Amoeba - Watchful (1997)

I reviewed this one back when I was writing stuff for Ed Pinsent's Sound Projector about a million years ago. I encountered my review once again just a couple of weeks back and, aside from wondering why Ed even printed some of the garbage I submitted, it occurred to me that I'd done this album something of a disservice, so here we are again. I'm just trying to be a better person.

To be fair, I suspect Ed sent this one my way having formed the initial impression of a tasteful new age soundtrack for coffee bars, or at least this was how it looked to me. It's certainly constitutes a type of which there were a shitload back in the nineties - young poetically inclined men with black clothes and cellos presenting musical analogies to the cover of a Sandman comic painted by Dave McKean; and yet for all that Watchful ticks boxes which shouldn't ordinarily be ticked, two decades later it still blows you right off the sofa, out the window, and into the yard.

Musically we're not talking anything too unexpected - double bass, brush drums, pseudo-Spanish guitar and whispy vocals preventing the subtle loops and digital wash of sound fully descending into ambient territory. It's probably not a surprise that half of Amoeba were probably better known for hanging around with Lustmord, although frankly this is better, and sufficiently so as to give me cause to wonder whether better than Lustmord might not be considered an actual genre in its own right, although of course there would be one fuck of a lot of acts under that particular umbrella, possibly as many as all acts.

Watchful haunts the listener, or it has haunted me, creating vast spaces within which one cannot help but pick out fascinating details, then suddenly you're listening to an actual song, something which tugs at the heart like the dream you wish you could remember upon waking; and the bass and the melody sound like the saddest thing in the world. I suppose there were a lot of similar acts in the nineties. I used to hang around the World Serpent office nosing around their stock to see what had come in, and aside from the obvious names, there were always a couple of goth-neofolk-darkwave hopefuls I'd never heard of - yet more poetically inclined men with black clothes and cellos, some mediaeval woodcut on the cover and a band name which was clearly trying way, way, way too hard. The Soil Bleeds Black was probably the funniest of those I'm able to recall; and Loretta's Doll*, of course…

Anyway, to get to the point, this is what I suspect all of those bands wanted to sound like; and in 2019 it reminds me of nothing so much as the more wistful bits of Kate Bush's back catalogue. That's a recommendation, obviously.

*: I don't know, but I'm willing to bet that she probably wasn't from the Barbie & Friends Malibu Beach Gift Set.