The record is, tongue in cheek, Fripp’s most “commercial” offering and it begins with his comments to that effect. Just to show how “commercial” it was, Daryl Hall’s management and record label (RCA) refused to allow Hall’s voice to appear on several songs (in part) for fear of Exposure‘s lack of commercial appeal (on which see the Allmusic article here). I should say that a Fripp-infused Daryl Hall is a Daryl Hall I can listen too, and I’ll be looking for that Fripp-produced album this week.

Several things stand out from my repeated exposures to Fripp’s album in the past few days. The main thing is the way in which the entire album is united by theme, namely exposure to suffering. Interspersed throughout the album’s lyrics or spoken samples are either painful expressions of the inevitability of human suffering (as in Buddhism) or dire warnings of more suffering to come (as in the apocalypse of ancient Judaism or Christianity). This is done in an intriguing way both lyrically and musically.

There’s “You burn me up, I’m a cigarette” with a very down-to-earth expression of suffering in terms of relationships, “Exposure” with its terrifying screams, and Gabriel’s “Here comes the flood” with its apocalyptic warnings of the coming end (on flood imagery and ancient apocalypticism, go here; on Dylan’s use of similar flood imagery, go here). Spoken samples are also built into the songs, as when a scientist speaks of the coming of catastrophic floods in the near future and when someone (a follower of the Buddha?) speaks of the inevitability of suffering, at least in this world.

Perhaps most astounding is the way in which the music itself takes you on a roller-coaster ride that involves the listener in suffering and relief from suffering. The album runs the gamut of genres, from experimental new wave and heavy-metal to soothing ballads and ambient music (reminiscent of Fripp’s ambient work with Brian Eno — I’ll have to post on that soon, since I also managed to find a copy of the LP No Pussyfooting). Quite often, you are moved from harsh and jarring sounds in one track, to a soothing aural experience in the next. The heavy-metal style vocals of Peter Hammil are juxtaposed with the soothing R&B voice of Daryl Hall or the gentle (Joni-Mitchell like) vocals of Terre Roche on some tracks. Yet Roche’s screams of “exposure” found on the title track are both impossible to listen to and impossible to abandon, despite the torture. And one could not ask for a more calm and emotive performance of Peter Gabriel’s “Here comes the flood”, which is stripped of the somewhat over-produced sounds on Gabriel’s debut album and replaced with Gabriel and his piano along with the subtle guitar loops of Frippertronics. Also interspersed throughout are ambient songs which likewise use the Frippertronics tape-loop experimentation begun on Fripp and Eno’s No Pussyfooting.

This is one form of suffering I would recommend.

UPDATE: It seems that the vocal samples involving a scientist’s predictions of the coming flood and the quotation regarding the inevitability of suffering are both by John G. Bennett, a British scientist who combined his scientific views with Eastern religious ideas. Interesting combination.  He started up his own school to teach such things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HM0b_M-ToU

The first time I heard the band The Call, it was a tape of Modern Romans (1983) that my friend Sue lent to me. The tune you are listening to now, if you pressed play above, is “The walls came down” from that second album (and, yes, that is Garth Hudson, seated, on keyboards). I remember thinking how raw, direct, and (often) angry the album sounded, and I was intrigued enough to start listening to more (I was about 16 at the time).

I still listen to The Call’s albums and wonder why it is that, unlike some of their contemporaries, the band has been largely forgotten. Clearly they were talented, and their brand of alternative rock involved an interesting combination of musical influences. They also evolved over their career, shifting from this more basic and direct sound to a more mature and well-constructed musical style.

There were also clear signs that a good number of musicians appreciated The Call. Peter Gabriel liked them enough to ask them to open for his “Shock the monkey” tour, as the Wikipedia article points out. Gabriel, Bono of U2, and Jim Kerr of Simple Minds all offered backing vocals on certain albums. Garth Hudson of The Band played keyboards on thefirst few albums, and Robbie Robertson played guitars on the Reconciled (1986) album, which is among the best contributions of The Call.

