The Tear Garden
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In the exponentially-advancing field of electronic music, there are very, very few records released that don't sound dated within a year or two. Take Prodigy's groundbreaking bigbeat manifesto, The Fat of the Land, for example: "Firestarter" and "Smack My Bitch Up" are still great songs--hell, the entire album is great!--but they sound almost primitive these days, repetitive and rather dull, their once-keen edge blunted by overplaying and the fatiguing efforts of a hundred-thousand imitators. Anyone listening to them will almost certainly lean back and sigh as they reminisce about flailing about to "Breathe" for the first time waaaaaaaayyyyyy back in 1997. Songs that once sounded like The Future of Music today sound like historical artifacts--still relevant, of course (great music never dies), but relevant in the same way that famous paintings or sculpture in an art museum are: as examples which others have done in the past, encouraging new artists to go further. Rare indeed are those albums which even twenty years after their release still sound like artifacts from the future. Gary Numan's Replicas and The Pleasure Principle are great examples of music that still has a futuristic edge to it, even though both albums came out before most of the people reading this blog were probably even born. There are many, many others--Aphex Twin's seminal IDM and ambient works, for instance--but one that is all too frequently overlooked is The Tear Garden's masterful 1987 album, Tired Eyes Slowly Burning.
The Tear Garden began as a collaboration between cEvin Key from legendary industrial pioneers Skinny Puppy and Edward Ka-Spell from the Amsterdam-based psychedelic band The Legendary Pink Dots. Over the years, the Tear Garden would go on to release several more albums, but as more and more members of the Pink Dots took part in the recording, those later records--such as 1992's The Last Man to Fly and 1996's To Be An Angel Blind, The Crippled Soul Divide--are prettymuch just LPD albums featuring cEvin Key on keyboards. Only Tired Eyes Slowly Burning is representative of a truly unique marriage of cEvin Key's multilayered electronics and Ka-Spell's eerie lyrics, and after two decades the album still sounds as fresh and as weird today as it did when it was first released in the waning years of the '80s.
Many of the songs on the album feature Key's eccentric percussion and bizarre synth arrangements, stitched together from electronic basslines, loops, and shredded radio samples, providing a truly psychedelic (in the most literal sense of providing "perception of aspects of one's mind previously unknown...by the creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ostensibly ordinary fetter" [Wikipedia]) bed for Ka-Spell's weird, warbling voice. The album opener, "Deja Vu," sounds like a gentler, more melodic, but no less strange Skinny Puppy track with its powerful beat and echoey synths. But instead of Nivek Ogre's psychotic growl, Ka-Spell's voice floats through the track like a whisper through a gloomy fog. This song is a perfect example of sound reflecting lyrical content. As Ka-Spell sings, "It was a cold November evening / and I should have worn a coat / I shivered, waiting for the ferry boat," the chilly synths and atmospherics create an ambience of a miserable London evening with a murky fog rising like mustard gas from the turgid Thames. "Room With A View" takes the listener into a confined, claustrophobic space with its heavily-compressed beat and Ka-Spell's effected, mutated delivery of the song's creepy, voyeuristic hook: "I see I see from my room / I see from my room with a view."
The third track, "Coma," is one of the albums true highlights, though. With its gigantic, if distant beat and swirly synths, the song conjures images of hazy dreams seeping like blood through the cottony isolation of a coma--which, again as in "Deja Vu," reflects in sound the meaning of Ka-Spell's lyrics. The power of this record lies in the uncanny affinity between Ka-Spell's words and Key's music, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the album's masterpiece, "You and Me and Rainbows."
Many artists have tried to tell stories with epic, narrative songs. Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" and Rush's "2112" are excellent examples. But, whereas this kind of narrative songwriting is fairly common in progressive rock, country, and folk, it's absolutely unheard of in industrial music, a genre that aims for either punishing soundscapes or percussive dancefloor assaults. "You and Me and Rainbows," however, is a flawless combination of industrial elements and storytelling, opening with an ominous synth overture stitching together a repeating musical theme with scathing auiosculpture built from all manner of rusted, shattered sounds, which bleeds away into a pretty, simple melody that introduces Ka-Spell's lyrics about a failing addict named Jane and the suitor who is willingly following her into oblivion. Key's martial drumming leads up to the tragic chorus: "Loaded guns attract / we know the rules / we don't react / we wait in hope / we don't expect / just you and me and rainbows." A better definition of the junkie's imploding life I've never seen before or since in music." This section collapses in cacophony to introduce the next movement, a chugging, grinding industrial march rather reminiscent of Pink Floyd's "The Trial," which brings in Skinny Puppy frontman Nivek Ogre's bloody-tongued, chaotic contribution depicting in livid sound the torment of junk-sickness (which both Key and Ogre knew from firsthand experience). As this section collapses abruptly like a cow poleaxed in a slaughteryard, a lovely ambient section built of lush synths and radio samples gives the listener's ear a moment of refreshment after the mutilating horror of Ogre's section...but this section is deceptively calm, for soon nightmarish screams and shrieks begin to plead "Noooooo!" in the echoey depths of the mix, sounding like damned souls crying out for any kind of merciful release from their lives. The next section is a simple synthpop recasting of the first movement with Ka-Spell continuing the narrative with surrealistic lyrics that still touch on the harsh reality of addiction as Key's rumbling percussion pounds like a headache to the rear of the stage. There is almost a promise of release in this section...which dies into a mournful acoustic guitar solo over which Ka-Spell's repetition of the chorus, "Loaded guns attract, etc." comes like an exhausted eulogy. The final movement of the song is a genuinely creepy industrial jam session constructed almost entirely of strange radio samples that sound like the distant chatter of life in some abandoned part of town. At 16:46 in length, "You and Me and Rainbows" is a truly major effort that works for just the same reason that "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "2112" do: namely, it tells a story in several distinct, but related, chunks. Even at almost 17 minutes long, it's not, and never can be, a tedious experience.
After something as monumental as "You and Me and Rainbows," it's only natural that the remainder of the album doesn't sound quite as good. "Oo Ee Oo" is an interesting, if rather shapeless, ambient track. "The Center Bullet" is an old Skinny Puppy instrumental (originally found as one of the final two unmarked tracks on Bites) over which Ka-Spell has dubbed some lyrics. Quite frankly, though Ka-Spell's lyrics are interesting and certainly do complement the song adequately, "The Center Bullet" is much better as an instrumental, as the vocals tend to cover up some of the original song's nifty little subtleties of sampling and orchestration. "Ophelia" is a fast-paced, almost frenetic dance track which also sounds like a Skinny Puppy outtake with Ka-Spell's vocals added later--but it's still a welcome change of pace after the leisurely pace of the previous two tracks, though it does tail off into a nicely-layered ambient postlude. Finally, "Tear Garden" and "My Thorny Thorny Crown" end the album with two simple, stripped-down songs that, unfortunately, are rather forgettable, as though Key and Ka-Spell had run out of steam by this point--and after producing something like "You and Me and Rainbows," it's easy to understand why.
Nonetheless, even though the album ends on a slightly flat note,
everything about it--from the lyrics to the sampling to the synths still sounds like music from the same dreary, rusted future inhabited by Ridley Scott's Blade Runner or Alien.
Perhaps it's because this album is so little-known that its sound has
not been copied by and thereby dated by imitators. Perhaps it truly is a vision of a strange, cyberpunk future. This album is a must have for aficionados of timeless music or prognosticators who want to look into the future's bloodshot, burning eyes.
Links:
myspace.com/teargardenband
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