The Hope Blister: ...Smile's OK
The definitive album of spooky atmospheric dolor for spooky atmospheric dolor's sake, to me, is still It'll End in Tears, the first album by producer Ivo Watts-Russell and the conscripted stable of 4AD colleagues that comprised This Mortal Coil. If we were moving off the Earth, and data capacity were limited, I could even reduce It'll End in Tears to its first three songs, covers of Alex Chilton's "Kangaroo", Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren" and Chilton's "Holocaust" sung, respectively, by cindytalk's Gordon Sharp, the Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser and ex-Buzzcocks singer Howard Devoto, as perfect a three-song encapsulation of the 4AD aesthetic as anything ever released on the label. The other two TMC albums, Filigree and Shadow and Blood, each have some worthwhile moments, as well, notably Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly singing Chris Bell's "You and Your Sister", on Blood, but It'll End in Tears' revolving cast of minor celebrities, which also included Lisa Gerard from Dead Can Dance, and Modern English singer Robbie Grey, mostly gave way, after the first album, to a stream of people I didn't have any personal attachment to. The three albums were eventually boxed up, along with an additional disc with the original versions of twenty-one of the covers, as 1983-1991, and the original-versions disc turned out to be the prize of the set, for me, a remarkable testament to Watts-Russell's ability to find the 4AD spirit, not just manufacture it, and the thing that resulted in me buying my first Emmylou Harris album, an associative link that seemed a lot stranger before Wrecking Ball.
Why Ivo opted to assume a new band name for ...Smile's OK, I don't know; the album could have been credited to This Mortal Coil without much risk of buyers being misled, as the mood hasn't changed appreciably. Vocalist Louise Rutkowski, who sang several duets with her sister Deirdre on Filigree and Shadow, and a couple on Blood, and saxophonist Ritchie Thomas, who played on one song on Filigree and Shadow, are joined by a bass/cello/viola/two-violin string section, and the group takes eight songs, all written by other people, and makes them sound like work of a single gloomy pen. The repertoire, this time, mines recent obscurities, rather than forgotten treasures: Slowdive's "Dagger", Heidi Berry's "Only Human", Chris Knox's "The Outer Skin", the Cranes' "Sweet Unknown", David Sylvian's "Let the Happiness In", Gus Gus' "Is Jesus Your Pal", Brian Eno's "Spider and I" and John Cale's "Hanky Panky Nohow". The stretch that reaches towards the heights of It'll End in Tears, for me, comes in the middle of this album: The tense "The Outer Skin" is arranged for only Louise's voice, a backing-vocal chorus that sounds like it was created by molding the echoes from her own reverb, and an instrumental coda that could be the same noise with the vocal timbres ironed out of it. "Sweet Unknown" is my favorite, a simple guitar pattern and subtle strings supporting a haunting farewell phrased, like Jane Siberry's "The Taxi Ride", as a benediction and release to the next relationship, which for some reason always seems to me like the most poignant kind. And "Let the Happiness In", the most menacing of the three, undercuts the sunny repetition of the title with muted, pendulous bass guitar, slow string cascades, and a fade-out choir. The only misstep on the album, for me, is "Hanky Panky Nohow", and then just because the phrase "Hanky Panky" seems intrinsically goofy, and I can't bear to hear it so solemnly intoned. But the song drifts for another minute or two after the last chorus, and before long I've forgiven it, and am floating, trying to keep the final echoes from dying away by concentrating on them as hard as possible. Ivo's universe has a soothing physics, and I emerge from another forty-minute visit to it in a state where everything around me seems like it could obey those same laws. The LEDs on my CD player could blink a little slower, if they put their mind to it, I'm sure. My desk lamp must have a softer, bluer setting. The fan in my computer would sound great with just a touch of flanging and an extra harmonic, singing periodicity duets with the refrigerator, kicking on and off downstairs. If it weren't for the steel plates, I think I could sit here, listening to the revealed shape of nothing, until dawn.