Written by: Dave Cantrell
Echoing, in deed if not word, his once (and almost certainly never again) future bandmate, who famously stated somewhere back in the misty post-punk decades that “If it’s me and your granny on bongos it’s still the Fall,” any project helmed by this founding Fall member, be it called Blue Orchids, Factory Star, the Super Reals, or even, sure (to a formative extent, anyway), the original Fall, is in essence a conduit existing primarily to funnel the work of the artist Martin Bramah out in to the world. While both self-evidenced in the lurching gleam of the man’s songcraft that, minus minor deviations, links this-named band to that, and more-than-clearly iterated in our most recent interview last year, Bramah has seemingly decided to lay any questions as to the breadth of his aesthetic consistency to rest by releasing, through upstart American imprint Tiny Global Productions, three complete full-lengths all on the same day (June 3rd, 2016). Arcing with electric restlessness across the man’s immediate post-Fall career to the recent past and of course the still-vibrant present, two are Blue Orchids albums – the entirely new The Once and Future Thing and the odds’n’sods-ish Awefull streamed exclusively at SEM a few weeks ago – and the third the legendary ‘lost’ solo album – and significant enigma – The Battle of Twisted Heel, seeing the light of a new day after its brief availability online over eight years ago. A healthy burst by anyone’s standards (even Robert Pollard, to my knowledge, hasn’t ever managed a single-day trifecta), it’s also a wholesomely welcome one. Filling in some crucial historic gaps of one of his – and my – generation’s most vital talents while simultaneously presenting a spanking brand new Blue Orchids album (by, it should be noted, a spanking brand new ensemble – see above for why that hardly matters) is an unheard-of feat we’re more than happy to hear.
Perhaps it’s something in the wider Manchester municipal water supply but, like his rapscallious former mate, there’s something staunchly imperturbable about the style and substance of the music Martin Bramah creates, a kind of wild mercury steadfastness that’s as boldly apparent on The Once and Future Thing as, well, anything I can think of in the artist’s catalog. The phrase ‘return to form’ gets thrown around with a lazy recklessness whenever one of our cherished 1st generation acts returns from the vinyl dead new disc in hand. But I will tell you right now that if you were ever a fan of Blue Orchids and yearned for new material then by all means acquire this record with due haste. Without the slightest blink of equivocation, with no qualification whatsoever, be assured that this album is at least as imperishably strong as Greatest Hit (or you choose) and no exaggeration. Why this is unsurprising is, quite simply, down to the fact that Bramah has never ceased in his pursuit. Therefore he’s hit the ground running here and the only possible surprise, I suppose, is the complete lack of fatigue in this particular set of post-punk legs.
While in terms of undiminished longevity, several fairly obvious corollaries will be oft-referenced in pieces about The Once and Future Thing – Wire, Swans, and yes the Fall – another case where the fierce yet often playful vision (if you will) of one man drives the legacy forward would appear more apt and that’s Robert Lloyd with the Nightingales. Just as that once Brummie-centric concern carroms along impervious to the whims of current fashion or the pull of nostalgia, so too Blue Orchids. Additionally, holding that the churning ‘rock quotient’ is equal, there’s a roughly indentifiable regional terroir to each band’s sound, the Birmingham contingent with a rust-edged post-industrial serrated aspect, the Manc-derived Orchids evincing a similarly gritty working class frisson but in their case fringed with a fair touch of English mysticism, which is to say that, of the two, it’s Blue Orchids that will tend toward a touch of the supernatural. It’s in their – which is to say his – blood.
