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Summary.
Three fourths of
Bauhaus
formed
Love And Rockets, a band that defused Bauhaus'
gloomy pop and linked it with the generation of shoegazers and ravers.
More electronic sounds and dance beats, plus evanescent vocals and evocative
guitars, lent Seventh Dream Of Teenage Heaven (1985) the quality of a
mirage, accomplishing de facto the old hippie ambition of turning
acid-rock into abstract trance.
After the commercial Express (1986) and Earth-Sun-Moon (1987),
the band reached a new synthesis for the rave generation on the
hyper-psychedelic Love And Rockets (1989).
But the style was still in progress.
The lengthy ecstatic litanies of Hot Trip To Heaven (1994) contributed
to found the genre of acid ambient music
(like Stone Roses covering Pink Floyd's A Saucerful Of Secrets),
whereas the ethereal Sweet F.A (1996) exaggerated and diluted the idea
(early Pink Floyd fronted by Donovan and arranged by Brian Eno).
While not up to their creative standards,
the futuristic/edonistic electronic music of Lift (1998) seemed
to come full circle and to eventually make sense of their entire career.
Full bio.
In retrospective, the Love And Rockets were one of the most under-rated British
bands of the 1980s. Their ability to isolate the surrealist and hedonistic
elements of dark-punk's claustrophonic sound, influenced the next generations.
Both shoegazers and ravers learned from them how to transform psychedelic rock
into trancey atmosphere.
The original members of
Bauhaus,
guitarist Daniel Ash, bassist David Jay (Haskins) and drummer
Kevin Haskins (David's brother),
formed Love And Rockets after the schism that split them from singer
Peter Murphy.
Each of the trio had already recorded independently.
Jay had recorded the solo album
Etiquette Of Violence (Situation Two, 1983) and played in
Jazz Butcher, and, after leaving that band,
had released some singles, including
I Can't Shake This Shadow Of Fear (Glass), and two more solo albums:
Crocodile Tears and the Velvet Cosh (1983) e On Glass (1985).
Ash and Haskins formed Tones On Nail, whose career is collected on
Everything (Beggars Banquet, 1998):
the six-minute single Burning Skies (1983),
a trance-y variation on the Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams,
their feverish polyrhythmic tribal single Go! (1984),
and the album Pop (Beggars Banquet, 1984).
The album has nothing that compares with Go but is a varied compendium
of their influences:
gothic folk ballad (Real Life),
Gang Of Four's funk-punk (War),
and electronic dance music
(the sleek and almost macabre synth-pop elegy Lions, the Kraftwerk-ian dance Performance).
The highlights are the noir atmospheres that evoke black music of the 1950s (Movement of Fear and especially the swinging Happiness) and
the celestial atmosphere of the eight-minute ambient psychedelic suite Rain.
Love And Rockets were born when the trio decided to start playing together again.
Seventh Dream Of Teenage Heaven (Beggars Banquet, 1985) was almost a
reunion of Bauhaus because it restarted exactly from the lightweight and
psychedelic sound of
Burning From The Inside, Bauhaus' last album.
By increasing the electronic elements and the dance beats,
Love And Rockets coined a significant revision of that idiom, which, like it or
not, defined
with Ball Of Confusion a new standard for alternative discos, predating
the rave scene.
All the songs are slowed down by an evanescent vocal style, which in
If There's A Heaven Above
lapses into celestial songwriting; but the song, endowed with a brisk disco rhythm, shot through with strong guitar distortion and punctuated with Caribbean vibraphone chords, is emblematic of how the arrangements feed on themselves.
The effect is often of early Pink Floyd psychedelic trance, for example in
The Game, even more intangible though drenched in film-noir atmosphere, or
in the solemn
A Private Future, in which gospel organs counterpoint a heavenly synth melody, or in the title track, imbued with exotic and "industrial" ambience.
The other characteristic of the sound is the
tribal beat which permeates songs like
The Dog-End Of A Day Gone By (wed to vocal harmonies and to a "religious" mellotron a` la Moody Blues).
Express (Beggars Banquet, 1986) displays the same pros and cons: on one
hand a superficial self-indulgence, and on the other hand some sophisticated
tunes
(Yin And Yang,
Kundalini Express e All In My Mind).
Earth-Sun-Moon (Beggars Banquet, 1987) still can't decide between
sophisticated pop, glam-rock and bold experiment.
The arrangements can be grotesquely bizarre, but
the Rockets' must be credited for a virtually unlimited imagination, that
makes each song a completely different experience, and often a uniquely
different one.
If the results seldom match the hard-rocking voodoobilly of
Mirror People, the syncopated blues-rock of Welcome Tomorrow,
or the ghastly, sumptuous ballad Everybody Wants to Go To Heaven,
the quest for ever more innovative structures is unending.
The dilated, distorted quality of tracks like
The Telephone Is Empty and Earth Sun Moon
even recalls early Grateful Dead's acid-rock.
Occasionally, the search for originality sinks in
awkward and trivial appropriations of stereotypes, like when they mimick
David Bowie in Waiting For The Flood or in the
anthemic No New Tale To Tell,
which is reminiscent of Joan Jett's I Love Rock And Roll
(plus a Jethro Tull-style flute solo).
The inspiration is not always up to the ambition.
The retro tendencies that surfaced on that album led them to their greatest commercial success, the single So Alive (1988), and the hyper-psychedelic album Love And Rockets (Beggars Banquet, 1989). Although the album contained some interesting variations on the styles of Marc Bolan (Bound For Hell) and Jesus And Mary Chain (Motorcycle, also on single), the group disbanded , or at least stopped making records.
