23. Echo & the Bunnymen, Porcupine (1983)

[2021 review here.]

Once again a previous review says a lot of what I want to say (it’s the same album, after all, and it’s still me). I don’t plan to make a habit of this, but still: the weirdly titled Porcupine “arguably tends more toward the cerebral side of psychedelia, full of trippy climax and those thrumming string contributions from L. Shankar [no relation to Ravi].... these woozy dim images playing from wake-up movies, tarted up with exotic Eastern elements and a dense and sludgy production that bursts at will into clarity. The trademark dread of the Bunnymen lurks constantly. They're afraid of something. What is it?” (No, I don’t know what I meant by “wake-up movies” either.) Though Porcupine is now considered an album in good standing in the Bunnymen canon, in 1983 it got a fair amount of bad press. The knock, mainly from the UK, was that the band was already, with their third album, starting to go stale and recycle themselves. I have never heard Porcupine that way. For one thing it has two of their best songs in “The Cutter” (quite possibly their single best) and “The Back of Love.” It’s my favorite by them, and it's not just the exotic Eastern flourishes, but equally that creeping, gnawing sense of anxiety. Certainly on the druggy side of psychedelic experience dread and anxiety are usually there. Consider a first trip, or any. waiting to come on. Everyone is a little nervous and conversation is hard to focus. This is probably also the place for me to mention that, while I don’t consciously participate on either side of any rivalry between Ian McCulloch of Echo & the Bunnymen and Julian Cope of the Teardrop Explodes, I certainly have a preference. Cope if anything has pursued more determinedly psychedelic avenues but I couldn’t connect with any of his solo stuff lately, at least not on first listens (of Peggy Suicide and Interpreter), nor have I ever cared much for the T.E. But when I reached for the first four albums by Echo & the Bunnymen they all sounded at least as good as ever. And this still sounded best, as psychedelia or otherwise.

Porcupine (1983)

My favorite album by Echo & the Bunnymen arguably tends more toward the cerebral side of psychedelia, full of trippy climax and those thrumming string contributions from L. Shankar. But in memory it remains a soundtrack for bleary mind-groping post-midnight party scenes, playing very loud. It's head trip music that fills your head up and is heady too, these woozy dim images playing from wake-up movies, tarted up with exotic Eastern elements and a dense and sludgy production that bursts at will into clarity. The trademark dread of the Bunnymen lurks constantly. They're afraid of something. What is it? A fair argument points out the album attacks with its best, the two singles, "The Cutter" and "The Back of Love," and steps down from there song by song. Maybe—but the mood is consistent, stirring, dramatic, mysterious, infinitely exciting from moment to moment, about to turn another corner. All my favorite adjectives apply. And why not put your best out front? "The Cutter" enters already on a high point like exhausted caravansary entertainment at the encore, functioning on automatic yet with precision and impact, writhing string figures, sharp guitar chord on the upbeat, whammy bar touch, the song wandering yet building, until at 1:45 when it opens like glorious landscape and soars. It was their biggest hit. "The Back of Love" follows with nervous tempo and martial pounding on the drumkit. It seems to be scoffing at love and it never lets up, elevating after the chorus like a jet taking off, until finally it goes flying into colorful cloud-like scenes of meditation and yelping in a certain David Byrne mode. "The White Devil" involves John Webster and follows in a minor key, with thrilling xylophone. The title song (porcupine WTF) turns a great wisdom of the hallucinogen into magnificent soporific chant: "There is no comparison / Between things about to have been." Which translates approximately to "the past looks different in the future." Or perhaps not—proposed as another discussion point for the wee comedown hours. "Heads Will Roll" starts with a Love quote on acoustic guitar, shortly to be intruded upon by Bunnymen anxiety and Shankar's amazing strings again. The 2003 CD tacks on bonus tracks that run the whole thing close to 80 minutes, mostly alternate versions mostly unnecessary. The original is still the best. Put it on after midnight at your very next party. I mean, after the pandemic is over. I don't give parties or go to them much anymore myself.

Crocodiles (1980)

Annals of postpunk: I never owned a copy of Crocodiles until a few years ago when I picked up the 2003 CD edition with 10 bonus tracks (for an album that originally had 10 tracks). Echo & the Bunnymen, if you haven't noticed, can be terribly frustrating for completists and/or originalists. The box set Crystal Days: 1979-1999, for example, does not include anywhere on any of its four CDs any version of "Going Up," the opening track on Crocodiles. What, they decided to disown it? Streaming doesn't help either. On Napster, certain tracks from that box are simply not available, nor is Crocodiles at all. Anyway, as if all this fragmentation were not enough (there are also two 1980 versions of Crocodiles but never mind), my first exposure to this album was on a tape somebody made for me. I'm pretty sure I had the whole album on one side of a C-90 and I know individual tracks also appeared on mix tapes people made for me. Listening to the album more systematically I see it's what I would have considered a one-sided album if I'd had it in vinyl—namely, side 2, which kicks off with the single "Rescue" (a long-time favorite) and elevates a notch further with "Villiers Terrace," which pounds with hysterical anxiety you just have to declaim along with in Jim Morrison voice. "Pictures on My Wall," "All That Jazz," and "Happy Death Men" follow along in the afterglow. From the vantage of my old tape collection, Echo & the Bunnymen struck me as a bit of a same-y act—that is, all the songs on their albums sounded like versions of the best song, so it was easy to just let them play. I remember Bram Tchaikovsky, the Pretenders, Gang of Four, XTC, and even Elvis Costello to some degree fit that model. These artists made for good tapes for playing all day. The first side of the original Crocodiles is also not bad, I will add—I might have ended up playing it as an "upside-down" album if I'd had the vinyl, one of those albums I would play side 2 of before side 1 but would play both sides. But side 1 of Crocodiles is definitely more spotty (the hard-to-find "Going Up" is not bad but not great). For that matter, the bonus tracks on the 2003 CD have their points as well. About half are live, and a few are alternate versions in a munge of the two 1980 releases. What a mess these guys have made in a way, but I wouldn't be without "Rescue" and "Villiers Terrace."

Echo & the Bunnymen, "The Cutter" (1983)

(listen)

As with many of the non-charting songs I have picked to write about these last couple years (though it turned out a few actually had crossed the rubicon into the top 40, d'oh!), "The Cutter" is here mostly representing the album it comes from, in this case the third Echo & the Bunnymen album Porcupine, which is fine. In fact, all of their first four albums start at worthwhile and move toward essential. The general appeal is most often characterized as shades of neo-psychedelia in a postpunk frame. Wikipedia, for example, is quick to drag in the obligatory Sgt. Pepper-era Beatles on the matter of the thickly textured strings in this song. Fair enough, but I also want to call attention to Ian McCulloch's vocal, which had always displayed enough twitchy anxiety to get over on New Wave terms. For me, I had to hear the Bunnymen covers of Doors and Velvet Underground songs found on the box set to clarify just how good (and how ambitious) McCulloch always was. There is also the deceptively easy and unpretentious way the band has of packing in so much drama to so many of their songs. The stakes always feel high and so it is with "The Cutter." It thrums with a bottom vibrating at deepest levels even as the keyboard hooks elegantly stair-step across scales at the song's highest pitch, holding in place for its greatest effects. It's dread and atmosphere and yet light and frolicsome even, and always propulsive. It starts on a high note and builds to a glorious crescendo, like death and then heaven. I'm not even sure what it is exactly, let alone what it is about. And I don't know who or what "the cutter" is supposed to be but I don't think I want any part of it either.

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.