Due that extra dimension, a track like “Feather From the Sun,” as pleasingly aggro as any on here, Bramah aiming at and hitting moments of pointed guitar lunacy between and even during Mescaleros-like passages evoking the spell of a worldwide frequency, something of a feverish bucolicism obtains. Same applies to the smithy hallucinogenics of “Iron Tree,” a pounding treatise of Celtic proportions that, along with the clamoringly robust postcard-from-the-past “Motorway,” also happens to most trigger aural memories of Bramah’s notorious past associations. Then there’s “Road to Perilous” that, even over Chris Dutton’s pretty much prototypical Strangler-y bassline, exudes a moors-exploring vibe that’s damn near lysergic which, one supposes, shouldn’t be too unexpected given the track title’s unambiguous nod to previous outfit Factory Star’s only LP (Enter Castle Perilous), itself a daring and eloquent trawl through the borderland where England’s ancient eldritch shadows overlap the housing estates and neo-lib architecture of modern-day Manchester. Even the otherwise summery strum of “Rosy Hours,” replete with a synth’s sylvan airs and a ghostly hanging angel vocal courtesy Ann Matthews, can’t escape a Shelleyesque mindset, both in mood and lyrics imbued with a sort of pre-Victorian transcendentalism. All that said, though, with Bramah’s literary spiritualist bona fides firmly established, let’s not lose sight of the fact that The Once and Future Thing is an instant relic of that undying – and apparently immortal – category of popular expression known as ‘the rock idiom.’ So regardless of how refreshing and necessary it is for many of us to hear on an LP released in 2016, it’s best to keep in mind that it’s not all vestiges and verdigris ’round here. No sir, these woods also echo with the visceral revels of pure music-making pleasure, or, as “August Rebels” would have it, “making mayhem on prime time.”
Insofar as that “August Rebels” is concerned, you suss that something might be slyly askew when you notice that neither ‘August’ nor ‘Rebels’ is the noun you might reflexively read them as but instead adjective followed by verb. Whether or not that makes any immediate sense, the track’s funkified irreverence, the thing rocking like the Pop Group gone all Kool & the Gang, should make it unshakably clear it’s the singer’s dry and giddily dark sense of humor at play here, a fact cemented by what may well be the funniest aside (“more blood, please“) I’ve ever heard in a pop context. Add to that the rousing banger “A Good Day to Live” that opens the album on a note of raspy, insouciant, tongue-in-cheek-but-genuine optimism (there’s Bramah’s inveterate sense of irony announced up top, then), the terraces-appealing “Whisky Burn” with its pub lurch and swaying bonhomie officiated by John Paul Moran’s winking fairground popsike organ and a set of drums (Chris Connolly) marching forward in a falling-down way, and the sinuous coiled and muscular “Groundhog Life” that, despite existing primarily as a knotted bed in which Bramah might lay a spoken-word string of allegorical mistidings (“a trifled fool with no sense of mirth” should give a sense), teems with restless life – a bassline snaking with lurking menace just below the surface, a chording piano lending Cave-like drama, the stinging meander of a lead tracing melody and memory, barren and electric – and we’re gifted here with what could at least be considered the ‘comeback album of the year’ but again the problem there, of course, is that Martin Bramah never exactly went away.
A singular if intriguing oddity made something of a hodgepodge by the subsequent fate of over half its songs, The Battle of Twisted Heel, seen in context of its original 2008 limited release, rumbles with a throaty grace that, in terms of stylistic logic, places it squarely between the seldom-heard Slum-Cavern-Jest! EP that loaned a couple tracks to this effort and which hewed toward a stripped-down, astringent anti-folk, and the Avalon-gone-sour mythologies of Factory Star, the jaded minstrel threads of which you sense being woven behind the scenes here. Incipient versions of six of that later band’s songs (“The Fall of Great Britain,” “Super Real,” “Stone Tumbling Stream,” Lucybel,” Black Comic Book” and “Strangely Lucid”) appear in relatively skeletal form if no less lethal. Stepping free, however, of all that history (as if that’s possible), Twisted Heel stands on its own as a forceful – if what at the time might have been an unexpected – document.
Because of his forever post-punk affiliations and the extent to which they might have obscured Bramah’s above-discussed leanings toward the parapets of the occult that hang over England’s medieval history, this record, to those that sought it out, may indeed have surprised. Perched sturdily between the leafy surrounds of a Pentangled English folk and the stylings of a wandering if ever keen-eyed troubadour, much of TBoTH (a couple exceptions flourish as the record plays out) is a primer for those that forget as they scurry across the internet that under the UK we know today lies a rich, rune-saturated past that echoes throughout the moors and craggy outcroppings and runs like hidden capillaries beneath the steel and asphalt of its every gleaming city. While not meant to edify, per se, Bramah’s work does seek to remind of just how inescapable this deep, strangely-brewed history is that hovers like a djin just beyond the scrim of his fellow countrymen’s busy lives. Rather than gloss past it with a nod of acknowledgement, the man’s pursuits, more here than anywhere, are rather steeped in it.
