Guitarist Vini Reilly had gone AWOL from normal life. He suffered from anorexia nervosa, and his music sounded as translucent as you'd expect from someone with almost no flesh: intricate skeins of guitar fed through an echoplex and always played with the fingertips, delicate and prismatic, like Jack Frost on a window pane. On the second Durutti Column album, 1981's LC, Reilly recorded a tribute to Ian Curtis, but the song, "Missing Boy", could just as easily have been about himself.
Durutti Column - Missing Boy 1981
Heard best on the early single "Flight" and the live side of their debut album The Graveyard & The Ballroom, A Certain Ratio's music worked through the tension between dry funk (rimshot cracks and feverish snares, neurotic bass, itchy rhythm guitar) and dank atmospherics (trumpet that seems to drift through fog, diffuse smears of guitar so heavily processed it sounds more like synth).
A Certain Ratio - Flight 1980
Formerly a classically trained percussionist, The Passage's leader Dick Witts built dense, dramatic arrangements that were stirringly rhythmical but not in the least rock-like. "We used bell sounds, military sounds like trumpet fanfares, brass and trumpets - anything that suggested things outside rock", he says. Matching the epic sound was a thematic loftiness verging on the didactic: "Devils and Angels" railed against organized religion, while "XOYO" obliquely explored gender politics.
The Passage - Devils and Angels 1981
The Passage - XOYO 1982
No comments:
Post a Comment