Waterboys

It's November 1969 when "Scott 4", the new album by Scott Walker — until just a few months earlier one of the most talked-about public figures on the British scene — is released quietly. The record opens with a landscape of tension built from tremulous acoustic guitars and a blaring trumpet that sketches out tragedies with a gypsy flavour. What follows is a series of deep, solemn-sounding songs, positively futuristic for the era.

Sixteen years pass, and once again a British record opens with dark acoustic tremors and trumpet flourishes — this time, though, the intro doesn't last just a few seconds but a seemingly endless minute and a half. When the drums finally kick in, the effect is like being buried under an avalanche.

Mike Scott knows exactly what he's doing, and decides to christen that sound "big music". Besides his own Waterboys, the label would prove applicable to other bands of the era too, among them Echo and the Bunnymen and Simple Minds.

These bands thus crafted hypertrophic sounds, dense with instruments and effects, but rather than chasing a baroque impact, they aimed at evoking vast open spaces. They did so fully aware of the risks involved. Echo and the Bunnymen and Simple Minds did conquer the charts, but ran into serious trouble with the press, which — obtuse as ever — couldn't stomach new wave bands with such a massive sound.

The Waterboys, for their part, managed to create a folk rock that was strongly '80s in timbre, yet essentially foreign to post-punk. Freed from those chains, they won over the critics. They would, however, struggle much harder to win over the public. Opposite situations, yet both seemed to condemn anyone showing more ambition than average to a degree of dissatisfaction. And while the passing of time has partly set things right, even today the three bands, classics though they now are, remain in one way or another less celebrated than they deserve.

At the point when Scott was getting ready to record "This Is The Sea", the Waterboys' previous album, "A Pagan Place", had sold no more than a few thousand copies. Yet rather than losing faith, Chrysalis chose to double down and once again provide him with the budget needed to realise his vision. The result was an album so imposing that its predecessor, fine as it was, risked being overshadowed.

The intro mentioned above belongs to "Don't Bang The Drum". Drums resounding like the footsteps of a titan, a hammering piano and a searing, ever-shifting guitar — the latter kept in the background, though, generating dynamics rather than dominating the other instruments. Then the saxophone rears up dramatically, synthesizer flourishes mimic the surges of an orchestra, and everything builds in a continuous accumulation. This boundless sound is Scott's own personal theatre, a piece in which man is invited to revere nature with mystic dread, lacking the means to confront its immensity.

I know you love the good life, that you love to roam.

You love to beat your chest and make a noise,

but not here, my friend. This is sacred ground,

with a power running through it,

and if I know you, you'll beat the drum

like the monkeys do

In any case, by the end even words lose meaning: Scott finds himself moaning as if in ecstasy, and the arrangement, now gigantic, sweeps everything away.

Decidedly less aggressive, "The Whole Of The Moon" is driven by a trotting piano, while the lyrics tell of two opposite and complementary characters: one travels for years to every corner of the world, the other stays in his own room the entire time, yet it's the first who considers himself incomplete, convinced he can only glimpse part of the things the other sees in their entirety. If the spiritual symbolism is obvious, its application is left wide open: friendship, love, questioning the meaning of life are all themes that fit the lyrics perfectly, and there's something undeniably uplifting and vindicating about hearing such words sung over such a vital melody.

A near-imperceptible detail, audible on headphones if you pay close attention, reveals just how much Scott poured into recording this track. While interlocking vocal games can be spotted throughout much of the song, somewhere around 3'45" and 4'05" there are four vocal lines running simultaneously over the chorus: the two main ones, Scott and the choir, are audible on both channels. The other two, one per channel, tend to slip by unnoticed: one belongs to delicate session singer Max Edie, the other is Scott again, roughened by a filter.

This labyrinth lasts only a few seconds, but it sums up all the obsessive care Scott poured into the album. An album on which he plays electric and acoustic guitars, piano and synth, percussion and drum machine, with the near-exclusive assistance of saxophonist Anthony Thistlethwaite and keyboardist Karl Wallinger, the latter nicknamed by Scott a "one-man orchestra" for his ability to produce practically any sound required.

"The Pan Within" marks the entrance into the Waterboys universe of the man who would later become one of its cornerstones, violinist Steve Wickham. The lyrics are perhaps not among Scott's most meaningful, using the vision of the ancient Greek god Pan as a metaphor for love, but the music - as if the previous tracks hadn't already done so - redefines the very concept of epic scale, with a triumphant electric guitar riff, piano notes climbing gradually higher, and violin that alternately pushes on stubbornly and shrieks in solos as sharp as blades.

"Medicine Bow" kicks off with tight drumming and a wall of distorted guitar, further thickened from the midpoint on by Thistlethwaite's sax. The lyrics list a series of formative journeys, in the manner of the quintessential Romantic artist. In the first verse, having grabbed his beloved books and put on his scarf, the protagonist runs headlong through the storm and snow to reach the mysterious Medicine Bow. Which, however, turns out to be in the middle of the sea according to the second verse, or atop a hill according to the third: the destination is in fact irrelevant, what matters is the journey taken to get there.

Carried by a bed of syncopated piano, harmonium and saxophone, "Old England" is the most concrete track of the bunch: its target is Margaret Thatcher and her policies, so inattentive to the weakest segment of the population. It's amusing that even a poet as ethereal as Scott, light years away from the laments of Morrissey or the political commitment of the Clash, felt the need to dedicate a thought to her.

"Be My Enemy" is a cowpunk ride with a Celtic flavor, and undoubtedly the most adrenaline-fuelled cut on the tracklist, in stark contrast with what is instead the album's most intimate moment, namely "Trumpets", a love song built on driving piano, a touch of celesta and a bit of sax. No rhythm section, no guitars, no backing vocals, aside from a barely audible second vocal line. With its reassuring lines ("Your life is like an ocean, I want to dive in naked, lose myself in your depths"), it was placed at this exact point in the tracklist for a reason, likely serving the double purpose of allowing a breather after a wild track and setting the stage for the final triumph.

What follows, closing the record, is in fact the title track. If it isn't the album's peak - it being impossible to rank such classics against one another - it is at the very least the peak of Scott as a performer. His high-pitched timbre, which by the end strains itself almost to the point of cracking, is worth the price of admission on its own. The rhythm section is once again absent, but in its place there's piano, violin, brass, synth, tambourine, a whisper of electric guitar, and no fewer than seven overdubbed acoustic guitars, the ultimate expression of Scott's wall of sound. The power of the arrangement is genuinely astonishing; few predominantly acoustic tracks have ever sounded like this.

The voice constantly rises and falls in intensity as the imagined interlocutor laments the disappointments and bitterness he's experienced. Scott answers him that expectations of happiness and security were only a river, while life's unpredictability and hardships are the sea. And yet, in the final message, it is hope that wins out:

I heard that there's a train now, it's coming down the tracks,

it's yours if you hurry, you've still got enough time,

and you don't need a ticket, and you don't pay any fare,

because that was the river and this is the sea

Hope that was clearly well placed, since the album earned the band their first, modest entry into the British top 40, selling around 60,000 copies. The "The Whole Of The Moon" single also reached the middle of the charts, though it would certainly have fared better had Scott not refused to appear on Top of the Pops over the miming issue. No great loss: reissued in 1991, it would climb to number 3 among singles and push the compilation "The Best Of Waterboys '81-'90" to number 2 among albums.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

03/08/2014