Thus the stark original take on “The Fall of Great Britain” is given a hill country frankness – the acoustic and clucking banjo close-mic’d left and right in ageless conversation, the lyrics allowed a plainspoken full fettle – “Coming Forth By Day”‘s message of Arcadian reverie gets hoisted upon the tender shoulders of Charlotte Bill’s flute and a bit of prancing mandolin, the statement of Thoreau-like autonomy “Stone Tumbling Stream” that would gain more of a, umm, tumbling momentum when resurrected for Enter Castle Perilous, here has something of a county faire busk feel to it, while “It’ll Be Night Soon,” beyond its British Rail sound effect opening, balances a hearty holy acoustic strum with the single brittle wend of an electric while between them Bramah offers the solace of a cosseting dark to a lonely friend. Even on Heel‘s most urban cut, a shredded, unvarnished early take on Perilous centerpiece “Black Comic Book,” its trawling deliberate pace and the intimacy of its mix can’t help but lend the impression of a dry gothic folk tradition given the scraped-raw electric treatment. Of the two selections harvested from Slum-Cavern-Jest!, the erstwhile Karen Dalton album title track”Green Rocky Road,” aside from single-handedly proving by its provenance alone where lay that EP’s heart, is both the pick of the two (by a hair over the unsettlingly spectral “Strangely Lucid” that would appear in more robust form on Factory Star 12″ New Sacral) and provides a compelling impetus to seek out said EP not to mention the entire Dalton catalog if you’ve not already done so. As for “Lucybel,” Bramah’s immortal addition to the canon of Christmas songs, I’ll leave you reference SEM’s review of its Factory Star version (on a split single with The Granite Shore), since this slightly more modest take could hardly budge the critical needle as indeed no rendition feasibly could since it is, inarguably, an enduring holiday classic.
Multi-faceted, mildly idiosyncratic and blessedly stuffed with all the charm those two qualifiers imply, The Battle of Twisted Heel, added to The Once and Future Thing, means that even if Awefull were as bad as the word its clever title has appropriated, we’d still be batting a respectable two out of three here. But hey, as this third bauble from the sun is a crucial, compacted distillation of the Blue Orchids phenomena as initially experienced back in the (yes) awe-inspiring half of the 80’s (first half if you have to ask), how’s it going to be anything but a dashingly handsome addition to anyone’s collection? Seeing as all but two tracks derive from what we might well consider the Blue Orchids über-text – their first two singles, 1980’s double A-side “The Flood”/”Disney Boys” and 1981’s organ-dripping “Work” backed by the frantic, witchy “The House That Faded Out,” and the 4-song 12″ EP Agents of Change from 1982 – that, while nice to have all sitting tidily on one disc don’t necessarily warrant further discussion (nor a rush to the ‘order now’ button for most of you I’d bet), the propelling curiosities here are those two previously unreleased tracks, both demos.
First is “The Unknown” from Bramah’s early interim project Thirst, formed with fellow Fall founder Una Baines (and Carrie Lawson) in 1987. A short-lived flash in a brilliant pan, Thirst had but one 12″ before disbanding and while it too is well worth hunting down, the difference between that “Unknown” and this one is a study in subtly striking contrasts. The ‘original’ actually being this demo, it’s notable that, though not drastically different, there is a lighter jazzier touch to it. The version in this form feels busier even as the final product boasts a significantly more dynamic production value. At the least, besides being a cracking tune, there’s always some intrigue in being provided a snapshot of a song’s development (sorry, yes, bit of a process nerd here). The other, “Sleepy Town,” originally the title track of a 12″ from 1985, tweaks one’s curiosity mostly due the crying ringing howl of Bramahesque electric that opens the track and reappears in prominent spots like a Manc-not-Yank Tom Verlaine apparition taking up temporary residence in the host guitarist, thereby bringing a kind of strychnine-flavored thrill to the loping funkiness that would remain all the way through to the pressing plant.
Ultimately, then, cool though it is to have this hat trick delivered to our virtual doorsteps all at once as if brought by some sort of latter post-punk [modified] Magi that has us looking for the guiding star that brought us such fortune (hint: it’s tucked away in “Lucybel”), the truest joy should be, and is, the vitality, verve, and songsmithery inherent in The Once and Future Thing. Though all three, as shown, are crucially worth your time and money, it’s having the mere fact of Martin Bramah’s continued ‘return’ transformed into the status of a quietly ecstatic event that should be celebrated, attended as it is not by hoopla but instead that universally gratifying experience of hearing a fully realized record from someone with Bramah’s legacy, a legacy that’s just now going through its most profound upgrade. Bravo.
