BLACK BOX RECORDER: ENGLAND MADE ME (1998)
1) Girl Singing In The
Wreckage; 2) England Made Me; 3) New Baby Boom; 4) It's Only The End Of The
World; 5) Ideal Home; 6) Child Psychology; 7) I. C. One Female; 8) Up Town Top
Ranking; 9) Swinging; 10) Kidnapping An Heiress; 11) Hated Sunday.
One hell of a fun ride would be playing this
album back-to-back with Springsteen's Born
In The USA — another album that describes the uneasy relationship between
the protagonist and his home country, but in a diametrically opposite manner.
As someone born in the USA, the Boss is rowdy, hot, dynamic, willing to go to
extremes in any given emotional state. As someone made by England, Sarah Nixey
is... frozen. Black Box Recorder?
More like Ice Box Recorder, if you ask me. With cockle shells and silver bells
to boot.
Interestingly enough, the Black Box Recorder
project was started up by Luke Haines before
his main band, The Auteurs, folded its wings and went to sleep. In its deepest
essence, the project pursued the same goals — a cynical, melancholic
deconstruction of any life-asserting values that the surrounding society and
culture might contain — but the execution was very different. All the songs
were co-written by Haines with John Moore, formerly the drummer and guitarist
for The Jesus And Mary Chain, and all the lead vocals were female, handled by
the abovementioned Sarah Nixey, formerly a nobody, but as a member of Black Box
Recorder — one of the most haunting figures in British indie pop. Consequently,
Black Box Recorder explored a «softer», subtler, less rock-based approach than
The Auteurs, and its combination of ingredients, even if it is not necessarily
«better» than The Auteurs, seems much more unique.
The key ingredient of England Made Me are the vocal melodies that Luke and John are
feeding to Sarah — and her interpretation of these melodies. Unlike, say, Beth
Gibbons of Portishead, who typically sings out of a bathtub with razor blades
fastened to her wrists, Sarah never lets her slightly childlike voice quiver
with extreme emotion. Instead, she delivers those lyrics, usually full of
gruesome, morbid, or cynically bittersweet imagery (the most often quoted line
is the chorus to ʽChild Psychologyʼ — "life is unfair, kill yourself or
get over it"), like a formerly sweet and delicate person that, after some
particularly dreadful trauma, has pretty much lost all feeling, or fallen in an
entranced state. Pinned to a background of quietly plucked guitars, inobtrusive
backing vocals, occasional chimes and synthesizer strings, it makes for a great
combination: simple, immediately hitting all the right nerve centers, and with
no direct analogies.
The price to pay for this is monotonousness:
the level of variation in between these 11 tunes is fairly low. But the tunes
themselves are short, and each one has a little something going on to hook your
attention, be it the decisiveness with which Sarah states that "my 18th
birthday, I'll die of boredom" (ʽGirl Singing In The Wreckageʼ), or the
gruesome conclusiveness of her "the kid is gone, he's not my son"
(ʽNew Baby Boomʼ), or the freezing, ironically consolating tone of her "it's
only the end of the world..." (meaning that the worst is yet to come,
after all), or the depressing blues picking on ʽKidnapping An Heiressʼ, which
leaves no hope for humanity even before the first bit of lyrics comes along.
The true wonder of England Made Me, though, is that it is one of those albums that
does not really make you want to kill
yourself — but rather to get over it. It wears its mourning clothes quite
casually and stoically, neither commanding the listener to fight this gloom
(because it cannot be fought against) nor, like Robert Smith or the
aforementioned Beth Gibbons, inviting you to masochistically gloat over it.
It's only the end of the world — get it? It's not that serious. It just happens. One of the key songs, ʽIdeal Homeʼ,
presents you with this mystical claustrophobic perfection ("in an ideal
home, everything's safe... in an ideal home, nothing you do can go
wrong..."), contrasting it with "miserable songs from the house next
door, perhaps they're planning to end it all" — you can take it as a blunt
allegory of social segregation, of course, but you can also view it as a hymn
to spiritual isolationism: the «ideal home» is a metaphor for simply locking
out all feeling and barricading yourself from all the evils, disappointments,
and different degrees of shit going on all over the world — an urge that may
not be completely alien to quite a few of us, right? Especially when the ʽIdeal
Homeʼ is set to such lovely music.
This is, of course, the quintessence of Luke
Haines, the most cool-headed guy ever to write and sing about the world's
evils, but Sarah here is a more perfect vehicle for his ideas than he himself
ever was, and England Made Me,
despite — or due to — painting a rather unsavory picture of England as a place
where people trap spiders underneath glass and kill strangers at railway stations
just because people love a good murder mystery, is one of his finest
contributions to the world of intelligent pop music. A humble masterpiece that
deserves to be much better known, so here's hoping that this enthusiastic thumbs up
might help it some.
Brilliant album and yet the best was still to come. One notable piece George didn't mention is "Uptown Top Ranking". I think it's been described as 'fucked with elephant tranquilliser'. Very apt.
ReplyDeleteAlso, my admiration for Haines aside, I would stress the songwriting qualities of John Moore. He has two new albums out this year, both terrific.