Customer Reviews

Born Sandy Devotional

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In 1986 people's view of Australian music changed forever. The Triffids led this change by showing the rest of the world that Aussie songwriting and musicianship was something to be reckoned with.

Born Sandy Devotional (BSD) is an essential piece of any music fan's collection. Whether you like rock, country, folk, pop, rap or classical, you will appreciate the songs written by David McComb and performed by The Triffids. The band's fans, know as "TriffHeads", are rabidly devoted to spreading the word about the Triffids and trying to help them reach new fans, especially in America, a country they were not able to break. BSD is considered by most TriffHeads to be their defining album.

It is hard to classify The Triffids. I would say somewhere between Johnny Cash and the Rolling Stones - yet, on their own plain as well. For instance the first song doesn't have a jingley-jangley guitar intro or a swelling build up to the first line. Boom, instant. The Seabirds hits like a big fat thick drop of honey upon your eardrum. As the album rolls on, the honey spreads and sinks in to your brain and then down your spine through your bones and blood. And there it stays. In fact, honey is a good metaphor for this music. Honey is sweet, nutritious, universally loved and can even heal wounds when applied to the skin. We know it is produced by bees but not sure how it is made or how the bees all work together in order to get their sweet product.

The musicianship is phenomenal. This is a band that listens to each other when they play. The many layers stretch and pull and touch and mingle in a way that keeps the music fresh through endless listenings. The band is known not just for their musical abilities but the way they interpret and produce David's songs. These songs are wired into the band member's brains and played from the heart. David McComb sings, plays guitar and keyboards, 'Evil' Graham Lee plays pedal, lap steel and shoulder guitars, Martyn Casey is on bass, Jill Birt sings and plays keyboards, David's brother Robert McComb plays violin and guitar and Alsy MacDonald plays drums.

Another reason to own BSD is that David McComb is arguable one of the greatest songwriters of all time. And I am including Mozart on this list. David was born to write and write he did prolifically for his short 36 years here on Earth. Like any highly regarded artist, his songs come from inside out. His lyrics are quotable and sticky. If you listen enough to The Triffids, you will have an insightful and philosophical comment for every occasion - just don't say it in front of another TriffHead because they will know you are just repeating one of David's lyrics:

"I know your shape

Our limbs entwined

I know your name, remember mine"

from Estuary Bed

I give this album the highest rating and it is my favorite of all time.

(The 2006 re-mastered version includes 9 bonus tracks and a booklet of David's hand written lyrics)

When the Triffids put out the Richter-cracking "Born Sandy Devotional" there was no further comment, for them or anyone else. It was soon to be the golden year 1986; satellite TV and cell phones were coming to the fore, and the world was glued to the television, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Whitney Houston.

Lots to be distracted about...

No one cared, and even now, most are still asleep. But the real earthquake may soon finally come; I hear "Born Sandy Devotional" is now being reissued.

Greil Marcus remarked a similar thought about the much-flashier Sex Pistols when he said something to the effect that "Never Mind the Bollocks" cracked rock and roll in half.

The Triffids were the "anti-Sex Pistols" in every single way imaginable. They didn't crack rock and roll in half (among many other things they didn't do). Most of the time, no one even noticed the considerable oxygen they'd used up in whichever club they'd just played in.

For better or worse, "Born Sandy Devotional" marked the informal end of what had once been known as New Wave music. The Triffids popularized the scary end of normal human emotions as...normal. Homemade music had suddenly stopped being apologetic for being homemade.

The leadoff song "The Seabirds" is the most un-rock "Track One" song I know of, on any song album ever recorded. Actually it's the most unlikely leadoff track, period. Any other band couldn't pull it off. But with the Triffids, it was all in a day's work. What with weird pedal steel, a forlorn melody, and the death-infused vocals, this song is an introduction to a crazy quilt of an album of misshapen things that simply couldn't ever be rock.

Not rock, perhaps, but instead, something that was unapologetically emotional and tearful, in a way that was unknown outside of American country music. But the Triffids weren't country, and they could never become country. They were too worldly for that, and were too intelligent as a band to ever be anything other than hopeless misfits.

Their confident songs were evidence that, in some muted way, the Triffids were aware of that fact. One can tell by the way they played the songs on this album. No one could ever mistake the soul-rending epic "Wide Open Road" for anything other than the Triffids, in spite of thousands of imitators who are largely afraid to mention the Triffids by name.

Nothing could ever take the place of this album. There is no equivalent to "Born Sandy Devotional" anywhere. Punk rock cannot address the issues that "Born Sandy Devotional" raises, and neither can anything else.

