I have two records sitting at the base of my stereo at the moment, both purchased last week. One is the Feelies’ new album Here Before, which I have been giving a severe flogging. The other is a lovely, near-mint original American pressing of Lou Reed’s Berlin, which so far I have been too scared to play.
Here Before is the first Feelies record for close to 20 years, and it’s as though they’ve never been away. There’s no great advance on the last three albums that the band recorded in the late ’80s and early ’90s, all of which are more relaxed, pastoral affairs than the band’s brilliant but twitchy 1980 debut, Crazy Rhythms. (That record opened with a song called The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness, which was a pretty apt description of the four of them, and the music they made together.)
Looking around for some information about Here Before, I came across this review, and I was struck by the following quote by writer Jordan Cronk, which sums up the record and my feelings towards it perfectly: “Here Before could have come out in 1987 or 2027 and my feelings about it would be more or less the same: this is a good album with a lot of easy-going songs that sound pretty much the same.”
I love this. Rock critics are like peacocks at the best of times, so it’s refreshing to read a review that eschews preening and instead gets right to the nub of things in a plain manner. He’s right: Here Before is a very easy listen, and many of the songs do sound, frankly, interchangeable. They do, however, consistently tingle the nerve endings in a pleasing manner. But when did I start becoming so satisfied with that?
Lou Reed is one of the Feelies’ obvious heroes – many of their songs recall the more mellow moments of the Velvet Underground, such as Some Kinda Love, or when they’re in a more energetic mood What Goes On (which they’ve covered).
I suspect, though, they never spent much time with Berlin, which is quite possibly the most depressing album ever made. It’s even more depressing than Joy Division’s awesomely bleak Closer, a reissue of which I also bought recently. Closer is an incredibly moving, magisterial piece of work, but it’s in no danger of being overplayed, because I never fail to end up feeling worse after listening to it. (As opposed to, say, the Ramones, who always leave me feeling better, regardless of how up or down I’m feeling on any given day.)
Berlin, though, leaves Closer for dead. It hits its peak of emotional devastation on The Kids, in which authorities are sent to remove the children of their speed-freak mother Caroline, the album’s central character. The song plays out – for several, awful minutes – to what sounds like a live recording of their screams and wails: “Mommy!” It’s so primal and genuinely upsetting that, on hearing this song playing in a record store a while back, I actually had to flee.
So, anyway, it’s been sitting in front of my stereo, daring me to play it. I will get around to it, perhaps after Christmas, but before the New Year. Who would want to kick off 2012 in such a fashion? Um, I probably won’t play it while my fiancée is around, either.
And after I’ve played it, it will be filed where it belongs, right after Transformer, Reed’s peppy, bitchy, completely wonderful take on New York’s ’70s drag scene. I’ll probably play that record, which is one of my favourites, another 20 times or more before returning to Berlin.
About eight years ago, I read Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs. I hated it. I hated its smug, tossed-off nature; the conceit that 31 examples of Nick Hornby’s self-absorption made for a meaningful exercise in criticism. But most of all, I hated it for an essay comparing Suicide’s Frankie Teardrop to Teenage Fanclub’s Ain’t That Enough.
In Hornby’s view, rock critics are a pretty sheltered lot. It is, he points out, a young person’s game, and young people tend not to have had a lot of life experience. Fancying themselves as romantic poets, they’re drawn to the dark side, and thus prone to over-excitement when art is calculated to shock and awe, as Frankie Teardrop (and Berlin) undoubtedly is.
I might have accepted this if Hornby had been honest or at least self-deprecating enough to have included a younger version of himself in this monstrous over-generalisation. Instead he proclaimed to need no convincing that life could be scary. He was 44; his son had been diagnosed with autism; his friends were starting to die; and he never knew when a terrorist might invade his own home and blow up his whole family.
“It is important that we are occasionally, perhaps even frequently, depressed by books, challenged by films, shocked by paintings, maybe even disturbed by music,” he writes in conclusion. “But do they have to do these things all the time? Can’t we let them console, uplift, inspire, move, cheer? Please? Just every now and then, when we’ve had a really shitty day? I need somewhere to run to, now more than ever, and songs like Ain’t That Enough is where I run.”
I mean, please, my 32-year-old self thought. Cry me a river, why don’t you, or just have a good hot cup of HTFU.
Now I’m 40. I have a mother with Alzheimer’s Disease. But also (and this is perhaps more important) I’m engaged, in love, my heart is completely full; it’s no longer nine parts water, one part sand. And Berlin’s still sitting there, unplayed. I’m starting to understand how Hornby felt.