Customer Reviews

Heaven Up Here

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

 

 

Buy these remasters. The clarity and improvements to the mastering is quite nice. Great separation in the guitars and the rhythm tracks (Pete & Les) are huge. Nice addition of great live tracks make these essential. The price is right too. I only wish they would release a nice retrospective DVD including 'Pictures' as well as the complete 'Crystal Day' concert and all the early stuff as well. Classic band that deserves classic treatment. Rhino does it again.

The Bunnymen's second album focused on dense textures, swirling atmospheric sounds and Ian McCulloch's dark, expressive voice. The songs are equally as powerful as the debut album. Build up around Les Pattinson's tumbling patterns on bass guitar Heaven Up Here certainly stands as the band's darkest statement but there's always hope--the jangly "A Promise" counteracts the dark tonic of "Over the Wall".

The extensive liner notes are interesting although there is some recap from the boxed set put out in 1999. The sound is brilliant sounding--a sonic step up from the previous Cd and equal to the boxed set. "Fuel", "No Hands" and "Broke My Neck" from the boxed set appear within their proper context at the end of the album.

There's a couple of interesting previously unreleased tracks here as well although nothing as revolutionary as the previously released stuff. It's all interesting though including the live versions of "Zimbo", "Show of Strength" and "All I Want" as well as 1 track I can't remember at the moment.

Housed in a nice slip jacket (at no extra cost no less), Rhino's doing right by the other lads from Liverpool.

There is a time when we are young adults, just starting to touch the world (maybe not even really experience the world because the word experience would imply coming to understand), maybe falling in love for the first time, that we come to the realization that life is bigger, much bigger, and more tantalyzingly beautiful, and thus more terrifying, than we had ever previously imagined.

If you are a feeling person who has not been raised to express their feelings well, then you can become very overwhelmed by this new dimension of depth that life is revealing. Many of us seek solace and understanding in rock n' roll music, after all these musicians are expressing intense passion through not only their voices but their shrieking guitars as well. These sounds often approximate the intensity that we feel inside. And we confuse this approximation of intensity for the dimension of depth which we are discovering and many of us come to believe that the musicians actually "understand" what we are feeling.

They may, or they may not. They may just be silly rock stars going through the motions to make a quick buck and get laid. They may be confused, troubled individuals. They may be egomaniacal freaks. Or, they may be all of the above.

When I was 19 or twenty years old Echo and the Bunnymen, and U2, were the bands I went to to try to understand my world. The Bunnymen were the more confused of the two and, since I was also confused, the Bunnymen seemed to understand what I was feeling even better.

I knew U2 was the better band in every way, but I scoured the Bunnymen's music for meaning. I would have done better to stick with A Love Supreme by Coltrane, which I had been listening to since I was fourteen. But somehow, rock music spoke to me more when I was nineteen. The fact that the lyrics never quite made sense made the music seem all the more deep.

Oh brother. (Oh, by the way, which one is Echo?)

There is part of me that wishes I could take that whole part of my life back and there is part of me that wishes I could experience it all again.

It's nice to be older and have the casual leisure to walk into a book store on a Saturday afternoon and rummage through the CD racks and say to oneself, "Wow, check this out; Heaven Up Here. Man, I haven't heard that in years. I think I'll buy it and give it a listen just for old times sake." You know, when I bought the album way back when it was so important to me that I probably spent the only money I had to buy it. It was so important to me that I went home and listened to it over and over again.

Now it's just kind of a one-off thing, like, "Let's give it a listen. I wonder what it will sound like?"

Well, I'm right back to where I was when I was nineteen. No, just kidding.

Really, it's ok. It's pretty good. I give it four stars not because it almost a classic, but becasue, as silly as it may seem, Heaven Up Here was a foundational album of eighties Goth music.

Eighties music has not been dissected as much as seventies music, but I certainly think it deserves to be. The music of the eighties expressed the feelings of teenagers as well as (if not better than) the music of the seventies did. Do you want to tell me the Who's Tommy wasn't silly? How about The Lunatic Is On the Grass or that last bombastic song on Dark Side of The Moon? Or how about, "Does anybody remember laughter?"

No, that silliness had nothing on Joy Division, the Cure, Modern English, the Bunnymen, Bauhaus, Love and Rockets and the whole Goth movement.

I'm glad to find that the bass and drum pattern at the end of Show of Strength does still give a kick. And there is still a cool mystery to Ian's vocals, "Hey, I came here right on cue. One is me and one is you." Over The Wall, All My Colors, and The Disease are all still suitably surreal. A Promise still betrays vague hope with it's disjointed imagery like, "Light on the wings." Yeah baby.

And Will Seargent's guitar still shrieks like a ghost in another room.

But, it's Pete deFreitas whose musicianship now sounds so prescient. Clearly the Emo drummers cut their teetch listening to the man from the Bunnymen. His martial rhythms crack and explode like a drum corps in a stone hallway. Love it.

I'll leave you with one more thought based upon the music of Echo and The Bunnymen,

"Zimbo Zimbo Zimbo Zimbo Zimbo Zimbo Zimbo."