The album Modern Romans (1983 [out of print and never released on CD]) was a politically charged album about the decadence and decline of western society using the image of debauched Romans (see cover) as the analogy. As a student of the Roman empire, I would not exactly subscribe to this picture of the actual Romans (see the post Golden rule: Do unto others according to the “pagans” or Apart from vomitoriums and orgies, what did the Romans do for us?). But as an album concept and critique of western society, it works. The song you are listening to offers a critique of militarism and Cold War politics in particular with an allusion to the falling walls of Jericho built into the song title and chorus:

Well they blew the horns
And the walls came down.
They’d all been warned
But the walls came down.
I don’t think there are any Russians
There ain’t no Yanks
Just corporate criminals
Playin’ with tanks.
(by Michael Been, 1983)

Although the first three albums have not been released on CD and are out of print, The Walls Came Down: The Best of the Mercury Years (out of print), which can still be found, gathers together the best of these first three.

After a slightly disappointing synthesizer-heavy Scene Beyond Dreams (1984), several excellent albums were to follow beginning with Reconciled (1986) with the better known “Everywhere I go”. There is a sense in which this album represents the maturation of the band. The quieter and more atmospheric Into the Woods (1987) is also a favourite of mine. The lyrics here are still quite serious, intense, and, at times, introspective, as in “It could have been me”:

It could have been me
Lying in that jungle
Out in that heat
Fighting for my life
Dying for nothin’
Feeling a bullet
enter my soul
It could have been me
It could have been me
It could have been me
Living in that prison
Locked in a cage
Damning the walls
Damn the division
Wondering why it had to be me
Well, it could have been you. . .
(by Michael Been, 1987 Neeb Music / Tarka Music).

The follow-up, Let the Day Begin (1989) brought the band momentarily into the spotlight with the title-track, which was number one for a while. However, I find the final album of this era, Red Moon (1990), among the best by this largely forgotten band.

In Rainbows is a very highly produced album with great attention to detail, something that may make reproduction in live shows a trial for the band, I would imagine. The result of this production is a very clean and sharp sound, with percussion, guitar, and other instrumentation often jumping out at the listener in stark ways. Although there’s a bit of ambience as well, it’s hard not to pay complete attention to most tunes on this album when they are playing — this is no music for airports!

Despite having played this album a number of times, I still wonder what’s next as I listen, simply because of the rather non-traditional structures of the songs and the interesting juxtapositions of the different instruments and sounds, both acoustic and electronic, harmonic and dissonant. This is what makes the overall aural experience very intriguing. I sit on the edge of my seat for most tracks on this album, even though I do find the high level of production sometimes lacking in warmth or even emotionally sterile at times (but warmth is not likely what Radiohead was going for on some of these tracks).

The sterility I mentioned may well be intentional. The running lyrical themes of this album, which are also echoed by the music, are futility, darkness, and despair — the end, the singer’s end, is near in just about every tune. If he is not falling off the edge of the earth or going to hell, he’s dead from the neck up or trapped in the prison of his body. The album evokes phantoms and there are times, as in “Nude”, when the vocals are best described as the cries of displaced angels.

When you are listening to “Weird Fishes/Apeggi” it is truly the sounds of the depths that you hear, and Mephistopheles (Satan) is indeed grabbing at you to bring you down to destruction, as in the finale, “Videotape”. Despite the haunting darkness of this album there are moments of light, and the finishing lines suggest that light wins out: “No matter what happens now, I won’t be afraid. Because I know today has been the most perfect day I’ve ever seen.”

There are a number of fast-paced songs here, including “15 Step”, “Bodysnatchers”, and “Weird Fishes / Arpeggi”. It is here that one senses the feel of The Bends at times. The solemn and haunting “15 Step” combines heavy drumming with synthesizers in a sort of sombre harmony. In “Bodysnatchers”, distorted guitar gives way to a whining guitar background reminiscent of tunes on U2′s Achtung Baby.

The slower songs reflect an interesting range of sounds from one track to the next. A highlight of the album, in my view, is “All I need” with its slow cello-like sounds juxtaposed with distorted synthesizers. This gives way to a piano and violin-sounding climax with heavy drumming. Lyrically, here the persona of the singer is a moth trying to get out of the darkness and towards the light, and the music itself suggests some hope in this regard. Also very effective, musically, is “Reckoner”, where the interplay between lead guitar (played as bass) and distant tambourine-like percussion provides the ideal background to the gentle vocal tones that climax in an ambient string orchestral arrangement before returning to the beginning again.

