Echo & the Bunnymen, "Rescue" (1980)

(listen)

There may or may not be a story about a beatbox behind the odd name of this late-'70s Liverpool postpunk outfit but it was certainly a name that was good at winning them attention. On the basis of it alone, an old friend of mine was all over the early singles—"Rescue" was their second—and then the Crocodiles album. I went along for the ride and became a fan myself. Singer Ian McCullough was a bit of a student of Jim Morrison and the band drew on various arch '60s garage-band gestures in service of mostly New Wave aesthetics; and they were all pretty much willing to let things fly out as they would. "Rescue" works like the best of their stuff, with spooky overtones and bent-over rhythms and moments of stark if incoherent drama; ladled from a crock two and three minutes at a time it sounds and feels like it has been simmering on the fire for hours. Sometimes I think I might like another song from the album a little more, "Villiers Terrace" maybe, or "The Pictures on My Wall," but the good news and the bad is that there's a sameyness to much of what Echo & the Bunnymen were about. They had a sound. They made great albums (Porcupine is my favorite), but essentially each arrives with its own undifferentiated blobbiness, a pleasurable wallow for a week or two at a time. But "Rescue" is not any less transcendent in its way than Fontella Bass's own classic plea for one—it truly remains the best of early Echo & the Bunnymen, lifting with a sing-songy style, a deceptively offbeat rhythm, and a spare, noisy arrangement, taking one head-first into the kind of places only found otherwise in carnival fun houses, and you can sing along with the chorus too. Or chant, if you prefer.