Customer Reviews

Sulk

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

 

 

...I'm now holding the latest CD release of the Associates' Sulk. This world couldn't keep a beautiful soul like Billy MacKenzie alive but sure can ship you a product around the world. The Associates: Billy MacKenzie, spirit-as-voice, Alan Rankine, virtuoso/torturer of guitars. Bassist Michael Dempsey and others fill out the sound on Sulk. MacKenzie had the most distinctive instrument in the whole post punk-New Wave scene, what the opera calls a Countertenor: a high man's voice, a soaring melodic and masculine voice that MacKenzie uses to cut, sigh, croon, all at the same time. The full-blooded MacKenzie creates a titanium jet-copter that dives on the twist of a relationship, hovers to drop a choicy phrase, plunges on a whimsical half-thought and snatches meaning from impulse. You get this record for double-hipness: that soaring, razor voice, and guitar arrangements that beat at your ears with astounding originality. In the early-80s era when the Music That Mattered freed itself from popular taste and brain-lazy record company executives, the Associates are the freest of all. Dischords, accidental guitar grunts, vocal yelps and yammering, pointlessly pointless lyrics, are symphonized into three minute pop songs that hook and engage you helplessly. MacKenzie and Rankine established a new benchmark for cool, building a room then inviting you in with a slamming beat, you go in and the room's dark, then you realize you just didn't see it at first, you adjust, now you see. You listen and listen, are disgusted, horrified and engaged. Then you know, MacKenzie's talking to himself, this is his life, he's telling us everything, he's looked everywhere inside his entire head and this was right there. MacKenzie made a career of it, becoming smarter, cagier, more deliberate. But nothing held back means nothing held back, on this record and in his career. In his cut-too-short life. It never got freer. Irritating, annoying, gorgeous, rays of cool beaming in on a solo car trip on a rainy day or on a dark manic crush of bodies in a club, perfume and sweat and cool rain mingling in a sonic pheromone.

The Sulk re-master was done by Michael Dempsey, who left The Cure in 1981 to record and tour with the Associates. They tortured the master tapes back then with massive overdubs and layering, and the records were always thin, trebly and hissy with no bottom, very demanding to listen to even if you love the stuff. Dempsey's gotten his studio chops together in 20 years, and the new mixes are magnificent. Lots of bassy bottom which the faux-funky club hits "Party Fears Two" and "Club Country" always deserved, separation, operatic space - they're just magnificent, unreal. V2 included a bunch of unreleased tracks including MacKenzie and guitarist/songwriter partner Rankine scratching out "Its Better This Way," which was to became one of the album's over-the-top production jobs. Very interesting - tremendous, furious, committed, talent. Hooray for the raw, for the experiment, for the now!

The 80's wasn't all big hair and materialism - in Scotland the Associates were producing dark and emotionally robust music. Billy McKenzie's cod-opera voice soars above chunky synths and fluid bass, singing of despair and longing, taking musical and lyrical cues from Bowie, Roxy Music and even heavily under-rated 70's angst-kings Magazine. Despite the influences 'Sulk' is a unique work, self-conscious, and not for those who crave gritty realism in their music. Let's be honest - it's a deeply pretentious record but I think that's a good thing. After all you can't get more 80's than that.

Growing up in the 1980s, a much derided decade, I've always been an advocate of pop: it's not a dirty word! & the early 1980s, post-Abba/post-Bowie/post-Chic/post-Moroder/post-Roxy, was an era when pop was at its most inventive. From ABC's The Lexicon of Love to Scritti Politti's The Sweetest Girl, from Cabaret Voltaire's Red Mecca to Simple Minds' New Gold Dream, from The Human League's Dare! to Prince's Controversy etc- this was an era of wild abandon alluded to on the recent compilation 'Death Disco'. Associates' Sulk is probably the masterpiece of the era, an album that on one hand was perfect pop, and on the other wildly experimental. This is the album that just edges out other contenders for greatest album of the era- Sorry for Laughing, The Correct Use of Soap, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, Avalon, Climate of Hunter, New Gold Dream...

