It all comes together for 1984's Ocean Rain, in which the psychedelic leanings, the bleak soundcaping, the reverb and the echoing, the portentous, pretentious lyrics, the oppressive atmosphere, are all played to their utmost and then drenched in some really inventive string arrangements. Ocean Rain is a fantastically good album, one of the highlights of the 1980's. There are nods to all kinds of stuff (the Doors get rather cheeky references throughout 'Thorn of Crowns') and yet it's an album that is not rooted in the past. I suppose it's one of those albums that demonstrate just how much more imagination was involved in being imaginative in the 80's. For all the bluster and nonsense of prog and the artless stupidity of punk, it was really in the 1980's that bands started to forge something truly new out of old materials, and it's all still enormously exciting to listen to all this time later. Ocean Rain is a unique record in that it touches perfection at exactly the same time as it reaches its peaks of overblown silliness. 'Thorn of Crowns' really is a perfect example: despite McCulloch yelling "c-c-c-cucumber, c-c-c-c-cabbage" you're still swept along by the graceful currents of the song, it's fabulous, and in many ways it really is what the Doors were probably trying to do. Will Sergeant's guitar work is at its most scratchily inventive throughout Ocean Rain and in fact every song is a masterclass in understated performance and low-key creative thinking, while seeming to be ostentatiously showy. 'Silver', 'Crystal Days', 'The Killing Moon', 'Seven Seas' and the majestic title track, it's all really wonderful, wonderful stuff.
A hiatus meant that the next album wasn't released until 1987. The eponymous album is an interesting development, it is much cleaner, less darkly atmospheric, much more concentrated on melody and hooks and all of the string arrangements have gone again. It's effectively simply a straightforward indie rock album of its time. The songs are fine, the sound is fine, the arrangements are fine, but it nonetheless feels like a disappointingly airy and slight album compared to those that had preceded it. In many ways it's the bands most immediately enjoyable and likeable album, there are some lovely sort of poppy indie rock songs on it ('Blue Blue Ocean' is relatively trite, but it's a lovely tune) and there's no denying that it's a really good indie rock album, but there's just that mystery mising, that sense of something hidden and it really doesn't feel like it has the same weight at all. Finally we have the Crystal Days boxset (2008) which has album tracks and rarities from 1979 - 1999. My copy is actually missing the first of the four discs which is annoying because it contains probably the most interesting stuff. Anyway, it's got a bunch of diverting bits and pieces, the most interesting being the B-side 'Way Out and Up We Go' and most of a live show from 1985, composed largely of revealing cover versions of songs by the Rolling Stones, Velvet Underground, the Doors, Television and Dylan.
From a great example of just how special British indie rock can be to a demonstration of how utterly pedestrian it can be. Echobelly's first album, Everyone's Got One (1994) came out at just that period when things started going wrong again in culture, when all the advances that the 80's made, specifically in opposition to the cultural pressures from a political system of antipathy, started unravelling. In other words it was the end of thoughtful, progressive cultural thinking and the start of the Loaded era. For women, the long fought for essential acceptance as part of the indie aesthetic (ie gender being an utter irrelevance) was pretty much within reach when this kind of crap happened, and the half-witted coverage by an invertedly sexist music press of people like Louise Wener and Sonya Aurora-Madden made it possible for the discussion to be reduced to fatuous comments along the "I'm not a feminist but" line, and women were once again brutally and efficiently reduced to the status of either lust object or big mouth rather than musicians and writers. To suggest that it was the women talking the nonsense's fault is to misrepresent entirely the situation, it was the half-wits running the NME and Melody Maker (and by extension the publishers of any "men's interest" magazines - in fact the idea that WHSmith actually separates music and film mags as "men's interest" speaks volumes about just how far back we've all fallen) at the time, but nobody helped out, and the dawn of the disdainfully overtly women-hating post-Oasis Britain was an inevitability. This is all to no purpose in talking about Echobelly, but that's partly because there's almost nothing to say about an album which lasts in the memory exactly as long as it's actually playing. Slightly jangly indie rock at its least inspiring, part of the fault is the dead production that so many of these bands were prey to, but it's also the half-hearted songs, the anodyne performances, coupled with the irritating facetiousness of the overall delivery. It's hardly a record because it's scarcely there.
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