Talk Talk

Half a minute of silence; but an oscillating silence, pregnant with a vibration that stretches and suspends. So begins the muted hum of a guitar amp with vibrato effect, the masterpiece and testament of Talk Talk, “Laughing Stock”. Mark Hollis's band, on this occasion made up largely of session musicians on strings and horns, released in 1991 the follow-up to the other essential album, “Spirit Of Eden” from 1988 — a record perhaps even more important than this one, at least from a historiographical standpoint, since it was the first to dismantle the foundations of pop-rock with a formula entirely new in structure and sound, arguably setting the stage for what a few years later would come to be called “post-rock”. But it's with “Laughing Stock” that the path traced up to that point is pushed to its extreme, and inevitable, conclusion, reaching formal and substantial perfection across six tracks of immense depth and rarefaction.

Half a minute of silence, as we said; and then a chord, liquid and reverberated, and Hollis's unmistakable voice sketching the first strokes of the fresco: “Place my chair at the backroom door”. It's a muted entrance, through the back door indeed, it's a music you have to make an effort to follow through its empty spaces in order to truly enjoy its fullness. “One note is better than two, and none is better than one,” the singer and composer loved to repeat at the time. “Myrrhman” unfolds this way, without you noticing, without being able to tell where it wants to take you, amid Hollis's sad sob, his guitar sketching impressionistic smudges of sound, and a few hints of trumpet and percussion; and then, without a break in continuity (but with a barely predictable harmonic shift) it lets us glimpse an even calmer and more rarefied sea, made of a carpet of thin, polished strings over which a distant oboe traces a melody of profound melancholy. A few seconds of this half-lit paradise, and it all fades out, giving us no time to get used to it: it's already a peak, a summit from which to observe, alone, the world below.

“Ascension Day” is the other side of that paradise. Percussive (though in a way very far from rock drumming, closer to psychedelic jazz) and guitar-driven (a guitar right up front, in overdrive and with the most acidic tones, truly worlds away from what Talk Talk, like every band of the 80s, had accustomed us to), it unfolds over a 7/4 pulse, leaving room only, in the brief “chorus” — if you can call it that, a fleeting passage repeated a couple of times — for a flash of organ of evocative, immediate beauty. Ascension Day, which however retains very little of the celestial (“Bet I'll be damned/ Built the debt I turned twos up today”, “Kill the bed/ I'll burn on Judgement day”), lasts exactly six minutes, the last of which is devoted to a sonic maelstrom, Hollis's guitar lashing out, off-beat, over drum work of devastating power, all snare rolls and cymbals slammed in your face; and then, suddenly, silence, leaving us floating suspended in the void with the echo of that wall of sound still ringing in our heads. A moment of disorientation is only natural now; and it's providential that, in an album where every single breath, every single second of music or silence is perfectly calculated, “After The Flood” (one likes to imagine that “flood” also refers to the cataclysm just concluded) begins by arriving from afar, gradually creeping into our ears and up into our brain. Two tiny, minuscule ascending organ phrases interlace with one another, painting an oasis of serenity and, at the same time, of disorientation, over a rhythm that this time is simple and straightforward (though it's still the sound of the drums that makes the difference; above all, the beat kept almost always on the ride rather than the hi-hat, blurring the pulse and making it so pleasantly jazzy), until it breaks against the refrain — more pronounced this time — which once again lets slip through the subtle anguish that permeates the whole work, underscored by the insecure, nasal tremor of Hollis's timbre. You barely notice someone is singing, no melody initially sticks in your head, until the terrible lines of the chorus: “Shake my head/ Turn my face to the floor/ Dead to respect, to respect to be born/ Lest we forget who lay”; and for a full ten minutes the track glides on, over what is, by contrast, probably the most easily assimilable structure on “Laughing Stock”, enriched with organ and vocal gems of great stature.

The second side of the LP (because, yes, back then there were still LPs) once again bears the mark of rarefaction, even more pronounced this time. “Do you die in sin or born again?”… a few notes, minimal to say the least, of guitar, and once again a halting voice narrating death and rebirth, and then death again, in an endless circle with images that are decidedly cryptic yet of great impact. Several minutes pass this way, between nothing and very little, only to give way to another nothing, another very little, made of shadings and dissonances of trumpets and strings. The tones here are dark and sinister, there's nothing celestial about it; but nothing infernal either, the pains are too muted, the anguishes too rarefied. This is limbo, where one floats in the eternal wait for a final judgment.

And then, the final judgment arrives. This is where paradise lies, in the nine minutes and forty-six seconds of “New Grass”; this is where the flight lies, this is where the meaning of it all lies. It's the sad paradise of one who doesn't understand, who never stops marveling, who would like to give up but is incapable of it; or perhaps, depending on the angle from which you look at it, of one who wouldn't want to give up but knows how to do nothing else. It's a continuous pulse in 3/8, kick and snare barely grazed; it's a guitar origami of five, maybe ten notes, clear as air, repeated endlessly; it's a progression of light, sparse piano chords, descending like a bowing head; it's a few inlays, here and there, of a handful of organ notes, cracking open a sliver of light from above before immediately closing it back on itself; it's a few phrases scattered across the carpet of sensations painted with music, a universal, timeless music, or rather a music of every age. “Someday Christendom May Come”, sings Mark, and nothing could seem more self-evident, listening to this fragment of grace that has landed, somehow, in our ears in the form of sequences and frequencies.

Then, “Runeii” takes on the difficult task of waking us from the dream; but “Runeii” prefers instead to let us slip into an even deeper sleep, where the disillusionment is the same but, perhaps, hits less traumatically. Once again, minimalism in its purest state, Hollis's hands sliding over the guitar as his voice slides over the words, closing the album with a few notes that fade out on themselves, like flowers withdrawing their petals into the dark. Night has fallen again.

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12/11/2006