Spirit of Eden is an album by the English band Talk Talk,
released in 1988. Critical reception on release was mixed, and it was not a
commercial success; though its reputation has improved over the years, and it
is now seen by some critics as influential to post-rock, a music genre that
developed in Britain and North America in the 1990s. The songs were written by
Mark Hollis and Tim Friese-Greene, and performed by numerous musicians using a
diverse combination of instruments. The album developed from a lengthy
recording process at Wessex Studios, London during 1987 and 1988: often working
in darkness, the band recorded many hours of improvised performances, edited
them down heavily, then arranged the remaining pieces into an album using
digital equipment. The end product includes elements of rock, jazz, classical,
and ambient music. The album, the fourth by the band, was released on the
Parlophone record label, an imprint of EMI.
In 2008, Alan McGee of the Guardian wrote: "Spirit of
Eden has not dated; it's remarkable how contemporary it sounds, anticipating
post-rock, The Verve and Radiohead. It's the sound of an artist being given the
keys to the kingdom and returning with art."
Critics often view Spirit of Eden as a departure from Talk
Talk's previous albums. Compared to their 1986 hit The Colour of Spring, it was
commercially unsuccessful. While upon release it received mostly mixed to
negative reviews, it has been acknowledged as being an influence in the musical
development of a number of later alternative rock musicians and subgenres.
Talk Talk, led by singer Mark Hollis, formed in England in
the early 1980s. From the start, Hollis cited jazz and classical artists like
Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Béla Bartók, and Claude Debussy as major musical
influences. But Talk Talk's first two albums, The Party's Over (1982)
and It's
My Life (1984), did not readily reflect such influences; critics
compared the band to contemporary New Wave groups, especially Duran Duran.
Hollis partly attributes the shortcomings of their early music to a financial
need to use synthesizers in place of acoustic instruments.
Although critics did not favour the band's early output, the
first two albums were commercially successful in Europe. This gave Talk Talk
the money needed to hire additional musicians to play on their next album, The
Colour of Spring (1986). The band no longer had to rely on
synthesizers. Instead, musicians improvised with their instruments for many
hours, then Hollis and producer Tim Friese-Greene edited and arranged the
performances to get the sound they wanted. A total of sixteen musicians
appeared on the album. The Colour of Spring became Talk
Talk's most successful album, selling over two million copies and prompting a
major world tour. At the same time, minimalist songs like "April
5th," "Chameleon Day," and the outtake "It's Getting Late
in the Evening" pointed towards the band's next direction.
It was very, very psychedelic. We had candles and oil
wheels, strobes going, sometimes just total darkness in the studio. You'd get
totally disorientated, no daylight, no time frame.
For the success of The Colour of Spring, EMI rewarded Talk
Talk with an open budget and schedule for the recording of their next album, Spirit
of Eden. Talk Talk were given complete control over the recording
process; their manager and EMI executives were barred from studio sessions.
Recording for Spirit of Eden began in 1987 at Wessex Studios, London and took
about a year to complete. Engineer Phill
Brown has also stated that the album, along with its successor, was
"recorded by chance, accident, and hours of trying every possible overdub
idea."
By early March 1988, the band had finished recording Spirit
of Eden and had sent a cassette of the album to EMI. After listening to
the cassette, EMI representatives doubted that it could be commercially
successful. They asked Hollis to re-record a song or replace material, but he
refused to do so. By the time the masters were delivered later in the month,
however, the label conceded that the album had been satisfactorily completed.
Despite their reservations towards Spirit of Eden, EMI chose
to exercise their option to extend the recording contract with Talk Talk. The
band, however, wanted out of the contract. "I knew by that time that EMI
was not the company this band should be with," manager Keith Aspden told
Mojo. "I was fearful that the money wouldn't be there to record another
album." EMI and Talk Talk went to court to decide the issue.
The case centered on whether EMI had notified the band about
the contract extension in time. As part of the agreement, EMI had to send a
written notice within three months after the completion of Spirit of Eden. The
band said that EMI had sent the notice too late, arguing that the three month
period began once recording had finished; EMI argued that the three month
period did not begin until they were satisfied with the recording. Justice
Andrew Morritt ruled in favour of EMI, but his decision was overturned in the
Court of Appeal of England and Wales. Talk Talk were released from the contract
and later signed to Polydor.
Spirit of Eden's moody, experimental nature made it a challenge
to promote; one critic said it "is the kind of record which encourages
marketing men to commit suicide." Tony Wadsworth, Parlophone's marketing
director at the time, told Q: "Talk Talk are not your ordinary combo and
require sympathetic marketing. They're not so much difficult as not obvious.
You've just got to find as many ways as possible to expose the music."
Evaluating some masterpieces of the eighties in a 2004 article for The
Guardian, John Robinson calls Spirit of Eden, like David Sylvian's
Brilliant
Trees, "triumphant, [but] completely unmarketable."
Although the band did not originally plan to release a
single, EMI issued a radio edit of "I Believe In You" in September
1988 (the previously unreleased "John Cope" was included as the
B-side). The single failed to breach the UK Singles Chart Top 75. Around
November, Tim Pope directed a music video for "I Believe In You",
featuring Hollis sitting with his guitar, singing the lyrics. "That was a
massive mistake," said Hollis. "I thought just by sitting there and
listening and really thinking about what it was about, I could get that in my
eyes. But you cannot do it. It just feels stupid."
The band did not tour in support of the album. Hollis
explained, "There is no way that I could ever play again a lot of the
stuff I played on this album because I just wouldn't know how to. So, to play
it live, to take a part that was done in spontaneity, to write it down and then
get someone to play it, would lose the whole point, lose the whole purity of
what it was in the first place." They would never tour again.
