Talk Talk - Spirit of Eden (1988) (1 Viewer)

Nice, I like it! I'll probably have another listen or two this week. I'm still not mad abut your man's singing but I can cope with it now and I'm over my issues with the harmonica. Mainly I like the quieter bits, especially on side one. There's a nice tension in the restraint, like it's threatening to break into something more but when it happens on Desire I wish it didn't. Still, back to the nice stuff again after that. I'm still a bit wary of listening to any of their other albums.
 
I'm on to my 5th play of this.Its a fine album.

Do not ask me what he's singing about I havent heard a word...but I like his voice a lot,,.and is that bassoon I'm hearing?

Its a quality record alright

I for one am loving the Thumped Album Club
 
It's very different. Much more 80s pop.
 
I spent most of the weekend with this on and in the process got myself reacquainted with Laughing Stock and Hollis' solo album as well!
Spirit Of Eden is one of my all time favourite albums and I remember getting it when it came out, having loved the Colour of Spring, and not knowing what the hell was going on! It was such a change and I wasn't used to listening to (what I then thought of as) Avant-garde or experimental music! It's a great album but a very tense listen. I love all of the tension/release stuff going on, and while some of it has a sort of stoner groove, I find it a very edgy album to listen to. I love the instrumentation and the overall "vibe" of the record. Yes it can appear self-indulgent (or is that experimental??) and the lyrics are mostly complete garbage, but the overall effect of the album is quite hypnotic.

I also dug out Phill Brown's book, "Are we still rolling?", which is a great companion piece to the records. He's the engineer on Spirit Of Eden, Laughing Stock and Mark Hollis and his book has a few chapters dedicated to each album. It's a terrific read - especially if you're into all the technical aspects of recording; he really goes into great detail. It's interesting that Hollis picked him to engineer because he'd worked on sessions with Traffic in the late 60's (Steve Winwood guested on Colour of Spring) and Hollis initially wanted them to only use instruments and studio gear that was around in 1967/68!
Also interesting to read was the EMI refused to release the record and sued the band for turning in a non-commercial record! (Color of Spring yielded about 4 hit singles I think?)
Talk talk didn't seem to fare well with labels, they had a lot of problems with Polydor who they recorded Laughing Stock for. Hollis was apparently getting pretty hefty advances (rumours of a million pounds per album) so understandably the labels weren't keen on the band's results! Incidentally Laughing Stock was deleted 3 months after release, a fact which Hollis wasn't made aware of until some years later.
 
/me scratches head

Listened twice on Sat, doing nothing much for me so far. Not much in the way of humable tunes, insightful lyrics, rhythmic interest, or excitement. Also I don't like the blue-eyed-soul style vocals, yer man sounds like Michael McDonald

Will try again in the car on the way home from work
 
I have it on as I work. I can fade in and out..it's fine. The kind of thing I'd put on at home if I was reading or something.
 
There seems to be some decent songs in there but they're all hidden by the instrumental meanderings over on top. I imagine I'd like their synth pop stuff a lot more. Are these at least partly responsible for the Irish post-rock scene? Sake.
 

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