Swell Maps

Often the first approach to an album coincides with the fascination for a particular cover: straddling the 60s and 70s, the iconic covers of Pink Floyd albums or those of progressive bands ensnared hordes of listeners, and a decade later the same phenomenon repeated itself in the new wave world, albeit with a less baroque and visionary aesthetic, often more minimalist, yet just as conceptual and artistic. Among the covers of that period to strike the most curious explorers of post-punk (myself included) was surely that of Swell Maps' "A Trip To Marineville", which drew me toward the band's work without having heard a single note, with the same allure as a striking poster for a film one knows little or nothing about. That cover depicts a house on fire, and the first sensation it produces is one of fear and danger, later justified by the album's sonic content—though once the listen is over, one might think the fire in question had spread from the sacred flame of creativity: a creativity as overflowing and uncontainable as the flames pouring out of the windows and door of the burning house.

A striking metaphor applicable not only to the album or band in question, but to the entire new wave movement, one of the most important and revolutionary phenomena in the history of rock. And it is precisely into the wave cauldron that "A Trip To Marineville" has been placed, though paradoxically the work of Swell Maps can't be reduced even to such an all-encompassing term, given the free, anarchic scope of this unprecedented mixture of r'n'r, (post-)punk, psychedelia, kraut-rock and avant-garde, which moreover anticipated much of the noise, lo-fi and certain indie-rock that would follow.

The Birmingham band rested mainly on the axis formed by the two Sudden brothers, Nikki, singer and guitarist, and multi-instrumentalist Epic Soundtrack, whose stage names revealed a certain artistic ambition. Two genuine born losers who walked the wild, wrong side of the street, destined for a marginal role in rock history, yet so visionary as to prove seminal through their influence on countless successors, more or less aware of their importance, starting with Sonic Youth, Nirvana and Pavement, down to the innumerable disciples of the bands just mentioned. It's possible that even knowledgeable connoisseurs of post-punk have ignored or snubbed them in favor of the likes of Joy Division or Wire, but beyond their historical importance, this is a band capable of delighting both fans of the most abrasive rock and lovers of the boldest experimentation, by virtue of an irreverent, iconoclastic approach meant to shake up the rules of the game.

After the release of their first acid-punk-inflected singles, in 1979 the band debuted on the long-playing format with "A Trip To Marineville", and even today the first encounter with the album remains devastating, with the opening triplet ("H. S. Art", "Another Song" and "Vertical Slum") channeling the best of early English punk: the bullet-songs of early Wire are detonated with the explosive gunpowder of the Sex Pistols, taking on the lopsided trajectories of the Fall and the hyperkinetic speed of the Buzzcocks, whose virulence is further accelerated by infectious melodies. All wrapped in an unprecedented lo-fi din that arose well before that term became associated with a musical genre. One could even invoke the term art-punk, particularly for the lyrics (in full, not just the mantra "Do You Believe In Art?") of the opening track, halfway between a reflection on the authenticity of art and a surrealist sneer, imbued with a nihilism no longer tied solely to the socio-political situation but able to spill over into aesthetics.

In the two tracks following the opening triad, the band shows it knows and handles the punk genre superbly, not just in its UK form, but also drawing on the New York tradition with the tracked-tank bubblegum of "Spitfire Parade", actually closer to Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers than to the Ramones, and the prescient sound of the Stooges on "Harmony In Your Bathroom", where the riff from "I Wanna Be Your Dog" is chewed up, digested and spat back out in a noxious vomit. Up to the midpoint of this track, "A Trip To Marineville" might seem like just another punk-oriented record, eclectic and distinctive in its blend of influences, but in the second half of the song the first anarchic warning signs appear, amid electric derailments, hammering piano and assorted noise-making (including gurgles from the bathroom mentioned in the title), harbingers of the experimental spirit that will animate the second half of the record. A true two-faced Janus that on one side rattles out r'n'r in the aggressive '77 style, and on the other climbs the paths of the most visionary avant-rock, free of any intellectual pretension yet propelled by a playful, Dadaist and thoroughly free spirit.

The rock-avant-garde dichotomy resurfaces in "Midget Submarines", rooted in a classic garage-rock riff—a genre not evoked here in a nostalgic key as in the 80s revival—made unsettling by a sickly vocal and backed by guitar evolutions that foreshadow much of the alternative rock to come, before closing out with a proto-noise coda.