Every song on "Born Sandy Devotional" has a friendly face combined with a scary underside. Crime, lost love, death by misadventure, and personal decline are all handled like silly merry-go-round tunes for children.

Whee!

By the time the listener reaches the bizarre-but-brilliant "Tender Is The Night" at the end of all this, they will wonder if it was a great music album, or a nightmare. But its cathartic effect simply cannot be denied. David McComb's vocals are simply too insistent, and the band is too erudite, for it to pass as anything other than a one-in-a-million collection of songs.

Listening to BSD is hard work and occasionally even unpleasant, but it is very much worth it, in the end. You haven't lived, until you live through an unbroken listen to this musical landmark.

This album is simply not to be missed.

This is an extraordinary album. The sound has a wonderful lushness and sense of space, although most of the songs deal with loss, regret and isolation. The late David McComb's lyrics are extremely evocative and unusual - "No foreign pair of dark sunglasses could ever shield you from/The light that pierces your eyelids, the screaming of the gulls" are the lines which open the album. It's a very emotional album, made all the more so by the haunted note in David McComb's voice.

It's difficult to pick highlights when the album hangs together so well, but "The Seabirds", "Estuary Bed", "Wide Open Road", "Stolen Property" and "Tender Is The Night" all bring a tear to the eye. Somehow, the overall effect of all these rather gloomy songs is really quite uplifting, possibly due to the fine, rather swoonsome arrangements and soaring melodies. I bought this album when it came out in 1986, and it's one that has stayed with me. This will appeal to fans of skewed pop like The Go-Betweens, The Smiths, REM or even Nick Cave in his slightly less lurid moments.

Loses one star because "Chicken Killer" and "Life Of Crime" are a bit sub-standard.

In 1986 people's view of Australian music changed forever. The Triffids led this change by showing the rest of the world that Aussie songwriting and musicianship was something to be reckoned with.

Born Sandy Devotional (BSD) is an essential piece of any music fan's collection. Whether you like rock, country, folk, pop, rap or classical, you will appreciate the songs written by David McComb and performed by The Triffids. The band's fans, know as "TriffHeads", are rabidly devoted to spreading the word about the Triffids and trying to help them reach new fans, especially in America, a country they were not able to break. BSD is considered by most TriffHeads to be their defining album.

It is hard to classify The Triffids. I would say somewhere between Johnny Cash and the Rolling Stones - yet, on their own plain as well. For instance the first song doesn't have a jingley-jangley guitar intro or a swelling build up to the first line. Boom, instant. The Seabirds hits like a big fat thick drop of honey upon your eardrum. As the album rolls on, the honey spreads and sinks in to your brain and then down your spine through your bones and blood. And there it stays. In fact, honey is a good metaphor for this music. Honey is sweet, nutritious, universally loved and can even heal wounds when applied to the skin. We know it is produced by bees but not sure how it is made or how the bees all work together in order to get their sweet product.

The musicianship is phenomenal. This is a band that listens to each other when they play. The many layers stretch and pull and touch and mingle in a way that keeps the music fresh through endless listenings. The band is known not just for their musical abilities but the way they interpret and produce David's songs. These songs are wired into the band member's brains and played from the heart. David McComb sings, plays guitar and keyboards, 'Evil' Graham Lee plays pedal, lap steel and shoulder guitars, Martyn Casey is on bass, Jill Birt sings and plays keyboards, David's brother Robert McComb plays violin and guitar and Alsy MacDonald plays drums.

Another reason to own BSD is that David McComb is arguable one of the greatest songwriters of all time. And I am including Mozart on this list. David was born to write and write he did prolifically for his short 36 years here on Earth. Like any highly regarded artist, his songs come from inside out. His lyrics are quotable and sticky. If you listen enough to The Triffids, you will have an insightful and philosophical comment for every occasion - just don't say it in front of another TriffHead because they will know you are just repeating one of David's lyrics:

"I know your shape

Our limbs entwined

I know your name, remember mine"

from Estuary Bed

I give this album the highest rating and it is my favorite of all time.

(The 2006 re-mastered version includes 9 bonus tracks and a booklet of David's hand written lyrics)

Australian artists must generally leave for Britain or America to really succeed in the music business. Though this album was recorded in London, The Triffids seem to yearn intensely and defiantly for their distant homeland.

