We Be Echo - The Misanthrope (2021)

 

It's not that I never imagined I'd still be listening to We Be Echo in 2021, but I didn't expect it to be new material; or for there to be quite so much new material - this being the second new album in about six months; or that the new material would actually eclipse those tapes from back when we were all a whole lot younger. With The Misanthrope we've gone beyond the possibility of attempts to revive former glories, which is weird because it seems like a new, unfamiliar dynamic in music biz terms, like Emotional Rescue turning out to be the definitive Stones album.

I suppose the biggest initial surprise was We Be Echo evolving into something sounding so much like a band and hence somewhat removed from the days of boxes plugged into a music center. As with Darkness is Home, this is very much a guitar orientated sound, or at least bass guitar orientated, presenting potential comparisons with Wire, Joy Division, the Talking Heads impersonating Joy Division, Neu, or even the first couple of Eno albums; but the more I listen, the more I realise this is a fairly logical progression from Third Door from the Left, Kevin Thorne's other band of times passed, and specifically from It's Not Us which seems vaguely ancestral to this material, at least in terms of mood.

For an album called The Misanthrope, this is a surprisingly uptempo set. The bass pounds and chugs with melodic intensity over driving beats and Thorne's increasingly confident vocal, and if it's slightly frosty in tone - possibly cold wave as I believe people who need to have names for things would call it - it's passionate, emotional and informed, so I would imagine, by turmoil. Love You Anyway and Need You Like Water are particularly powerful in this respect, presenting near solid walls of mood with the intensity of epic landscape painting or even something from Faith, the only decent album the Cure ever made, but without the disadvantage of being by the Cure. It's been a while since I got earwormed this hard by anything, but Love You Anyway may even be We Be Echo's New Dawn Fades.

 

 

 

The Cure - Faith (1981)

Here's another one I bought when it came out, albeit as a cassette because it had a film soundtrack for something called Carnage Visors on the other side, which seemed like a good deal. My dad bought a new family music centre that Christmas, and somehow I managed to persuade the folks to let me play Carnage Visors on it as we ate Christmas dinner, myself, my parents, and my granny. I still have the tape, although it's in a cardboard box full of other tapes presently on a different continent, but the memory was of sufficient strength as to cause me to shell out for this vinyl reissue when I saw it in Hogwild, my local independent record store.

It feels weird buying a Cure record in 2016, not least because I've hated everything they did since this one, pretty much. Love Cats was shit. That mega-twee Caterpillar song was wank served with a soupçon of shit, toss, and arse. Lewis Carroll through a flange pedal worked fine for Siouxsie & the Banshees who at least had the sense to move on once the affectation had done it's job. Since Faith the Cure have been a fat clown crying into his guitar, as Henry Rollins memorably, entertainingly, and accurately put it. I've heard Pornography but I can't remember a thing about it beyond that it failed to change my mind. Faith was the last good thing where the Cure are concerned. This was where it came to an end, but Jesus - what a record to go out on. Seriously, you should hear this thing.

This was the Cure as a Joy Division tribute act, so ran the generalisation, although listening to it now the differences seem too pronounced to take seriously. At most they were Joy Division without the Black Sabbath, and it's not exactly like the Divs were the only band placing this sort of stark emphasis on their rhythm section that year. Not even the mood is particularly similar. Without bothering to check, I vaguely recall reading that Robert Smith was massively depressed around the time of recording Seventeen Seconds and this one, and it shows; but it goes beyond boo hoo into near existential nausea, the numb, almost comforting feeling of understanding that there's no point to anything. The mood is as much to do with a distracted guitar jangling away and bearing no resemblance to anything on Unknown Pleasures, as Smith's disconsolate wail - a voice that became an unlistenable whine on later records but here works beautifully; and beyond the voice and the guitar there's all that space betwixt the twinned basses and percussion so dry it sounds vacuum sealed, and it seems like there's something haunting all that space between but you really have to listen closely to pick it up.

There's not a poor song on here, and at a perfect eight tracks it's too short to outstay its welcome, and - fucking hell - All Cats Are Grey is one of the greatest things ever recorded, working that sombre mood like not even Elgar managed. Lordy, the Cure were really something back then. It's a shame they couldn't have just called it a day after this masterpiece.