Radiohead’s “Jigsaw” combines acoustic guitar and funky bass in a slow build that leads to a full sound once again more reminiscent of The Bends or OK Computer. Here the statement is made: “What’s the point of instruments. Words are a sawed-off shotgun”. Overall, Radiohead’s In Rainbows proves quite the opposite. It is the rich mix of instrumentation and juxtaposition of various sounds that make it possible to withstand the darkness (or dodge the shotgun) of the album and come out alive. I would recommend this album, as you may have guessed.

Buy the album

One band that very few seem to remember (at least in North America), even if they were teenagers in the 1980s, is The Alarm (full discography). The Alarm was a contemporary of both U2 and Simple Minds, and there was a fair bit of interaction among members of all three of these bands in the early 80s. Bono was known to appear on stage at Alarm concerts, and vice versa for Mike Peters, the lead singer of The Alarm. The Alarm opened for U2′s War tour in 1983. There was a sense in which The Alarm was Wales’ U2, Simple Minds was Scotland’s U2, and, well, U2 was Ireland’s U2.

All three bands were punk-influenced (as is clear in the Alarm tune you are listening to now and the cover of Declaration [1984] to your right) with a touch of new wave and a Joy-Division-like somberness at times. All formed and began recording in the late 1970s or early 80s. All were played on “alternative” stations, such as CFNY (now “the Edge”) here in the Toronto area.

By 1983, both U2 and the Alarm were known for their politically-charged anthems. U2 and the Alarm were also known as excellent, lively concert performers. I can remember how overwhelmed I felt at one particular Alarm concert at Massey Hall when I was about 16 or 17. The energy at an Alarm concert was hard to match!

Although there are similarities among the three, each nonetheless had its distinctive character (and I’m not just talking about the Alarm’s regretful hair-dos). While U2 went on to mass stardom and Simple Minds continues to have radio play (on retro stations) as a result of their hits (such as “Alive and Kicking”), The Alarm is largely forgotten here in North America. This is the case even though Mike Peters has continued to record both under his own name and with bands such as Coloursound, along with members of the Cult (Bill Duffy) and the Mission (Craig Adams). Most recently, Peters has now formed a new Alarm (official site here — a video will start playing), called “Alarm MMVI”, which charted in the UK with “Superchannel”. The loss of memory of the Alarm is unjustified in some ways.

Listen as you read: “Eye of the Hurricane” (audio snippet)

The Alarm quite quickly progressed from the very basic, punk-influenced marches (and, yes, you can march to just about every early Alarm track) of 1983′s self-titled EP to a more well-refined alternative sound by 1987′s Eye of the Hurricane (© IRS). There are also continuities, though, in the sense that from beginning to end the Alarm had an intriguing sound marked by a combination of both acoustic and electric sounds (harmonica was not uncommon). The new incarnation of the Alarm XXVI harkens back to the 1983 sound more so than 1987, by the way, with its more direct, garage-band sound.

In some ways, the Strength (1985) album was a clear transition from the earlier, more basic sound which was still heard in “Sixty-Eight Guns” (on Declaration [1984]), to the more refined and produced sound of Eye of the Hurricane. This fourth album seemed promising in breaking the band to a larger audience, and it did so to some degree. The single “Rain in the summertime” which you are listening to now did get considerable radio play at the time and hit #6 on the US charts, according to the Wikipedia article. It was a bit harder to get Alarm concert tickets as a result. The album is an interesting combination of acoustic and electric as expected, and yet synthesizers were added and stand out quite prominently here (understandable for 1987). Two more, commercially less-successful albums followed (Change [1989] and Raw [1991]) before the group disbanded. As mentioned, Mike Peters continues to record but is basically unknown in North America, and he has remixed all of the Alarm CDs, adding b-sides and other rareties to each.

UPDATE: Little did I know, but it seems that there have been two, recent documentary-style reality shows by the BBC that follow the daily family life and struggles (including the struggle with cancer) of Mike Peters and his wife and two children. Go to the Alarm “news” section: The Peters’ Family BBC Documentary.

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