CAMEL: STATIONARY TRAVELLER (1984)
1) Pressure Points; 2)
Refugee; 3) Vopos; 4) Cloak And Dagger Man; 5) Stationary Traveller; 6) West
Berlin; 7) Fingertips; 8) Missing; 9) After Words; 10) Long Goodbyes.
I imagine that after the blatant «sellout» of Single Factor, this was Latimer's
attempt at repentance — another concept album on the issue of feeling lonely,
oppressed, and rejected in a hostile world, only this time neither rooted in
fantasy, as Snow Goose, nor in
exotic reality, like Nude: Stationary Traveller deals with the
everyday routine and escapist dreams of East Berliners, just five years before
the demolition of The Wall, but still in a period when most people could hardly
even dream about this event. A pretty decent topic for a Camel album, for sure,
but the lineup assembled by Latimer for the sessions is questionable from the
beginning — Ton Scherpenzeel on keyboards, a Dutch player who was the founding
member of the occasionally pretty, but often bland and boring «soft-prog» band
Kayak; and drummer Paul Burgess, whose main claim to fame was playing for the Godley-less
and Creme-free version of 10cc.
Not that we should exclusively blame the
keyboardist and the drummer for the fact that Stationary Traveller, for the most part, is a tedious, lifeless
bore — a record that, dare I say it, is much worse than The Single Factor, because it pretends to a higher level of
spirituality and a deeper level of, uh, depth, while at the same time fully
embracing the safe, predictable, and sonically limp values of «adult
contemporary». The sound has been compressed into a single monotonous texture
of plastic synthesizers and Latimer's out-of-new-ideas weepy guitar solos, and
all the songs produce absolutely the same emotional effect. Unfortunately, I
just can't take any of this seriously — certainly not when even a Mel Collins
guest spot on ʽFingertipsʼ takes on the characteristics of jazz muzak à la
Kenny G.
What really kills the album is that its
ultra-serious tone came at a very inopportune time. Take a song like ʽVoposʼ,
which is supposed to brew up an atmosphere of fear, nay, dread at the perspective of being taken at night by the
Volkspolizei — the atmosphere in question being represented by a dark
synth-bass line, a couple simple overdubbed synth loops, and a distorted power
metal riff added in climactic moments. Not only do all those tones sound
plastic and dated in the modern age, but the effort seems lazy and amateurish
compared to emotionally similar work from, say, The Cure: Latimer is simply
incapable of handling all that technology without making it obvious that he is
doing it just for the sake of trendiness. Or ʽCloak And Dagger Manʼ — that's a
classic example of «dinosaur prog gone pop», a steroid-muscular rocker that
sounds more like post-Howe Asia than anything truly respectable... and, by the
way, why is it trying to be so furious when it's about secret KGB agents?
It gets no better with the instrumentals, which
uniformly lack memorable themes and just feature one dull keyboard or guitar
solo after another. ʽPressure Pointsʼ is arguably the most interesting of
these, compositionally, with Latimer taking after Mike Oldfield and delivering
a strongly Celtic-influenced rather than blues-based passage — but the effect is
still almost nullified by the awful backing synthesizers. As for stuff like the
title track, it's largely conventional blues balladeering (ʽHotel Californiaʼ
style) with equally awful arrangements.
By the time we get to the grand finale of ʽLong
Goodbyesʼ, your main concern might very likely be about how to make the actual goodbye
shorter — at any cost possible. You were supposed to be drawn into a realistic
atmosphere of fear, depression, and solitude, but the means chosen to express
it all were so inept that, of all Westerners alive, I can only think of Barclay
James Harvest as an even worse speaker for the freedom and happiness of German
people. I have no idea of how well the album did on Western German charts at
the time, but I do know that Decca never expressed any desire to go on with
Camel's contract after it was released, and for once, I couldn't really blame
them; so here we go, with the first definitive thumbs down in Camel history.
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