BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST: TIME HONOURED GHOSTS (1975)
1) In My Life; 2) Sweet Jesus;
3) Titles; 4) Jonathon; 5) Beyond The Grave; 6) Song For You; 7) Hymn For The
Children; 8) Moongirl; 9) One Night.
For this somewhat uninspired (very mildly speaking) sequel to Everyone Is Everybody Else, the band
moved to a studio in San Francisco, and either the nice summer climate of California
mollified their brains after the proverbial London rain and fog, or such was
the overall decadent musical atmosphere of 1975 that the rotting process
would have started in any case. The average song quality on Time Honoured Ghosts drops down another
couple of notches — mainly because the band seems intent on purging out both the
last drops of psychedelic influences, and
its hard-rocking component at the same time (the presence of a few distorted
riffs here and there notwithstanding, their collected crunch now never really
rises above Crosby, Stills & Nash level). The melodic quotient still
remains, but so does the narcissistic sentimentalism — and there is only so
much heart-on-sleeve attitude that a tired old sense of perception can stand.
Moreover, it does not help that Lees continues
to explore the gimmickry line, launched with ʽThe Great 1974 Mining Disasterʼ. This
time, we are offered ʽTitlesʼ — a dreamy, more or less inoffensive mix of the
California sound with the European art song, but rendered unlistenable by staying
loyal to its name: the lyrics do indeed consist of little other than titles of
Beatles songs, stringed together to form a ghostly Profound Message ("across
the universe one after nine-o-nine, I've got a feeling for you blue and I feel
fine"). Every artist may have his, her, their ups, downs, collapses,
revivals, breakdowns, and comebacks, but this,
unfortunately, is a kind of creativity reserved for artists with serious
mutations in their taste buds — not only does it cast its cheesy shadow over
the entire album, but it simply blocks my ability to take these guys seriously.
Once again, Lees and Holroyd share primary
songwriting and singing duties, this time on a more or less equal basis, and
now that the band is firmly rooted in soft rock territory, the styles of the
two also begin to merge. Lees tries to set an intense atmosphere over the first
seconds of the LP: ʽIn My Lifeʼ (another glaring nod to the Beatles, as if
ʽTitlesʼ weren't enough) opens (and closes, after a rather dreary mid-section) as
a fast melodic blues-rocker that probably has more energy than the rest of the
album put together. The preachy lyrics are, as usual, quite off-putting
("But I was young, did not know, grace is for God, greed is to
know"), but if the entire album had been relatively faithful to this
style, instead of switching to unexciting acoustic foundations, slower tempos,
and exaggeratedly soulful high-pitched vocals (from ʽSweet Jesusʼ and onwards),
the band might have earned more respect from me. Instead, it just bores me one
minute and offends me the next, and there is nothing I can do to myself to
prevent those effects.
Every now and then, Holroyd's ʽMoongirlʼ on the
second side is extolled as the album's definitive highlight, a magical-mystery
art song where Sgt. Pepper-influenced
guitars are integrated with Woolly's enchanting keyboard overdubs like never
before or after. I probably would not mind, had the main chord progression and
its key role in the song's coda not been so blatantly (with very minor changes)
lifted from a far superior song — Eric Clapton's ʽLet It Growʼ, which already has
more than everything that ʽMoongirlʼ has to offer.
In between this «contextual failure» of one of
the album's suggested highlights and the embarrassing pretense of ʽTitlesʼ,
the rest of Time Honoured Ghosts
simply fails to attract this writer's attention or provoke any interesting
comments. So I will finish by saying that, perhaps, the best song on the album
is the sole contribution from Woolly — ʽBeyond The Graveʼ is yet another of
those attempts to emulate the symphonic ambitiousness of early XXth century
music (from Mahler to Strauss), this time carried out with surprisingly few
overdubs and practically no guitar at all: organs, synthesized strings, and
choral harmonies do all the job instead. The «poor man's majestic effect» is
there all right, although I would have honestly preferred that the song remain
completely instrumental — not only are the vocals needlessly delivered in
plaintive Procol Harum mode, but the lyrics, as usual, are beyond contempt
("we will survive beyond the grave, and as we sleep we will be saved, life
in its essence will endure while still on earth we can be sure" — we can
take stuff like that from Black Sabbath, perhaps, but hardly in a song that
pretends to draw its inspiration from academic styles of music).
So, although it would still take a long time to
reach the genuine creative nadir for these guys, Time Honoured Ghosts is the first BJH album to which I could not
possibly react with a thumbs up even if a swarm of professional musicologists
were to prove that each of the songs features a variety of subtle, previously
unheard of musical ideas. Mushy, unmemorable, preachy, gimmicky, downplaying
the band's strengths and extolling their weaknesses, it is not a «catastrophe»
— it is a «failure», which is even worse, because catastrophes can at least be curious
and amusing. Well, check out ʽTitlesʼ, perhaps, for such curiosity's sakes,
then join me in my thumbs down if you, too, do not react so
lightly to taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
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