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Versione 2
Rating: Away, away from men and towns
Toward the forest wild and the dunes
To the silent wildness
Where the soul need not repress
Its music for fear it finds
No echo in others' minds
Where the touch of nature's art
Harmonizes heart to heart.
[Percy Bysshe Shelley]
What do Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Teenage Fanclub, Boo Radleys, Saint Etienne, and Oasis have in common? Alan McGee and Creation. If the Scotsman has the undeniable merit of having risked bankruptcy to produce "Loveless," the shoegaze masterpiece, he should also be reevaluated for revealing himself (and equally hiding) as a talented musician and composer of unexpected sensitivity.
Already in Glasgow, he had been part of the obscure Laughing Apple, then moved to London, where he founded his label and his new group, the Biff Bang Pow!; both names pay homage to his revered Creation from Middlesex. The BBF, strong in their synergy or idiosyncrasy between 60s guitar pop and light, dreamlike psychedelia, interpreted indie pop or twee pop (or "shambling") in their own way, so well epitomized in the famous NME cassette compilation "C86".
The influences of the band of McGee and Dick Green, his business partner, are the Television Personalities, the Byrds, the Love, the Creation, and the The Jam. Their sound partially reflects that of the more twilight Big Stars, but with a more sinuous rhythm; it resembles that of Felt, yet escapes the post-punk breath; it prefigures certain landscapes that My Bloody Valentines would later flood with feedback, completely transfiguring the bucolic impression. In hindsight, we can see the affinities with the debut Slowdive and, later, with the early Belle And Sebastian.
The duo Biff Bang Pow!, born in 1983, was occasionally joined by talented musicians and collaborators. Here, after a rather spontaneous debut, i.e. "Pass The Paintbrush, Honey", the keyboardist Ed Ball (of Television Personalities) and the guitarist Andrew Innes (soon to join Primal Scream) stand out.
With this surprising "The Girl Who Run to the Beat Hotel", which Creation released in 1987, they came close to masterpiece. The work, with an acoustic structure and elegant instrumental weavings, offers an alternative sound, indie pop/jangle pop, visionary, vaguely melancholic, and hyper-dreamlike.
The lightness of the harmonic textures and the slenderness of the melodies proceed swiftly on flexible, non-invasive, and non-artificial rhythms: lights and mists make the visions they propitiate even more uncertain or dark, caressing you, taking you by the hand, without knowing whether they lead you to Eden or to the banality of everyday life. The instrumental timbres each have a character of their own, gruff in lightness, passionate but measured in their impulses.
Thus, languors not too submerged, inclined to folk, cross us with a sound care neither excessive nor cursory, but almost ingenuous, incredibly spontaneous, where the 80s plunge into the 60s to emerge completely out of time, with immense grace.
A perfect, enchanting album. Ten beautiful pieces and only 29 minutes: the first side delineates an aesthetic canon, the second broadens and blurs it, fading out of perspective in the finale, with a surprise twist. The order of the tracks is a revelation, thus becoming an added value.
The keyboards give depth to the slender textures and the fragile singing in "Someone Stole My Wheels" and in "She Never Understood", where even the drums are discreetly featured.
If "If I Die" tastes of certain REM guitar rides, "She Shivers Inside" is a ballad akin to Jesus and Mary Chain, while "He Don't Need That Girl" is another substance for Stuart Murdoch's and Isobel Campbell's notes.
"The Beat Hotel" is all acoustic droplets climbing a wet and fogged glass.
"Love's Going Out Of Fashion" is beautiful, with Mc Gee seemingly striving to imitate Robert Smith ("Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me" is contemporaneous) over jangling guitar, rolling bass, and Housemartins-like harmonica. "The way she looks, the way she talks is pure emotion/ ... But it's just confusion love creates/ 'Love's going out of fashion' I said".
"The Happiest Girl In The World" is pure, bare and sparse poetry, retro refinement with jazzed piano and the affable voice of Christine Wanless who, with her beautiful vocals, recalls the Morricone theme of "Le foto proibite di una signora per bene".
Two creative pieces close. "Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding" has an elusive and elegiac structure, with reversed voices, soft singing in the background, incidental instrument passages, sudden and repeated fades. Finally comes "The Whole World Is Turning Brouchard!" which is a solid and vibrant surf rock piece, soaked in keyboards halfway through. It breaks out of the LP's mood, its characteristic introversion, concluding a subdued yet intense journey, calm but rich in pathos.
By the time we get here, we find ourselves without melancholy, without hedonistic emphasis, without lysergic flights, without destructiveness.
Just the pleasure of making music, capturing something of the human soul, bound to daily labors, bearing all the weight and all the sound.
Biff Bang Pow! would shut down in 1991, after a handful of albums, including compilations, all beautiful and crafted, but no longer so magical.
"The Girl Who Run to the Beat Hotel" is an album that should be listened to, perhaps with eyes closed, because it can harmonize heart to heart.
Tracklist
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