Spirit of Eden
was released worldwide in 1988. It did not enjoy nearly as much commercial
success as The Colour of Spring. The album spent five weeks on the UK
Albums Chart, peaking at #19. The album
cover depicts a tree festooned with seashells, snails, birds, and insects. It
was illustrated by James Marsh, who did Talk Talk's artwork throughout their
career. The booklet provides reproductions of Hollis' handwritten lyrics. The
album was digitally remastered by Phill Brown and Denis Blackham in 1997. A
hybrid Super Audio CD (without surround sound) surfaced in 2003.
Although the album is noted for its tranquil soundscapes,
Graham Sutton of Bark Psychosis notes "Noise is important. I could never
understand people I knew who liked Talk Talk and saw it as something 'nice to
chill out to' when I loved the overwhelming intensity and the dynamics."
Spirit closed with the line "Take my freedom for giving
me a sacred love" – it sounded like Hollis had been boning up on the
renegade, mystical Christianity of William Blake.
Mark Hollis' lyrics contain religious and spiritual
references. Though Hollis acknowledges that his lyrics are religious, he says
they are not based on a specific religion, preferring to think of them as
"humanitarian." "I
Believe in You" has been described as an "anti-heroin song."
When asked whether the lyrics are based on personal experience, Hollis replied,
"No, not at all. But, you know, I met people who got totally fucked up on
it. Within rock music there's so much fucking glorification of it, and it is a
wicked, horrible thing."
Spirit of Eden has been both acclaimed and panned by numerous
music critics. Marcus Berkmann of The Spectator in a 2001 retrospective felt
that the album was "almost wilfully obscure", with a musical style
close to free-form jazz that was too far removed from The Colour Of Spring for
fans to enjoy. Roy Wilkinson of Sounds
felt that the band had "evolved into contemplative muso-techs", and
while their lyrics were a weak point and the second side did not fully work,
the first side achieved "magnificence". Chris Dafoe of The Globe and Mail was largely
unimpressed: "At its best, this can be evocative and slightly unsettling.
More frequently, however, it sounds like dreary New Age miserablism. Yawn
Yawn."
In the 1992 Rolling Stone Album Guide, J.D. Considine rated
the album 1 star out of 5: "Instead of getting better or worse, this band
simply grew more pretentious with each passing year. . . . by Spirit
of Eden, Mark Hollis's Pete Townshend-on-Dramamine vocals have been
pushed aside by the band's pointless noodling." Simon Williams of NME
noted the album's pretentiousness and aimlessness, but found it forgivable,
commenting, "...they're resolute and determined, flaunting commercial
rules with fascinating disregard for understanding or acceptance." A
review in Q criticized the band for not even trying to create the hit singles
they'd led the record label to expect, but concluded that "If Spirit Of
Eden often recalls the pastoral epics of the early 70s, it has a range,
ambition and self-sufficiency that enables Hollis and co to step out of time
and into their own."PopMatters's retrospective review was less qualified
in its praise, calling Spirit of Eden "an album for
the ages." Pitchfork Media named Spirit of Eden the 34th best album
of the 1980s. In 2006, Q magazine placed
the album at #31 in its list of "40 Best Albums of the '80s". In 2012, Slant Magazine listed the album at
#56 on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980s."
Some music critics consider Spirit of Eden and its
1991 follow-up Laughing Stock influential to post-rock, a music genre that
developed in Britain and North America in the 1990s. In a review of Bark
Psychosis' album Hex, where the term "post-rock" was coined, Simon
Reynolds opined that Hex aspires to the "baroque grandeur" of Spirit
of Eden. Andy Whitman of Paste
magazine argues that Spirit of Eden represents the beginning of post-rock:
"The telltale marks of the genre—textured guitars, glacial tempos, an
emphasis on dynamics, electronica, ambience and minimalism—were all in place,
and paved the way for bands like Sigur Rós, Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black
Emperor, Low and latter-period Radiohead." Simon Harper of the Birmingham
Post adds, "Certainly, their combination of jazz, classical, rock and the
spacey echoes of dub, using silence almost as an instrument in its own right,
lends itself to the vernacular of post-rock, and there can be little argument
that Tortoise and their Chicago-based compatriots would hardly sound the same
were it not for the staggering achievements of Hollis and Tim
Friese-Greene." Music historian Piero Scaruffi believes that with Spirit
of Eden, Talk Talk "invented a new form of music, one in which a
complex atmosphere is created out of slow, inorganic, inarticulate streams of
simple sounds. The six lengthy, free-form, brooding and cataleptic ruminations
pioneered 'slo-core'." Numerous bands and artists, ranging from Catherine
Wheel to Sarah McLachlan, to Matthew Good, Graham Coxon, Doves and Elbow, have
praised Spirit of Eden or have cited it as an influence in their own
music. Indie folk group Bon Iver covered "I Believe in You" during a
2008 show in Dublin and Edinburgh.
Track listing
All songs written and
composed by Tim Friese-Greene and Mark Hollis.
No. Title Length
1. "The Rainbow"
9:05
2. "Eden"
6:37
3. "Desire"
7:08
4. "Inheritance"
5:16
5. "I Believe in You" 6:24
6. "Wealth"
6:35
The track times reflect the original North American version
of the CD. UK and European releases of the CD present the first three songs,
"The Rainbow", "Eden" and "Desire", as a single
track, totaling 23:11. The North American version of the album, and subsequent
international reissues, divide the suite into three tracks, although they are
still presented without an audible break. There is a forced silence of just
over 30 seconds between "Desire" and "Inheritance". Working
titles of the songs were "Modell", "Camel",
"Maureen", "Norm", "Inheritance", "Snow in
Berlin" and "Eric".
No comments:
Post a Comment