{"id":443,"date":"2011-02-11T05:40:35","date_gmt":"2011-02-11T10:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=443"},"modified":"2020-12-08T14:43:18","modified_gmt":"2020-12-08T19:43:18","slug":"album-review-the-teardrop-explodes-kilimanjaro-deluxw-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2011\/02\/11\/album-review-the-teardrop-explodes-kilimanjaro-deluxw-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: The Teardrop Explodes – Kilimanjaro (Deluxe Edition)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 1980s sometimes get a bad rap when it comes to music. True, there was a surfeit of radio-ready product that wasn\u2019t exactly built to last for the ages. And the stuff that was good — Dire Straits<\/strong>, Fabulous Thunderbirds<\/strong>, Asia<\/strong> (hey: I<\/em> liked \u2018em!) got played to death. One had to dig a bit deeper to find interesting music.<\/p>\n

But it was there if you looked and listened. The early strains of the kind of music with which Wilco<\/strong> and the Jayhawks<\/strong> would later find success (of the critical and commercial kind) was evident on albums by The Long Ryders<\/strong>, the BoDeans<\/strong> and many others. The whole Los Angeles-based \u201cpaisley underground\u201d scene gave birth to an impressive number of bands who created high quality material: the Bangles<\/strong>, Green on Red<\/strong>, The Dream Syndicate<\/strong>, The Three O\u2019clock<\/strong>, and many others. A bit farther north, Translator<\/strong> was combining the influences of guitar-hero rock from the late 60s and 70s into something new and exciting.<\/p>\n

Of course, the British Isles had their own scene, and influences passed back and forth across the Atlantic. As ever, the British strains of a particular style would differ from their American counterpart. And as ever, one need only to look toward a city on the Mersey River to find some of the most compelling music coming out of the UK.<\/p>\n

In 1978 The Teardrop Explodes<\/strong> came on the scene with their own modern take on British psychedelia. Fronted by the enigmatic, idiosyncratic and fascinating Julian Cope<\/strong>, The Teardrop Explodes released a mere two albums during their brief time together (plus one belated release nearly a decade later), but their debut stands as a high water mark of 80s-style danceable psych pop. That debut disc \u2013 1980\u2019s Kilimanjaro<\/em> — has now been given the deluxe reissue treatment.<\/p>\n

Cope\u2019s voice is capable of covering a fairly impressive range, but on Kilimanjaro<\/em> he stays within a tight range of notes, and makes it work. Meanwhile his thick and propulsive bass guitar work (coupled with Gary Dwyer<\/strong>\u2019s brightly-mixed drums) cranked out a groove. Listeners could dance while their minds expanded. Chiming guitar figures similar to the sort that The Edge<\/strong> was putting on U2<\/strong> albums) filed in the midrange. Unusually, the band adorned the entire album with tightly-arranged trumpet section. So hypnotic numbers like \u201cSleeping Gas\u201d get the extra texture of brass. The unusual juxtaposition works well.<\/p>\n

David Balfe<\/strong>\u2019s keyboards (mostly piano and organ, plus a bit of synthesizer here and there) are also applied as a textural element: if late 60s Pink Floyd<\/strong> were reinvented in 1980 as a dance band, they might have sounded like The Teardrop Explodes. (And a connection between the two bands does in fact exist: one of the trumpet players on Kilimanjaro<\/em> is Norman \u201cHurricane\u201d Smith,<\/strong> producer of many early Pink Floyd records.) Hints of the later druggy \u201cMadchester\u201d sound (Happy Mondays<\/strong>, Inspiral Carpets<\/strong>) can be found in the grooves of Kilimanjaro<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Throughout the disc, an impressive knack for catchy melodies abounds, and plenty of dynamics gets applied to songs like the winning opener \u201cHa Ha I\u2019m Drowning\u201d and \u201cTreason.\u201d Listening to Kilimanjaro<\/em> some thirty-plus years on, it\u2019s interesting how little the album has aged. Yes, there are sonic artifacts of the era, but the strength of the songs and performances cut through the cobwebs. In particular, the busy bass lines \u2013 reminiscent of the approach favored by The Vapors\u2019 Steve Smith<\/strong> — make careful listening a worthwhile experience. Clever use of stereo miking on the drums adds excitement to numbers like \u201cSecond Head,\u201d though the songs hardly need the help. The dreamy track \u201cThe Thief of Baghdad\u201d is a near-perfect melding of melody, atmospherics, dynamics and an insistent beat. The album wraps up with the impossibly catchy \u201cWhen I Dream;\u201d even at seven-plus minutes (the original vinyl had a shorter edit) it\u2019s still a pop tune of the highest order. There\u2019s not a weak track in the bunch.<\/p>\n

I bought Kilimanjaro<\/em> on vinyl when it was new; then and now I considered it essential listening. But the new expanded reissue features thirteen additional related tracks. \u201cReward\u201d was on an earlier alternate release of the album, and is right up to the standard of the main tracks. An alternate version of \u201cSleeping Gas\u201d makes more prominent (and hypnotic) use of the venerated Vox Jaguar (a sound familiar to garage rock enthusiasts and owners of Elvis Costello<\/strong>\u2019s second LP). A false ending harkens back to 1967. The remaining tracks are assorted odds-and-ends from the era (Kilimanjaro<\/em> has gone through a number of reissues and reconfigurations), some of which are less than essential. \u201cKirby Workers Dream Fades\u201d is a psych instrumental, sort of The Teardrop Explodes\u2019 answer to The Beatles\u2019<\/strong> \u201cFlying.\u201d The demo-ish \u201cAll I Am is Loving You\u201d may test the listener\u2019s patience for its four and a half minutes run time.<\/p>\n

The album\u2019s title track wasn\u2019t on the original release, but it\u2019s here. Sounding very much like a soundtrack piece, \u201cKilimanjaro\u201d makes use of tribal-sounding drums and a synth line that manages to sound like an acoustic instrument on a windy plain. An eerie chanted overdubbed choral vocal arrangement repeats a single lyrical line while a guitar squall fades in and out. It\u2019s spooky, moody stuff, but quite uncommercial compared to the album as originally released. \u201cStrange House in the Snow\u201d features scraping cello, haunted house piano and a manic Cope vocal; it\u2019s interesting but would have sounded out of place on the album (it too was on a previous single-disc reissue). \u201cUse Me\u201d is essentially a Cope solo outing on vocal and acoustic guitar. “Traison (C’est Juste Une Histoire)” is \u201cTreason\u201d with the vocal recut in French.<\/p>\n

The bonus disc closes with an overlong, rambling live version of \u201cSleeping Gas.\u201d It does provide a hint of the experience of a live show. As one might expect, it\u2019s all about Julian Cope. As an album closer, it\u2019s damaging to the flow.<\/p>\n

Despite that final misstep, the 2010 reissue of Kilimanjaro<\/em> is a reasonably successful attempt to create a definitive release of this thirty year old album.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 1980s sometimes get a bad rap when it comes to music. True, there was a surfeit of radio-ready product that wasn\u2019t exactly built to last for the ages. And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","cat-65-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20302,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions\/20302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}