SOUND OFF
NEW YORK—How’s your memory? Can you recall the ragged end of the ’70s, the apprehension anyone with brains felt at Reagan’s election, and the uncertainty inherent in the arrival of Orwell’s decade? The Sound do. Although many of their contemporaries have mutated into dance fodder—Joy Division as the increasingly homogenized New Order, the Cure most dramatically, and the Comsat Angels least sucessfully—the Sound have remained remarkably true to their sound and vision.
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SOUND OFF
NEW YORK—How’s your memory?
Can you recall the ragged end of the ’70s, the apprehension anyone with brains felt at Reagan’s election, and the uncertainty inherent in the arrival of Orwell’s decade?
The Sound do. Although many of their contemporaries have mutated into dance fodder—Joy Division as the increasingly homogenized New Order, the Cure most dramatically, and the Comsat Angels least sucessfully—the Sound have remained remarkably true to their sound and vision.
Which, of course, is hardly the way to get ahead in a world where Huey Lewis is anything but a cartoon character. While their former peers tour America as icons, the Sound—when anyone bothers to even notice them—are portrayed as dour and humorless partypoopers. It’s a characterization that singer-guitarist Adrian Borland finds particularly irksome.
“I think we really get the wrong press,” he stated, “all this grim business stuff—it’s not accurate. When it comes right down to it, we play quiet songs and loud songs, and songs that are like leading up from one to the other. And that’s exhilarating! All the reviews make it sound like we’re building walls around the stage.”
In person, Borland is anything but a sourpuss. Wide-eyed, personable, and feisty, he is eager to set the record straight on the band and its music. He’s also used to not fitting in—when he started out in London during the heyday of punk there, his bands would always get slagged, he said, for not having spikey haircuts with pink streaks or whatever.
“...So we said, ‘Look, fuck it! The Ramones have long hair, Patti Smith has long hair...’ ” On the whole, Borland mused, “I think we’d have rather been here than over there. Their whole punk thing ruined itself—it got into another set of conformities.”
The Sound came together in 1979, owing a lot to Joy Division yet possessing their own vision. They could bristle with power, as on “Missiles” from their debut Jeopardy, or turn in a sensitive ballad like “Silent Air” on From The Lion’s Mouth which is equally moving in its understated way. Though England generally overlooked the band, they had an appreciative European following.
While tastes in the music world were drifting away from the Sound’s brand of gritty realism as this decade unfolded, the band kept on, and their third LP, All Fall Down, was their starkest and least commercially-oriented LP to date.
Shock Of Daylight is the Sound’s first American release—on A&M—and to support it, the band recently did their first U.S. tour. And to throw off those who would say that they are incapable of writing a pop(ular) song, they’ve just released their most commercial song to date, “1,000 Reasons,” which could pass for Echo And The Bunnymen’s recent work.
“Tune-wise it’s one of our strongest songs,” Borland admits. “It’s got more of a definite melody. A noisy thing with like one-note vocals I like, but melodies are always more commercial. It’s like pop rather than rock, maybe. Rock’s values to me are more to do with noise and attitude than anything else, whereas pop...tunes are pop.”
The song is taken from Heads And Hearts, a new LP hopefully soon to be issued stateside. And the Sound is rock. Stay tuned.
John Neilson
