Rating My CD's: Come on Down to My Rescue

17. Echo & the Bunnymen -- Songs to Learn and Sing

In my library/office, where I compose these deconstructions, I have a small paperback edition of Verse by John Updike, published in 1965, which I paid a pittance for in my favorite secondhand books & music store a few years ago. Every now and again, I flip through it idly, seeking knowledge and understanding, and finding only cleverness. For John Updike was a clever poet who poetry says clever things. A brief example, from A Cheerful Alphabet of Pleasant Objects:

Apple

Since Time began, such alphabets begin
With Apple, source of Knowledge and of Sin
My child, take heart: the fruit that undid Man
Brought out as well the best in Paul Cezanne

You see what I mean. The poem doesn't so much enhance my understanding as flatter it, with the wink that of course I know who Paul Cezanne is, and if I can't quite place his art, I remember him as an Important Artist that Educated People know about, so I assume that he painted apples. Damned witty, Wilde!


That's rather how I feel about Echo and the Bunnymen: They're clever people who wrote and played clever pop songs. It doesn't take very long into the opening track on this greatest-hits, "Rescue," before one starts appreciating the time that these fellows put to craft the melody and then gussy it up.

New Wave bands had it easy for a good few years. As Punk imploded, New Wave stepped into the void like a drink of fresh water. They had all the cute new fashion and all the sweet pop goodness that people didn't know they'd been craving. This was the music I first became aware of on MTV, that nexus of Simple Minds, Return to Waterloo, and Madonna. Being eight years old, I didn't get it.

Thus, for me the 1980's that people like to remember with nostalgia is summed up best by one of the first pop songs I actually liked, Genesis' "Land of Confusion." As I later wrote on the music of that era:

 I didn't like metal, heavy or glam, I didn't like New Wave, I didn't like rap. Everything was either limp-wristed, sybaritic, or psychotic. Where could a kid find a nice simple Rock sound, unadorned and unashamed?

I don't feel that way about the 80's anymore, and I don't feel that way about New Wave anymore. I now see New Wave as the afformentioned commercial version of Post-Punk, and a handful of bands, such as Joy Division, Gang of Four, and Wire have helped me hear the 80's all over again. It will never be my favorite era of music, but I no longer wrinkle up my nose and act all disdainful whenever somebody feels like going to 80's night at a club or when a band covers "Billie Jean" or "Every Rose Has its Thorn" (Hair metal still sucks though. Sorry).

This album is better than the grade I'm going to give it. Echo was a top-notch New Wave band that wrote top-notch New Wave Songs. They can be enjoyed without irony or self-deprecation. But they can't be enjoyed with much passion, at least, not by me. They're a touch to cold, too sterile, too full of the craft of creation and too empty of the joy of it.

Times come, like the early 1980's, when we want that kind of sound, when we need something to cleanse the palette. For me, those times, while never so rare as to make me dispense with this disc, are never so often as to make me jump to hear it.

Grade: OK