This reissue is as wonderful as it could be- as with The Affectionate Punch (1980), later versions of this were altered/remodelled (White Car in Germany turned up & Nude Spoons was nixed). This version, overseen by Michael Dempsey (an Associate himself, as well as the original bassist in The Cure)is wonderfully remastered, presents the album in its original 10-track format (which is how it was designed- imagine messing with the order of Pet Sounds or Sgt Pepper!) and now with 7-bonus tracks from the era. In addition, there are full-length versions of songs like Club Country (not quite the 12" version, but longer than the original vinyl issue) & the Diana Ross-cover Love Hangover is longer than the version on the 18 Carat Love Affair/Love Hangover single or the take found on 1990's Popera-compilation...

The late Billy Mackenzie with partner Alan Rankine were the main creative core of Associates & composed the majority of the material here (Dempsey co-wrote Skipping with them). They advance on The Affectionate Punch and the era collected on Fourth Drawer Down (1981), which saw them hit alien-pop abandon with songs like Fearless and White Car in Germany (not to forget their hard to find cover of Kites- an obscurity that has sadly not turned up on any reissues thus far & the song that predicts the sound of Sulk).

Sulk sounds like nothing else, it's one of those perfect albums like The Marble Index, Star Sailor, Swordfishtrombones, Tilt, and Trout Mask Replica that sounds like nothing else on earth. The kind of album that makes people listen and go, "What is that?"- Sulk is a record I've played people reared on Bjork, Radiohead, & Suede & blown their minds with. The Bowie-Eno-Roxy-Sparks influences are here, but taken much further by Mackenzie/Rankine, Dempsey, drummer John Murphy, keyboardist/vocalist Martha Ladly and co-producer Mike Hedges- whose 'wall of sound' tops even The Banshees'Dreamhouse. This is an album that rivals Pet Sounds and Smile for ambition, arrangement, and production...

The first five-tracks are seen as the dark half, opening with instrumental Arrogance Gave Him Up (which like bonus-cut And Then I Read a Book was the kind of song they experimented with on the two-volume BBC sessions)- which with closing instrumental nothinginsomethingparticular gives the album a circular feel. Arrogance...is pristine-pop and eons more adventerous that New Order at the time- New Order at least in the UK being revered as the pioneers (sometimes the sole pioneers- which is an overstatement). The first song proper No opens with washes of thunder & then a semi-classical piano refrain and a potent, all consuming ambience that makes me think of Michael Nyman. Mackenzie's lyrics are both oblique & poetic,"Tore my hair out by the roots, planted them in someone's garden...Tearing facial masks in bed, what kind of sequel is this that you dread?." Arguably some of Mackenzie's lyrics can be seen to predict his tragic suicide- No's "Shaved and cut myself again, should have let it slip down further", or Partyfearstwo opening&closing lines, "I'll have a shower and then phone my brother up, within the hour I'll smash another cup." A deeper melancholy lies there...

Bapdelabap and Nude Spoons were both songs cut from later versions of Sulk, here they provide the angular side of the darker half & rival Magazine's The Correct Use of Soap. Bap De La Bap is strange sideways stuff, trance-like rhythms and more oblique lyrics, "Vasco de Gama only voyaged with intent to stare...A labrador sits on a bed with its tsetse tied." The key word regarding Sulk, both lyrically and musically, is ABANDON. A brilliant cover of Gloomy Sunday (a song associated with death, suicide, & tragedy) takes us into the dark and lays the ground for the manic-meltdown of Nude Spoons. This sees Rankine explore manic-guitar and a sound advancing on the hoover-inflections found in 81's Kitchen Person & has Mackenzie's potent vocals drift into mania declaring,"I'm glad this vital heart attack/It clears psoriasis...It lies there canistered for future reference...It lies there canistered with nude spoons euphoria." A key element of pop remains the ability for something to sound alien, but kind of make sense- I haven't got a clue what Nude Spoons is about: which is fantastic and shows Mackenzie was a fabulist who should have been filed between Don Van Vliet & David Lynch. I like not understanding...

The second half of Sulk lets the light back in, Skipping is a gorgeous song that balances funk with melancholy and looks beyond the bleak stuff, "doors lead to other doors, roads lead to other roads- they're simple, they just happen..." It's Better This Way (revisited with a lone guitar & vocal on bonus track The Room We Sat in Before)offers resigned drama, a Banshees/Magazine-sound and a vocal that sounds like Scott Walker colliding with Bjork colliding with...something heavenly!

