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Rating: Reviewing Marc Almond is always a challenging task for me; stimulating, engaging, fulfilling, but it’s all about carefully weighing words, finding the right ones, and managing to effectively convey emotions, atmospheres, and authorial background; then checking if everything’s in place, if there are no redundancies, repetitions, unfortunate metaphors or comparisons. And it's never easy. Some reviews just pour out of me, almost playfully, without overthinking, while others I take more seriously; Marc's are in a category of their own. And this applies when I praise him, as I have always done so far, let alone review him negatively. From what I’ve had the chance to listen to, there are only two albums that just don’t work for me: "Stranger Things" from 2001 and "Stories Of Johnny" from 1985; the first one, not much to say, a weak and anonymous album resulting from a physiological fatigue after a long series of great performances, the second one, however, is an album that enjoys much esteem and credit and surely deserves an explanation, a deeper look into why I dismiss it.
The period is that of the Willing Sinners, a group of musicians led by producer and co-writer Anni Hogan who accompanied the artist from 1984 to 1987, years marked by three LPs: “Vermin In Ermine,” “Stories Of Johnny” and finally “Mother Fist And Her Five Daughters.” Three very different albums; “Vermin...” is among the absolute peaks of his career: gritty, incisive, fiery, a true milestone; “Mother Fist...” is sophisticated, very singer-songwriter-like, with a wide stylistic range and pleasantly shadowy atmospheres, the second-born also has a very distinct identity, it’s a unique episode (fortunately) in Marc’s career, and it’s precisely its flamboyant yet monochord personality that hampers it, in addition to songwriting that, in my opinion, doesn’t match the two “sibling” albums. “Stories Of Johnny” almost completely loses the energy and emotional drive of “Vermin In Ermine” to settle into sounds that aim to be vintage, filled with horns, orchestrations, choirs, and countermelodies: the result? An album that has aged poorly and is terribly cumbersome despite its relative brevity. Take for example “Love Letter” and “The Flesh Is Willing”, two tracks that should theoretically lead the album, but what do they actually leave? Choruses repeated ad nauseam, almost like advertising jingles, polished but inorganic sounds, a vague sense of crowd-pleasing and an uninspired recital; the choirs consistently following the vocal line should in theory add nuances and uniqueness, but in practice they are unnecessary trappings that further burden an already unconvincing ensemble. The Marc Almond of this album is quite a bland crooner, almost unable to fully exploit the potential of his voice; he feels stilted, manneristic, somewhat forced, and it’s not just a matter of arrangements. Songs like “Always” or the title track seem to flatter the listener without much effect: they never manage to hit hard, to deliver true emotions; bittersweet mush that drags on with a tired and somewhat affected tone. “Contempt” could be a retro swing that’s not particularly original but intriguing, yet here again irritating little choirs spoil the whole thing, “Love And Little White Lies” with that flat and tedious gospel/choral backdrop is the quintessence of inconclusiveness that plagues the album.
What remains then? The mocking illusion of the initial “Traumas, Traumas, Traumas”, deliciously paranoid crescendo, fiery and elegant, marked by tribal percussion, reworking the mood of “Vermin In Ermine” in a more refined key; a brief and intriguing “The House Is Haunted”, a preview of the dark cabaret atmospheres of “Mother Fist...” and “My Candle Burns”, excellent performance as a vintage singer-songwriter, or rather how the album theoretically should have sounded, with an intriguing rhythm, pleasantly classical melody and choirs finally effective and used properly. Not enough to justify a whole album, especially from an artist I always have high expectations of. If I were him, I would have only released these last three songs, perhaps merging them with the excellent cover EP “A Woman’s Story” the following year, because everything else seems really small fry. I spontaneously compare “Stories Of Johnny” to Leonard Cohen’s “Death Of A Ladies' Man”: both are over-arranged albums with some good insights limited by an overall context that barely stands; the difference is that in this case, there was no need for any manic producer, Marc did it all on his own, channeling himself into a dead-end track, and thankfully he’ll immediately close this negative chapter with a wonderful series of masterful performances.
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