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62 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Laughing Stock, March 8, 2003
This is how music should be.I will never tire of Talk Talk's final album Laughing Stock. From their first album until The Colour of Spring (1986) Talk Talk very definitely held my attention. The Colour of Spring is one of the best albums of the 8o's, no questions asked. And then they released 1988's Spirit of Eden. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. A total departure from where 'Life's What You Make it' seemed to say they were heading. I love Colour of Spring, but Spirit of Eden is something else. The first three songs from that album are worth the price alone. And then there is Laughing Stock. It takes off where Spirit of Eden began, and i have heard nothing like it since. I've heard some acts emulate it, or incorporate its textures (Cowboy Junkies, Portishead come to mind), but no one will ever come close to what Talk Talk achieved on Laughing Stock. I remember listening to this album for the first time, and realised that this is how the music industry should always have been. Displaying great pieces of creativity with support and pride. yeah right, like you can expect that. And that this album got deleted immediately is no surprise. 6 songs in all, but this album is so beautiful it goes beyond words. It incorporates Delta Blues, Mingus jazz, psychedelia, orchestral bombast and subtlety all in 6 songs. I have never heard anything like it before or since, and I miss Talk Talk as a group ever since. But if this is how they chose to go out, I can only commend them for going out with a style that is rarely seen in the music business. The main theme of Laughing Stock seems to be about Redemption. Anyone familiar with Christian doctrine regarding Revelations will know what Ascension Day may refer to. This whole album seems to wrestle with the divine and the human. The limitations we feel as humans to overcome our deepest fears and drives. From the beginning of Myrrhman through til Taphead, these ruminations are explored lyrically and musically. This whole album seems like the journey of a soul. The reason that 'New Grass' seems a light relief is not only a musical one. Whats explored in After The Flood and Taphead seems an allusion to the fable of Noah and his Ark. And that 'New Grass' seems to imply that Hope is found once again after a great deluge only adds to the imagery and sonic explorations of Laughing Stock. Laughing Stock is a summers day. It is the dead of night. Its so many things from song to song that I have always seen this work as a goal to aim for. As a musician, composer, you owe it to yourself to find and buy this album. As a music listener or lover, you owe it to yourself to find and buy this album. The only other album I can think of that is such a one of a kind is Kate Bush's The Dreaming. You hear it, and realise there is nothing like it. Thats what its all about. Thats what it should always be. Laughing Stock. One of the best albums of the 9o's, and by far one of the best albums ever released. I'd actually beg you to buy it.
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49 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
No other album like it, April 19, 2004
When I bought this album in 1992 I wasn't ready. I was a huge fan of Talk Talk, right up until the album that came before (Spirit of Eden, which is brilliant by the way...). I loved the departure from pop for them. In fact, it was the quiet, dark, atonal moments in the previous albums that, for me, made Talk Talk stand out. But Laughing Stock was thick where I wanted thin, liquid where I wanted solid. I sold it a year later feeling sure it was brilliant and that I was missing out on something wonderful, but unable to appreciate it.Laughing Stock was an album you couldn't be prepared for because there was nothing like it. Even it's predecessor Spirit of Eden couldn't prepare the listener for the murky, uneasy, passionate journey that Laughing Stock is. Other reviewers have said it was ahead of it's time. If that was true in 1992, it's even more true now. Mainstream music is, with the exception of the last 3 Radiohead albums, still ignorant of this album. Laughing Stock is like pure grief in that the only way to make sense of it is to let go, let it wash over you and not try to make sense of it at all. It is painfully brilliant, hugely musical and very peace-inducing if you can surrender to it. It's not an album to dance to, or to try to decipher in one evening and I don't think there's one hook on the whole thing. It's the kind of album you put on over and over again until suddenly you notice that everything else starts to sound kind of hollow and trite in comparison. I once read an article with the engineer who explained that every instrument was recorded from a distance (most instruments in pop music are recorded with the microphones only inches away) and almost always in mono. The drums, for example, were recorded with one microphone from about 10 feet away instead of the traditional rock setup with a mic about 2 inches away from every drum, mixed in stereo and compressed to be full, loud and immediate. Nothing in Laughing Stock is immediate, especially the vocals, which (again, breaking tradition with 99.999% of all pop recordings) have no special priority over any other instrument and, as a result, are often buried in the mix. Silence and space play an important roll in this album as does the complex and often adversarial relationship between harmony and disonance. Years later, after hearing 'Tago Mago' by Can, 'Kind of Blue' and 'Bitches Brew' by Miles Davis, I stumbled upon an old tape copy I'd made of 'Laughing Stock' and was overwhelmed by it's brilliance. What had before seemed aloof and impenetrable felt intimate and almost painfully, passionately naked. I ran to my nearest record store (back when we had record stores) and bought my second copy feeling a lot like a man who has realized his error only a moment before it was too late. I put the CD in my CD player and played it constantly for about a year. By the time 'Kid A' came out by Radiohead I felt unsurprised. 'Kid A' was great. I'm a big fan. But for me, it wasn't revolutionary, it wasn't groundbreaking. I had already been to the source. Laughing Stock is deep stuff, and there there is no other album quite like it. If you like modern Radiohead, if you like Tom Waits, if you love Can, Holger Czukay, or David Sylvian, you will probably love this album. But you won't love it right away. Give it time.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
45 minutes of obscure, free-from ambience: sheer brilliance!, February 24, 2001
Talk Talk were dropped by EMI after a row over their previous album, the equally brilliant SPIRIT OF EDEN. They turned to Polydor's jazz label, Verve, to release their final album, but executives on the label must have despaired when they realised they had acquired some of the most uncommercial music ever recorded by a rock band. The album was deleted within three months!Fortunately another label has stepped in to rescue this extraordinary piece. Talk Talk had already entered into studio lore for spending a long and expensive day recording a large brass section, keeping only the sound of a trumpeter clearing spit from his mouthpiece. This is dark music, set to Mark Hollis's lyrics about sin and redemption. I don't bother too much with words personally -- Hollis never makes it very easy for us to follow what his fragile voice is singing about. The music is simply tremendous: spiritual, improvisatory, overflowing with ideas. This is Hollis's LOVE SUPREME. It is in the same vein, but in my view much better, than Radiohead's KID A.
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