|
It's
undoubtedly a sound career move, but that the former Grand Viziers of
Goth's slickest offering to date is a sonic accompaniment to gloomy
Gotham City on the soundtrack to Batman Returns has a nice irony to it.
Whatever would Siouxsie have said to such an idea in
'78? A curt
dismissal, no doubt.
But things change and
their second "best of," dating from '82 on, shows how much the
Banshees have moved away from the goth business. They produced some of
their best work in this period, superbly crafted vignettes of dark-hued
psychedelic melodrama. Just how far they've come is shown by the '84
reworking of "Overground," originally on their debut LP
"The Scream," where the teeth-grating abrasion of old gives
way to a panoramic sound of martial drumming, strings and flamenco
guitars. Strings were virtually omnipresent at the time, forming a
churning undergrowth to "Dazzle" and winding around the
rhythms of "Slowdive."
The music's sensuality
is mirrored in the lyrics, which are hardly your average boy-meets-girl
stuff. The Baudelairean imagery of "Melt!" evokes
claustrophobic scents of opium, sex and sickly flowers, and lapses into
morbidity with lines like, "You are the melting man and as you
melt, you are beheaded." OK, it's a touch ludicrous, but a great
pop song nevertheless. Big hit "Dear Prudence" first showed
how adept the Banshees were to become at tackling others' material,
proven on the underrated covers LP, "Through The Looking
Glass." Included here are Dylan's "This Wheel's On Fire"
which gets an oriental reading, and the horn-fuelled lope of Iggy's
"The Passenger."
Recently the Banshees
have gained a new audience but kept their pop integrity intact, no more
so than on "Peek-A-Boo," a shuddering collage of depth-charge
bass, accordion and everything else. Which brings us full-circle to
"Face To Face," sleek and smooth, with more good old sex and
death imagery.
"Twice Upon A
Time" is an hour of heady pleasure, a legal intoxicant par
excellence.
4 Out Of 5
Dave
Morrison
|
|