Wednesday 21 March 2012

LaRM day 46 (Blue Aeroplanes-Blue Nile)

After the critical success of Swagger, the Blue Aeroplanes made another album in a similar big style, which was preceded by the 'Yr Own World' single (1991). It's a great rock song with a lovely chorus and a good hook, and it was a canny choice for a lead off single for another big rock album. The other 3 songs on the single are also really good, one of which is a beautiful and much more sedate acoustic piece which harks back to the more experimental, lo-fi and low-key days of the band. The album, Beatsongs (1991) is a less successful attempt at creating an arty minded huge rock album. It's very much based on the Swagger template, but this time something doesn't quite come through as clearly as on that earlier album. It's still a fine record and it has some great songs on it but it just doesn't quite cohere and it doesn't have Swagger's sense of purpose. In some small ways there are hints back to their older records (a couple of the songs have a folky violin line for instance). All of the songs are perfectly decent at worst (with the sole exception of a disastrously ill-advised and inexplicable cover of Paul Simon's 'The Boy In the Bubble') and when it's good, it's as good as the band ever got.

I think the band were a bit full of themselves at this point and there were interviews with the music mags in which they talked about their own songs with unbecoming reverence, and they thought that the songs on the singles weren't getting the attention they deserved and in 1992 the band released a second compilation of B-sides and rarities called Friendloverplane 2. The difference between the two compilation albums is startling. The second is full of straight down the line rock songs, all well produced, well recorded and well performed and it's totally lacking in the excitement, the unpredictability and most importantly the enigmatic character of the first Friendloverplane. Once again, there are some fine songs, but this time around it feels like an unnecessary release. Likewise the 'Up in a Down World' EP which has four non-LP songs, two of which are pretty good rock songs, but there's a live reading of 'Breaking In My Heart' which isn't nearly as good as the one of the first Friendloverplane, and a demo version of an earlier album track. I stopped following the band at that point, but I did pick up one of their much more recent albums, Altitude (2006) just to see what had happened over the years. It's still following the cleaner, more straightforward rock approach. But the star having fallen seems to have allowed the band to relax a bit and Altitude feels much more comfortable than Beatsongs, much less like they were pinning their hopes on it. It's not an amazing record but it's definitely decent and it's nice to hear that they never really lost it.

Next up is the Blue Nile starting with their debut A Walk Across the Rooftops (1984). This is a fabulous piece of work, atmospheric, brooding, melancholy, enigmatic, it creates a crepuscular feeling with ease usuing the simplest of instrumental settings - keyboards, synthesised drums and bass. But perhaps the most important element of all is Paul Buchanan's plaintive vocals which create a warm and nostalgic setting for his emotive lyrics, which are for the most part a hyper-romanticised depiction of everyday (or rather every evening) life. All the Blue Nile albums feel like they were designed specifically to be listened to on rainy days, but none more so than A Walk Across the Rooftops. I think it's a gorgeous record and a genuinely moving one too. The first sign of the band's work rate was evidenced by the five year gap before second album Hats (1989) which shows absolutely no development of the sound or the style whatsoever, which for once is a great thing. Hats is another highly emotive record, full of open spaces and twilight moods. Every song is a beautifully romantic vignette. While stylistically quite different, I've always felt there's a strong affinity between the Blue Nile and the American Music Club, both telling small stories of individual lives and making them somehow grand scale. A Walk Across the Rooftops and Hats are easily two of the best albums of the 1980's for me, and bearing in mind it was an awesome decade for independent record releasing that's saying something. (I also have the 'Downtown Lights' 7" which has a lovely B-side called 'The Wires Are Down'.)

Another gap, this time of seven years before another album, Peace At Last (1996) was released. Interestingly the pristine production this time makes the album actually sound over-produced (the horrible sounding 'Holy Love') and the introduction of more actual rather than synthesised instrumentation detracts from the mood of the songs, making them less open. The best songs on Peace At Last then are the ones which are the most sedate ('Family Life' is really lovely), focussing on piano and atmospherics, as the earlier albums did. The songs for the most part are as strong as ever and it's another really good album, but it feels as if Buchanan has had to work hard to achieve that strange melancholy romanticism that seemed so easy before. Likewise the last album, High (2004), which had an eight year gestation period. High suffers from the same problems as Peace At Last but even more so. Once again it's certainly a long way from being a bad record, but it's one that doesn't seem particularly remarkable. Four albums in 28 years is a pretty impressive workrate. The next one I suppose should be with us around 2014.

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