to inhabit. This is, no doubt, the sort of album that makes you worry you don’t own enough Scandinavian furniture. It just happens to be an unusually good one. A very sober record, which I wouldn’t usually consider a recommendation, but that’s what gives it its clarity, reveals it as elegant, thoughtful, impassioned. In his poor, deluded, befuddled dreams, this is what Sting sounds like. (Album of the Week)

Review by David Bennum