The members of the band resumed their solo activities. David J released two more folksinger albums, Songs From Another Season (RCA, 1990) and Urban Urbane (MCA, 1992), and Daniel Ash released Coming Down (Beggars Banquet, 1991) and Foolish Thing Desire (Columbia, 1992), competing to see who was more boring. Foolish Thing Desire and Roll On, on Foolish Thing Desire, are decadent Marc Bolan ballads. Ash will return to the scene with Daniel Ash (Psychobaby, 2002), the most experimental and aggressive of his solo career.
The moniker Love And Rockets was resurrected for
Hot Trip To Heaven (Beggars Banquet, 1994), the album that they
had started recording in 1991 and that represented a new direction for the
band.
Most of the tracks were coming from another planet: the 15-minute
minimalist tour de force of Body And Soul builds up a hypnotic shuffle
sailed by a subdued, whispered melody,
like Stone Roses covering Pink Floyd's A Saucerful Of Secrets.
The same ecstatic mood permeates the slow-motion litany of
This Heaven, drenched in samples and propelled by a disco beat
(with ghostly, coda of distortions, tribal polyrhythms, jazz piano and female
breathing).
Trip And Glide has a stronger Pink Floydian sound and could be a
leftover from Dark Side: female vocals float over funereal organ and
funky beats.
The oppressed atmosphere of this song and of the
sitar-driven No Worries complements the more positive feeling of the
other tracks.
Two of the most promising experiments use jazz as an additive to their acid
ambient music, the
swinging zombie dance Hot Trip To Heaven and the
liquid bebop nightmare of Voodoo Baby.
On the commercial side, Ugly plays the role of So Alive, but
its middle-eastern flavors and alien electronics alter the linearity of
the dance beat.
The disc sinks in the swamps of its lengthy and monotonous tracks, but the
sinking couldn't be more magical. Love And Rockets have reinvented themselves.
The album was followed by the EP The Glittering Darkness, that includes
another long-lost remnant (the 1988 Bad Monkey) and an 18-minute
jam (Ritual Radio).
Humbler and less baroque, although still brillianly orchestrated,
Sweet F.A (Beggars Banquet, 1996) found again the appeal of the
inscrutable with a collection of slightly neurotic, psychedelic ballads that
are both subtle and crazy. It's as if Hot Trip never happened:
the band disowns the experiment and returns to its classical sound.
With crisp, breezy strumming of the guitars, dreamy, whispered vocals,
plus lysergic gongs and electronics,
Sweet F.A. sets the ethereal quality of the album,
as if very early Pink Floyd were fronted by Donovan and
arranged by Brian Eno.
The album is organized as a progression of ever more complex and driving songs,
as if to render explicit the process by which the unique style of Love And
Rockets was achieved.
Judgement Day alternates a loud, martial, distorted riff and a
laid-back country-rock shuffle.
By inverting the sequence, Use Me slams a languid melody against a
wall of distortions, thereby coining a new form of power-ballad.
Even more spaced-out guitars wails pierce Fever's refrain,
over a steady beat and strident gospel organ.
It's the emotional apex of the disc and the birth of a new genre,
psychedelic dance music.
The same electrifying overdose triggers Sweet Lover Hangover, even
busier and faster.
The oneiric atmosphere is set by evocative guitar reverbs, syncopated
percussions and sideral drones; then the ultra-catchy riff explodes and the
dance theme unfolds sensual, luxuriant and hypnotic, still punctuated by
loud distortions.
Even the atmospheric country-soul ballad Shelf Life is derailed
by frightening electric discharges.
Sad And Beautiful World builds on Sweet Lover Hangover
9steady beat, distortion, catchy lullaby) except that the tone is turning
ominous.
Natacha adapts Use Me's idea to a John Lennon-ish swoon and
a baroque George Martin-ish arrangement.
With Worlds Of A Fool the tone has wound up downright tragic and even
evil. The firm beat doesn't hold melody and arrangement together anymore
and the song structure gets progressively looser,
ascending to industrial-grade heaviness.
The dream has spawned a nightmare.
Clean plunges in a soul's neuroses: vocals echo in galactic clouds,
and guitars fly like spaceships fueled by nuclear reactions in a crescendo
of infernal proportions.
Here Come The Comedown is a demented, cartoonish, synth-pop
voodoobilly (like the Cramps playing Romeo Void's Never Say Never in
the Yellow Submarine soundtrack) that crowns,
like a pagan hymn, the descent into hell.
Sadistic violence is unleashed full-tilt in the Foetus-inspired Wagnerian
symphony of Spiked. The album is a desperate journey towards the
source of pain.
Truth is that these late works justified the existence of the band the way
that earlier works never did.
David J, now residing in Los Angeles, composed the rock opera
The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theater of Marvels (Cleopatra, 1996),
with Alan Moore and Tim Perkins.
The band resurrected one more time with Lift (Red Ant, 1998), their
electronic album. Perhaps the band wants to bridge the gap with
Hot Trip. The result, though, is a timid variation on styles that
they did not "live", they simple "heard".
Synthetic strings and programmed beats abound. It goes to their credit that
they never merely imitate.
Rip 20C, Bad For You and Resurrection Hex are
industrial techno at an intellectual level.
Holy Fool is the So Alive of the era, but carries deep scars
of funk, glam and pop.
The equally catchy Delicious Ocean is an essay on
futuristic/edonistic music of the 20th century.
The ambient psychedelia of Pink Flamingo,
and Ghosts of the Multiple Feature and the lengthy (both 9-minute long)
jams of My Drug and Deep Deep Down are what Love And Rockets
do best, but here they are "remixed" for the disco with little enthusiasm.
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