CATHERINE WHEEL: WISHVILLE (2000)
1) Sparks Are Gonna Fly; 2)
Gasoline; 3) Lifeline; 4) What We Want To Believe In; 5) All Of That; 6) Idle
Life; 7) Mad Dog; 8) Ballad Of A Running Man; 9) Creme Caramel.
Catherine Wheel's last album always gets a
pretty bad rap from fans and critics alike; to me, however, the blow to music
lovers' sensitivities that was dealt by Wishville
does not feel nearly as crippling because I never fell under their original
enchantment in the first place. What it does is smoothly and logically finalize
their transformation from a psychedelic art-pop band into a moody alt-rock band
— not in a revolutionary manner at all, merely putting the final touches on a
trajectory that they began laying out already on Chrome. Maybe the hatred was partially due to all the new
happenings in the band: they signed up with Columbia (sell-out!), fired their
old bass player, and had Rob Dickinson produce all the sessions himself.
Neither of these things per se is criminal, but taken together, they give some
cause for premature alarm.
Still, the main single from the album, ʽSparks
Are Gonna Flyʼ, is not too bad. Its revolving one-chord melody may well be
accused of monotonousness, but then again, this was never a band known for
super-complex riffs anyway, and the song's relentless pounding, coupled with
the desperation in Dickinson's voice, makes for some decent morose headbanging
fodder. At least there's some sort of daring, genuinely aggressive melodic
minimalism here, and it still manages to coexist with a massive wall of sound,
like in the old days. This is not something that can be said about the second
single, ʽGasolineʼ, which sounds as if they were trying to produce one of those
creepy, trip-hoppy, Freudian masterpieces Peter Gabriel-style (ʽDigging In The
Dirtʼ), but failed because of insufficient musicianship and not enough ideas to
make the atmosphere truly creepy (tiny bits of eerie laughter here and there in
the corners don't really count). In addition, there's not much to be said about
a chorus that consists of just one line, "I love gasoline", which
your brain probably refuses to process in a logical manner; personally, I have
no idea what Dickinson means by "gasoline" here, and I'm not sure I
even want to know.
After that, the record simply goes on to
fulfill its original promise — track after track of slow, distorted,
melancholic alt-rock where each song sets the exactly same tone as its
predecessor, with the main emphasis placed almost exclusively on Dickinson's
soulful choruses. That, actually, is the primary problem of Wishville: the near-complete lack of
kaleidoscopic guitar patterns courtesy of Brian Futter, who seems content to
contribute simple, unadorned lead guitar parts to Dickinson's more-and-more
generic alt-rock riffage. Where the vocals on the band's first two albums were
more like a cherry on top of the polyphonic guitar explosions, here it's all
about the vocals — and too many of these vocals just sound like your average
hard rock whiner, paralyzed by spiritual laziness and unable to convert his
general dissatisfaction with everything and everybody into anything remotely
constructive or properly destructive. Either of the two would work well for me,
but nothing is truly delivered.
All in all, it's a fairly sad case of
«self-betrayal», when you gradually let go of the things that constitute your
strength in favor of doing something where you just can't compete with the best
of the competition. Dickinson has a decent voice that can carry a good amount
of soul, but when you stare it right in the face, it's fairly monotonous and
colorless — certainly nothing like a Robert Smith, for instance, with his
capacity of making it ring, rise, and fall, but nothing like a Michael Stipe,
either, with his soothing, almost priestly, peace-be-with-you-son murmur.
Turning the dial away from the
psychedelic guitar sound and into the direction of these vocals was a rather
prideful and completely unwarranted development, a gamble that did not pay
off, and a sorry finale for Catherine Wheel as a bunch of musicians wanting to
leave their own trace in this world — and while I don't know the details, I'm
pretty sure that the band split not because Wishville got poor reviews and sold few copies, but because it
simply did not make any sense to keep the band alive once the transformation
had been completed.
I am not giving the record a thumbs down,
though; like I said, acute hatred towards it is a little unwarranted, because
technically, it is still several inches above the generic alt-rock waterline —
Dickinson is a monotonous, but never truly irritating singer, and there are
still enough tasty guitar bits here to last you through at least one listen.
But returning to it after your own desire? You'd have to be a real St.
Augustine to do that.
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