Their third record, Born Sandy Devotional, is a moving and beautiful release that combines at times languid, at times anthemic guitar rock with shades of mournful sea chanties and country ballads. The songs tell stories that remind me of Jack London's: desperation pushes the exhausted, frustrated, and betrayed to tenaciously endure and at times even indulge feelings of hope. Except for Life of Crime, the only track on the album that lacks passion and originality, and Chicken Killer, which is a tad too frivolous, every song feels like an open wound just before the healing sets in.

Though Jill Birt's voice is thin and of limited range, it is, thank goodness, used sparingly. The bulk of the singing is handled by songwriter David McComb, whose style blends the best qualities of Jim Morrison and Nick Cave.

If you've ever lost a part of yourself through losing a person or place that you love, this record will speak to you.

Whenever I meet an Australian, I usually try to strike up a conversation about Australian music. Most I've met know Nick Cave but not a single Aussie I have met stateside has ever confessed to knowing about The Triffids. Here in the states, I would wager that fewer still have heard of them. I'd likely never have heard of them myself if bassist Martyn Casey had not later joined Cave's Bad Seeds, a band of which I am a huge fan.

With the reissue of Born Sandy Devotional, Domino Recording Company commences a labor of love which hopefully will save this very good band from an undeserved oblivion. While most of the songs here lack the quality of some of The Triffids later releases, the raw and sometimes primitive sound carries on its notes a promise of future greatness.

When I first put this on, I was a little disappointed. The first four songs are decidedly unexceptional. But then it got better. My favorites are Personal Things and the pounding, vibrant title cut which oddly was not included on the original. I also like the songs containing sonic elements reminiscent the very early music of Nick Cave. These include Lonely Stretch, Life of Crime, When A Man Turns Bad, and Time of Weakness.

The CD comes with a small booklet that slides into the jewel box and which contains original lyrics and some notes on the bonus cuts. A larger booklet containing pictures, doodlings, and notes fits into the cardboard housing provided as an overcoat keeping the CD and the larger booklet together.

While Born Sandy Devotional is certainly not the best CD ever, as one reviewer gushes, it is useful to all those wishing an introduction to the often brilliant song-writing of the late David McComb. I applaud Domino Recording on the quality of this reissue (and other Triffids reissues I own) and hope that their devotion to keeping The Triffids music before the public is amply rewarded.

Again, I feel compelled to set the record straight for the poor lost souls ;) that at the time of me writing this review, had rated this astonishing Australian album less than 5 stars. My advice: go back and have another listen and then listen again and then listen on a good hifi system and then listen on a good pair of headphones....then yet you might appreciate it's complexity, wonderful songwriting and the sound of a band that had found itself.

For those reviewers who called Born Sandy Devotional "brillant" and "extraordinary", and then proceed to rate this 4 stars, you might want to check your dictionary! Perhaps everyone who is fortunate enough to listen to this muscial masterpiece, should just try picking 5 other Australian albums released in 1986 at random, and then appreciate what a ground breaking work this was. Recorded in the UK, where The Triffids were based then, it evokes the Australian landscape, psyche and experience better than any album I have ever heard.

Listen to music released by INXS, Uncanny X Men, Mental As Anything, Wa Wa Nee and perhaps even John Farnham, to contrast the epic scope and quantum leap forward this album was for Australian music. All the aforementioned artists released albums in either '85 or '86 and when you hear The Triffids on Born Sandy Devotional, it is like Australian musicians just discovered a whole array of new instruments and production that was like nothing else.

And of course, in the centre of all these amazing songs, you have David McComb's towering and majestic voice that was pivotal to the success of The Triffids in future years. If you like this album, I suggest you buy "Calenture" and "The Black Swan". Nuff said....

All great Australian music talks about sunlight. This is no exception. The sun is always present in Born Sandy Devotional, from the heat it creates on the sidewalk, to the glare of the desert, to dusk occurring while half a world away it is dawn.

This album has five unbelievable songs about Australian life. The Seabirds, Estuary Bed, Wide Open Road, The Chickenkiller, and Tender Is The Night (Long Fidelity); these five songs are bona fide classics that everyone should listen to all the time, to absorb their depth, to revel in their soul, and to enjoy their message. The other five songs on the album are not so great, but it's still worth the money for the five canonical numbers.

The booklet that comes with this CD provides a lot of insight into the recording process.

This is supposed to one of the great Australian recordings... I don't get it... and i'm Australian. The song writing is painfully derivative and weak. The record left me more detached from Australian culture than before I listened to it. For art rock/pop its well below par.

The whole original album is superb but the bonus tracks don't really add anything. Very raw production and some of the song are pretty ordinary as well.