In the two minutes of "Bridge Head, Pt. 9", Swell Maps then forget any rhythmic-harmonic structure in favor of pure freak (out)-style abstraction, a sheer sonic delirium of percussion and random sounds, followed by another garage-punk-wave triplet in the Fall mold: in particular, on "Full Moon In My Pocket" Nikki Sudden's vocal takes on the psychotic style of Mark E. Smith, and it's hard to say who influenced whom, since the two were contemporaries in their early days—probably the latter on the former, given that the Fall's singer built a monolithic career on that tone, while for Sudden it was a fleeting inflection alternating with the sardonic sneer of Johnny Rotten and the swaggering register of Johnny Thunders.

In the closing stretch, the longer, more ambitious tracks emerge, further elevating the record: "Gunboats" is a heretical procession led by a dark bass à la Bauhaus, leading into a dark journey reminiscent of the mysterious allure of Pink Floyd's "A Saucerful Of Secrets" period, forging a psych-wave union that would later make a name for a band just as underrated and seminal, Red Temple Spirits. Less atmospheric but even bolder—and the crowning achievement of the album's avant-garde side—is "Adventuring Into Basketry", a bad trip powered by a kraut-propelled pinball machine in which the instruments fire off notes like berserk pinballs, before tribal drums and a pulsing bass lead the listener through a labyrinthine path marked by electric-rhythmic detours, an almost 8-minute-long sonic agglomeration condensing decades of experimental music, from the 60s of Red Krayola to the 90s of post-rock (which, incidentally, would arrive some twenty years later).

Incredibly, the record ends, at least in its original version, with the 43 seconds of "My Lil' Shoppes 'Round The Corner", a ballad for detuned guitar and toneless voice, anticipating the concise, ramshackle style of Guided By Voices, wrong-footing the listener yet again (as it did midway through the tracklist, with the piano sonata "Don't Throw Ashtrays At Me!" amid the sonic chaos), who by now is thoroughly stunned.

Once the listen is over, one immediately feels the urge to start again from the first track, both to take another spin on this crazed carousel and to return to the opening question "Do You Believe In Art?", brazenly repeated: it's hard not to believe in the art conveyed by "A Trip To Marineville", an art perhaps naive and naif, certainly mad and probably even brilliant, being the product of recklessness combined with talent placed in the service of an unbridled, fiercely free creativity.

Later CD reissues add four interesting tracks, a couple of which pay homage to the geniuses of rock's most eccentric tradition: "Steven Does" is a parody of 50s rock'n'roll for voice and guitar alone, entirely stripped of the rhythm section and rendered absurd by a wildly out-of-tune acoustic solo, a number worthy of Frank Zappa; while the spastic funk of "Doctor At Cake" edges close to the deconstructions of Captain Beefheart. On "Loin Of The Surf", meanwhile, the band cooks up a desert-psych(o)-garage riff that would delight fans of acclaimed contemporary bands like Thee Oh Sees and King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard, while the closer is disorienting once again with "Bronze & Baby Shoes", as unsettling as the most esoteric dark-folk. Tracks that enrich an ever more monumental and contradictory picture, one that could be the work of a band of certified lunatics or perhaps misunderstood geniuses (or, more likely still, both).

Despite the molten, not particularly marketable material, the record was well received in independent circles, but Swell Maps broke up right after the sophomore effort "Jane From Occupied Europe", just as visionary but less impactful than the debut. The band's creative fire would be partly dampened in Epic Soundtrack's subsequent solo career, paradoxically devoted to a fine, if unexpected, pop crooning, while the torch of rock'n'roll would be carried forward by Nikki Sudden's parallel activity, though within a rediscovery of the classics at the expense of experimentation. But the fire will keep blazing eternally within the immortal grooves of "A Trip To Marineville", an unsung masterpiece whose virulence, as well as its far-reaching influence, would be confirmed by the admission of an unlikely fan such as Tim Gane (Stereolab), who would confess to having listened to the record, freshly bought, over a hundred times, careful not to miss a single second of it. Hard to believe he was the only one.

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01/08/2021