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THE NAKED LUNCH
To scream or to
dream? To kiss or to miss?
The Creatures are
Siouxsie and Budgie and they must know that such questions are stupid,
because their "Feast" invites no clear choice but demands a
blurred complicity. Indeed, it begins with the very sound of
complicity: waves that are neither the crushing blows of night nor the
measured still of day, but the languid laps of dawn - a soundtrack for the
netherland between memories of dark and anticipations of light, the state
between lingering in the past and launching into the future.
Not an easy decision
- especially when the song's lyric "the morning is over" mutates
into "the mourning is over" - but one they are determined to
confront us with: no sooner have the waves died away when "Inoa
'Ole" begins, and its "Rosemary's Baby" soft-focus gasps
and slowmotion aches suck us into the trance between awakening and the
turmoil of whether to fight or to succumb.
Welcome, then, to
"Feast": the feast where no welcome is assured. The feast
where protocol matters and table manners are unimportant, and where you're
left dying for the cuisine... and not because it's late arriving.
Bring your own knife and fork.
"Feast"
was recorded in Hawaii, introduces itself with graphics of a kind of
brooding Inca majesty and of a demotic, tribal simplicity, and draws on a
musical heritage alien to our own: a heritage more simple in sound, more
complex in resonance.
In a sense, the
setting is a red herring: their tales of menace and futility in suburbia
transported to the jungle, where the only difference is that you have more
room and more heat to stew in your own despair, and a more luxurious heel
to darken your nightmare.
"Dancing On
Glass", for example, is like a more heady "Switch" where
one is pressed down not by urban edge but by "tropical fever"
(as they sing on "Gecko"). So, although I mentioned Nic
Roeg in the single review, "Feast" may be their walkabout but
it's not their "Walkabout". There is no sense of this landscape
being more implicitly pure or good or even natural; there is nothing
natural in Siouxsie's imagination, not even nature.
What makes the
ambience so right, then, is the sparseness of sound it affords, a
sparseness that is a more potent expression of this emotional malaise then
almost anything Siouxsie has created with the Banshees. It is, of
course, voice and percussion, and just as Siouxsie has two voices - the
true, pure, piercing melody and the nebulous whisper - then so there are
more facets to the percussion than we're used to: sometimes tuned and
reciprocating, sometimes shards of backdrop noise, an unrequited chorus of
cascades and chants.
There is something arbitrary
about the choice of locale, as well, but if it's an extra layer of morbid
duplicity, then it's a thrilling one: for if the artists are clambering up
a wall of voodoo to see what is on the other side, then it's a perfect
perspective. Because if one theme runs through these tales it is the
sting of voyeuristic decadence and the bite of cruel power. Few
people know why Burroughs called his novel "The Naked
Lunch" - the sudden charge of reality that the sight of the meat at
the end of the fork provokes - and even if Siouxsie and Budgie are among
the ignorant, I think they've worked it out for themselves.
"Flesh" is
the big one here, but although its stylised screams cut one to the quick
and its oblique "mise en scene" quiver the senses, its lyrics
merely dull them. A line like "a disfigured, dismembered sex
with a Third World cast" is all wrong, both too explicit and too
obscure at the same time: too explicit to allow for any subliminal
potency, too obscure to focus the disturbing imagery. The
histrionics of it all are redolent of Jim Morrison's excesses, and,
indeed, something like "Horse Latitudes" would not seem out of
place here.
Much better are the
true simplicity of "your loving strokes are fatal charms"
("Miss The Girl") and the true tease of "Erogenous touch of
brother and sister" ("Ice House"), or even "Panoramic
banana, a passion fruit samba" ("Gecko") - for although it
looks frivolous on paper, a mere reprise of "Christine, the
strawberry girl" silliness, there is a subtle yet crushing
difference. Where the psychedelic tone of that song posited a notion
of rose-tinted nostalgia, the phychedelia of this one (this album even) is
that of blood-rose psychosis: raspberries ripe and raspberries ruffled.
The most chilling
charge of it all is still "Miss The Girl", for when you hear the
line "miss the girl" itself it strikes you as banal. It's
only later, in the context of "you didn't miss the girl - you hit the
girl", that you realise you're in the presence of the most shocking
"double entendre" since Costello's "My Aim Is True".
Breathlessly exotic,
"Feast" is Siouxsie's frightening fruit from foreign
places. To scream or to dream?
Mark Brennan
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Imagine
if you can, a Banshees album stripped to it's bare bones, shattered,
splintered, and then sent cartwheeling off into another nameless
direction. 'The Feast' is such an album.
