This Mortal Coil

Certain labels, almost always small, independent ones, are known for developing or cultivating a particular sound. There’s a Sun sound and a Stax sound and a Motown sound. Sometimes, these labels take on the characteristics of a producer who owns or works closely with that label. If you want a fantastic plastic sheen and state-of-the-art production, you go find Trevor Horn and his ZTT label. If you’re looking for adventurously produced, punk-flecked reggae dub plates, you’re looking for Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sounds. And if you want to contemplate your Doc Martins, you want to find 4AD’s owner/producer Ivo Watts-Russell to help you out.

Popular music is often divided into broad categories – rap, rock, urban, country, alternative, and so on. And those classifications are often divided into further categories which then get sliced thinner and thinner, confusing the picture, until you’ve got seemingly thousands of categories that each hold maybe a couple of bands. Electronica regularly gets divided into house and techno and hardcore and ambient and jungle and drum ‘n’ bass and trance and so on until the distinctions are entirely meaningless. Of all the ridiculous names for these minute slices of sonic pie (twee? sadcore? stoner doom?), one of my favorites has to be a small movement that was briefly popular (in England, anyway) and is personified by the independent 4AD label, called shoegazing.

Shoegazing was initially named for the performing style of many of these bands, who would take the stage and then stand motionless during the set, refusing to make eye contact with the audience, and stare, as though transfixed, at the floor and play their instruments. More than just a lack of showmanship, shoegazing was about rejecting all that crass flash and lewd pyrotechnics that are often displayed on stage. Shoegazers turned their shyness into a political statement, showing that they were too world-weary and jaded to get worked up into a sweaty lather over anything – even if that anything was to get paid large sums of money to entertain thousands of fans.

But there was more to it than just a performing style. There was a sound associated with it, and nobody cultivated and captured that sound better than Ivo Watts-Russell. Probably the blueprint for the shoegazing sound was the band My Bloody Valentine, who painstakingly created gigantic monoliths of sound through the use of heavy reverb and multiple layering and treatments of electronic sound, in which all the instruments – voice included – smeared together into a dense, buzzing paste. But the band that did the most to refine that sound and inspire others with it was the seminal Cocteau Twins, the most successful of 4AD’s stable of shoegazers (and the worst concert my wife ever went to, lasting less than half-an-hour).

After starting off as a well-regarded post-punk label that had captured the early sounds of what was becoming the gothic movement, 4AD discovered reverb and drowned entire bands in watery waves of echoic sound and muddled murkiness that made them sound like they were playing at the far end of a really long marble hallway in the middle of the night with no lights on while slowly drowning in quicksand. In addition to giving the Goths a sound to listen to that fit their aesthetics (depressing dirges), 4AD also went quite a ways towards giving the scene a look as well. And much of that was thanks to their close relationship with 23 Envelope, a graphics company whose style was exemplified by designer Vaughn Oliver. Many of 4AD’s album covers were dark and cryptic, with fragments of sepia-toned photos blending together with hints of lace and incense. It is the perfect visual accompaniment to the mysterious, fragmented yet polished sound of the albums within, and fed the burgeoning Gothic scene with beautifully degraded imagery.

Pursuing his own filigreed muse, Ivo Watts-Russell assembled a supergroup of sorts (if a collection of obscure shoegazers could be called a supergroup) and recorded three albums under the This Mortal Coil moniker (title taken, of course, from Shakespeare’s description of life). Although most of the bands on 4AD were heavily influenced by Watts-Russell’s aesthetic, This Mortal Coil was his thesis statement, showing off all his techniques and influences. They are a peculiar batch of discs, alternating, as they do, between original instrumentals and extremely skewed covers of very obscure songs, all blended seamlessly together in a thick audio fog that swirls around provocatively. Some of the sounds are surprisingly harsh and abrasive, and some of the songs are a little too delicate and precious, but they are engaging albums nonetheless. Especially if you’re familiar with some of the original songs. It’s fascinating to hear how Ivo Watts-Russell takes complete ownership of the material he covers, converting it into the same delicate and arcane weave that his original material contains. In fact, if you didn’t know the originals, you’d be hard-pressed to figure out which songs he didn’t write. For me, that’s the mark of a good cover. Why do a cover and try to make it sound as close to the original as possible? That’s a tribute, and it’s a different discipline. A good cover should show something about both the original version of the song and the aesthetics of the people who covered it. And, on This Mortal Coil, Watts-Russell records some fantastic covers of everybody from Talking Heads to Big Star to Syd Barrett (the “crazy diamond” who formed Pink Floyd before he became England’s first acid casualty).

As intriguing as the songs are, I much prefer the instrumentals from these three albums. Singing has never really turned me on (which may be why I’m not particularly good at it – or perhaps it’s the other way around) and much of the singing on these discs is technically proficient, but preposterously precious. The Lacemaker is the lead-off track on the final This Mortal Coil collaboration (called Blood), and contains many of their sonic hallmarks, from deeply treated vocals to string quartets to decadently decaying washes of sound, all blended together in an almost arbitrary way. Since I could live just about forever without wading through the pained and pretentious vocals and because many of the instrumental pieces on the album are like this – flowing from one silky scene to another – I decided to build the ultimate This Mortal Coil disc by mixing all of the instrumentals together in one seamless 80-minute collage, which has now become my favorite album of theirs. Sorry, Ivo, but if I’m going to stare at my shoes, I don’t want anybody whining to me while I do it.