I wrote a Facebook post about this earlier this evening, but, to my mind, it begged for some extrapolation.
My friend and colleague Drew Katchen has been an invaluable divining rod for new music for me for the past five years or so, and recently hipped me to a relatively new band from the UK called These New Puritans, specifically citing their new album, Field of Reeds (their third release) as especially intoxicating. Based on the clues of his initial description of their sound, however, I asked him if he'd ever listened to the last two albums by the criminally under-praised British band Talk Talk. He admitted that he had not.
Sure enough, in virtually 9 out of every 10 reviews of These New Puritans, Talk Talk's 1988 album, Spirit of Eden and their 1991 swan-song Laughing Stock are invoked. While I did enjoy These New Puritans' music, all it really did was make me want to listen to their afore-cited forebears from the late `80s.
Forget what you think you know about Talk Talk if their name only conjures up skinny ties, synthesizers and angular haircuts. 1988's Spirit of Eden was a magnum opus that entirely erased the band's arguably ignoble beginnings (personally speaking, I still love their early stuff as well) in favor of largely uncharted, improvisational music that touched on everything from the deepest, most achingly soulful gospel to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and beyond. Put simply, it is sublimely unlike anything I'd ever heard before...or since.
In 1988, I was a senior in college, otherwise steeped in fandom for the industrial dissonance and cartoony grimace of bands like Ministry, Revolting Cocks and Skinny Puppy and reeling from the puzzling new direction of my beloved Killing Joke, who'd renounced their formerly elegant-yet-brutalist metier in favor of an ersatz-prog-pop endeavor with rhythms informed by numerology. Meanwhile, having always been a fan, I sought out the latest album by erstwhile synth-pop b-listers Talk Talk, based on a flurry of curious reviews that ran the gamut from rapturous to apoplectic. I bought the album in question, Spirit of Eden, without having heard a single note off of it.
Pointedly unlike their previous albums (which, not for nothing, had all rendered truly excellent pop singles like "It's My Life," "Talk Talk" and the untouchably brilliant "Life's What You Make It") Spirit of Eden was a very different beast, to say the least. Forsaking the synthesizer (let alone conventional pop-song-structure) entirely, Spirit of Eden featured music that did not simply start with a familiar 4/4 time signature so much as hazily arrive in a languid, inebriating flood of sound. Again, peppy New Wave this was NOT.
Being the prototypically self-indulgent, moody and histrionic college student that I was, Spirit of Eden was the perfect album for me. During my senior year (as an English [Writing] major with an incongruous side-line in studio art), I had craftily managed to convince some higher-ups in the art department to bestow me a coveted key to the university's art building, the then-vaguely decrepit Cleveland Hall on the lower part of the campus. At the time, Cleveland Hall was essentially a converted sports facility, built around a massive basketball court with cathedral-suitable ceilings that now served as a lofty painting studio. It was in this cavernous room in the small hours of countless evenings that Spirit of Eden revealed itself to be a shimmering document of incomparable beauty.
Armed with my key and a communal, endearingly paint-splattered boom box, I'd cloister myself in Cleveland Hall's imposing chambers in the dead of night, hit PLAY on a cassette of Spirit of Eden and let Talk Talk's engulfing sprawl of sound magically fill up the vast room's expanse as I indulged my long-suffocated compulsion to paint (a medium I'd suggest that I never really mastered).
I'm sure it all sounds so precious now, but those late, late nights scored by Spirit of Eden in Cleveland Hall did indeed leave an indelible mark on me. To this day, it remains one of my most cherished albums. And I'm certainly not alone.
Prompted by my invocation of Spirit of Eden, Drew unearthed this review of the 2001 reissue, and it is equally rife with purple prose ("It drags us by the ear to regions of the heart we would not voluntarily visit on our own"). As a somewhat eerie side note, it is a review that was published on September 10, 2001.
In any case, overlooking my bug-eyed, ultimately juvenile allegiance to several silly bands, I cannot -- in all seriousness -- recommend a single recording with more fervent reverence than Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden (although, yes, 1991's Laughing Stock is mighty fine too). Seek it out. Drown in it. Thank me later.
And, for the sake of comparison, here are These New Puritans...
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