Next up come the two UK hit singles Partyfearstwo and Club Country, both of which had legendary appearances on Top of the Pops, the former opens with Eno-like ambience before that sublime piano-refrain comes in. Billy's operatic vocals are mindblowing here, especially towards the end as they shift into backing vocals that sound spectral and Spectoral at the same time. Club Country is even better, a more alien-Haircut 100, with an opening sound that predicts the opening of New Order's Fine Time. Like Was(Not Was), Gang of Four circa I Love a Man in Uniform and early Heaven 17, Club Country is a major dance-track- hypnotic and mutant disco at its finest. It even has a moment that sees Billy kind of rap ("sad to see that you're suffering- work hard at being a something"). Rankine's rapid guitar has to be heard to be believed, a post-amphetamine/post-punk take on Nile Rodgers. Club Country is the climax and nothinginsomethingparticular is the end of credits...

nothing... returns in the bonus tracks, retitled as 18 Carat Love Affair and now a killer pop-song with hooks aplenty; its flipside Love Hangover is great fun, though personally I prefer the original! Tracks like Grecian 2000 and Ulcragyceptmol are more alien and experimental; the best bonus track remains Australia (which is actually track 16 and not 15) which is as great as any of Sulk-proper...

Simply put, Sulk is the number one album in heaven!

The Associates are usually shelved with the more experimental side of New Romanticism , and there is certainly an exotic swagger here reminiscent of an earnest ABC. But a track like 'No', in which a chilling, industrial expansiveness of sound conflicts with rigorously concentrated rhythmic form, is more reminiscent of Joy Division; there is a use of electronics, percussion, dark melodic colour, studied gloom, and a bursting pop sensibility that sounds more like New Order than New Order themselves did at the time. Mostly, it is 'Heroes'-era Bowie who presides over this austere carnival.

Much of the Associates' brilliance arises from the startling production, made up of all manner of found sounds and hubristic overdubbing, resulting in an impersonal, sculptural or plastic quality Kraftwerk might have envied. But one should insist on the sheer pop joy of a song like 'Club Country' or bonus track '18 Carat Love Affair', which is less New Romantic, than simply romantic. Among the enrapturing bonuses is a heartstopping acoustic version of 'It's Better This Way', pointing to the Manic Street Preachers in its thorny beauty.

I remember when this record came out in 1982. Me and my group of friends had all been huge Associates fans since 'The Affectionate Punch' and couldn't wait to hear 'Sulk'.

Of course, it immediately became the most thrashed record in our collections, but oddly, it also seemed to have a shorter shelf-life than the other 2 albums. It got to the point where I couldn't stand hearing the damn thing anymore, and this soon spread to all my Associates records (which were many as I had imported all the singles from the UK). I ended up giving them all away to a friend.

Recently, I came across the Remastered 'Sulk' and nostalgically thought 'What the Hell', and got it.

After 20+ years, it still sounds surprisingly fresh. The Remaster has improved the original 'sound' markedly.

Oddly enough, it's not the 'classic' cuts of 'Party Fears Two', 'Skipping', or '18 Carat Love Affair' that appeal this time around, but the tracks I used to skip over when I first got it - No, Bap De La Bap, & Nude Spoons are all seriously wigged out manic pop songs. In Retrospect, we now know that the band were consuming copious amounts of coke and speed during the making of this LP, and that sort of, makes it make more sense - the evidence is all there in front of us.

Add some pretty cool bonus tracks in a similar vein such as 'Club Country' B-Side 'Ultragyceptamol', the formerly unheard and Bowiesque 'And Then I Read a Book', and my favourite 'Australia' and it's a pretty decent album.

'Sulk' stands up against its contemporaries because of its originality. These guys came from a cabaret backround yet serve up Post Punk Synth-Rock. It's all but impossible to detect influences - there are some similarities, the most obvious ones being to Joy Division/New Order and Berlin-era Bowie, but The Associates give their music such a weird twist that comparisons are ultimately pointless.

Why didn't The Associates make it? They were spot on as far as I can tell. Billy Mackenzies vocal range is increadible, really stunning. The tracks are all well produced, and the CD reproduces this a ton better than my fading vinyl album. My wife and I were listening to it, and trying to think who they reminded us of. Eventually we hit on Echo and The Bunneymen, with Ian Mculloch being a scouse Billy.

If you like your 80s pop, you'll like Sulk. My fave tracks are Party Fears Two (is he spitting at the end of this?) and Country Club.

RIP Billy. Here is one fan who will enjoy meeting you at the end of the CD!

What an extraordinary voice and sound Billy MacKenzie and Alan Rankine captured in Camden Town back in 1982. It seemed to belong to another time then, cutting across the prevalent banality of New Romanticism with surreal lyrics and music from a parallel world, as in masterpieces such as Party Fears Two and Club Country; and so it does equally today.
This contains the full original UK album on CD for the first time, plus unreleased tracks and the double-A side hit 18 Carat Love Affair and Love Hangover, their unlikely cover of the Fifth Dimension hit that was later disco-fied by Diana Ross

Others below expound eloquently on the music, so this is just a quick thumbs-up for Michael Dempsey's excellent remastering of the original material which I remember well first time round sounding so muddy that it did take some of the gloss off. Finally the band's brilliance comes through clear as crystal. '18 Carat Love Affair' now shines and sparkles like a diamond, which is very welcome as it's one of the all-time great (if still unsung) pop masterpieces - unlike so much 80's music, Rankine & MacKenzie are beginning to sound distinctly timeless.

"Sulk" is definitely the Associates' finest hour and a stake through the hearts of bands like Human League,A Flock of Seagulls or even Depeche Mode,proving that synth pop could indeed be complex.
This album is,in a nutshell,the album of all excesses.Rankine squeezed in 3 minute songs every electronic effect he got his hands to,creating an organized chaos of extreme beauty.The intricate world built by Rankine found a perfect match in MacKenzie's outworldly voice:part operatic,part Scott Walker,part Bowie(which hinted at the 90's grandiloquence of Brett Anderson,to give one example).
The Associates,though,were't all sonic experiments and obscure intentions("No"),they also created breezy,uplifting pop songs like "Party Fears Two"or the best track on the album "Club Country"(this one has a black heart though).
A synth pop benchmark.

Alright, I've had this album recommended to me by literally a dozen [normally reliable] sources, all of whom have had nothing but the utmost praise for it. In fact, looking at the user reviews here on Amazon.com, one finds more of the same superlative fawning. So why exactly does this record suck? And who wants to give me back the 20 or so dollars I spent on it?

Here's the thing: for all I know, the source material is great. A cursory glance through the lyric sheet reveals some interesting ideas, and nothing that seems any more embarrassing than anything by any other indie rock from the UK in the 1980's. In fact, some of the wordplay seems downright clever. The cover photo is well-composed, with a couple of fellas who look a bit crazily-dressed (even by the standards of the time) lounging in a brightly colored room, surrounded by some brightly colored foliage. 6 points for style.

The problem arises upon placing this CD in your player and pressing the "play" button. This item is described as being a remastered album-- what this means is that someone dug up the tapes from the original recording session (or at least the master tape), and applied modern mixing methods and digital equalization, compression, and a host of other techniques to enhance the sound quality of the final product.

In some recent cases of remastering, I've noticed little or no difference between the original albums and their re-released counterparts (see the King Crimson 30th Anniversary Reissues of material from the late 80's through the early 90's). In other cases, the remastering process takes a great album and reveals dynamic changes and textural shifts that were previously impossible to detect due to analogue mastering deficiencies (see reissues by Bob Dylan, Echo & the Bunnymen, Fugazi, and Nick Drake).

"Sulk," if it really has been remastered, must have sounded UNBELIEVABLY awful the first time around, because even after the aforementioned digital facelift has been applied, this CD is abysmal. The mix on this album isn't just muddy in that neat, ambient way that 80's indie albums are. Rather, this is the sonic equivalent of diving into a 20-foot-deep pool full of oatmeal with the promise that you'll find a diamond somewhere inside. At some point, it's just not worth the effort.

The instrumentation-- which seems to consist mainly of synth and sequencer parts layered over other layers of synth and sequencer parts-- renders what may be some interesting work by the rhythm section basically inaudible. Also, I'm used to cloudy, effected vocals, but I'd think that when you're in a band with a guy who has pipes like this, you'd want them to be as present as possible. Apparently, I'd be wrong.

Perhaps the Associates were the greatest of all the new wave bands, with their records lost to time and cast into eternal obscurity because they were too clever for their own good. I have, after all, been repeatedly assured that this is the case by other fans of the genre. But I have another theory altogether: the Associates' records were sonically inferior to those of their peers, even to those peers whose material was less inventive or original.

If you're thinking about picking this CD up based on all the glowing reviews you've read, please, think again. Maybe even consider buying something else in the Associates' back catalogue-- I don't know how any of those CDs actually sound, but it can't be any worse than the "Sulk" remaster.