Talk Talk

(Originally published in Spring 2009)

I wouldn’t call myself a fan of post-rock. I don’t even really understand what the genre is about. Post-rock. What a term! To imply that rock is something linear, and that it has an end, and that that end has passed, that there has come a time to move beyond, post it, if you will. Ridiculous. The music which tends to merit the label evolved in the early 90s, mainly as a result of two albums that you’ve probably never heard of: Spiderland by Slint, and Laughing Stock by Talk Talk, both released in 1991. I can’t say I’m that familiar with Spiderland, though I’ve heard enough of it to be able to tell you that it sounds very little like Laughing Stock, which I do know something about. More bizarrely, I swear that Laughing Stock knows something about me.

I have been slowly retreating through Talk Talk’s discography. It’s probably the wrong way to do it, or at least the more perverse of the two directions one might take. There are several reasons for this. First of all, there’s the fact that, when it comes to discernable album-by-album evolution, few bands can compete with Talk Talk. To listen to a cut from their debut, 1982’s The Party’s Over, and then to hear something off of Laughing Stock, their masterful swan song, or even from Spirit of Eden, which came out only six years into their existence, one can hardly detect that these are works of the same band, though if anything gives it away it would have to be Mark Hollis’ mournfully idiosyncratic vocals.

What was their progression? I think a short list of the artists with whom Talk Talk have been associated will suffice: Roxy Music, Duran Duran, Steve Winwood, Miles Davis, Sigur Rós. Roxy Music inspired them; they drew endless comparisons to Duran Duran in their early days; Steve Winwood played on their third album, The Colour of Spring; Laughing Stock has been said to share a kinship with In a Silent Way, Miles Davis’ atmospheric masterpiece; Sigur Rós is one of their many “post-rock” disciples.

And yet, if you listen to any one album of theirs next to the one released immediately before or after it, there’s no question it’s the same band. Their progression is so elegant, unconscious even, like a sleeper slowly inching out of his sleeping bag, first just an arm, then a leg, until he awakens in the dark of night entirely uncovered. They’re the most organic, natural band I’ve ever encountered in my life.

I mean natural in as many senses as you could conceivably apply the word to music. One example: album art. They’re the sort of band whose album art effortlessly implies, even entails the sounds inside. The covers of their two masterpieces, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, feature surreally beautiful trees surrounded by white borders with the band and album names written in simple font. Spirit of Eden, which still retains much of song-structuring convention, has a willow-like tree with thin leaves and strong branches on which rest shells, sea creatures, and birds. It’s a bizarre, dreamlike image, but it’s still more ordinary than the artwork of Laughing Stock. In this case, the tree’s branches are bare and form a perfect circle. Here, the tree is filled only with birds, exotic and colorful, and the positions of the birds resemble the continents of the world. Thus, the tree is an organic globe, something like a natural, accidental incarnation of the earth itself.

But of course, there’s nothing at all natural about birds who happen to imitate the shape of the world’s land masses, let alone with a perfectly round tree. It seems to have intent; it is art. It is exactly the sort of thing that Laughing Stock itself is: art made of nature, or nature made of art. Listening to that album, I get the sense that I am hearing something that, like the tree on its cover, could have existed without human beings, just by chance, however unlikely. Somehow, this music could just be sifting through a forest, lilting over a desert, filling the voids of outer space. Certainly it would be an incredible thing to experience. Certainly I would be incredulous. And yet, I would not doubt my perception, I would not question the world because of this experience. I would merely count myself incredibly lucky to have heard nature at its most coherent, its most articulate, to have been at the right place at the right time.

That Talk Talk manage to harness this, to create this feeling, is almost as incredible as the music itself. But as unbelievable as it seems that humans could make an album this organically profound, it too remains plausible. Part of the reason for this is the fact that they clearly did not start out that way. As I implied before, listening to their first album, The Party’s Over, one would never believe that the same band could create music like the sort I’ve just described. I need only remind you of the comparison to Duran Duran to demonstrate my point. Their approach to Laughing Stock was gradual. Slowly Mark Hollis, Talk Talk’s frontman, was inhabited by this spirit of nature, or of nature with intent to be more precise.

Suddenly their fourth album’s title makes so much sense: Spirit of Eden. Eden—nature with intent. A garden created as paradise, something that potentially could have happened on its own yet seems to be watertight proof of the existence of some greater design. This “Spirit of Eden” is the lifeblood of Talk Talk. Listening to their last two albums, I can feel it coursing through the music just as surely as the speakers are emitting sound. It’s a powerful affirmation of the capabilities of humanity, as well as a powerful spiritual statement about the world in which we live. I am forced to ask myself, “Must there be something more to the world in order for this sort of harmony to exist seemingly on its own? Or is it possible for the world to really contain this beauty on its own, to every now and then pattern itself in just such a way as to overwhelm me so much that I question the very nature and origin of the universe?” Its fucking intense I can tell you.

Talk Talk’s lyrics reinforce their spiritual side. Mysticism is all over Spirit of Eden: the insistent, almost pleading declaration in “Eden” that, “Everyone needs someone to live by,” the cathartic then hushed mantra of “Wealth”: “Take my freedom for giving me a sacred love.” With their final album, the references only become more obvious, though the lyrics themselves grow more cryptic. The heart-wrenchingly beautiful “New Grass” includes the lines, “Seven sacraments to song/versed in Christ/should strength desert me/they’ll come/they come.”

I cannot deny that these lyrics come off stilted when I put them down here. Actually, I feel shame at having removed them from their music, their habitat if you will. Reading them here, naked on the page, is akin to going to the zoo. Sure you get a look at the animals, you get to see a giraffe or a tiger, but it doesn’t feel right, and you can’t say you’ve spent the day with nature by any stretch. It’s a mockery, a pale imitation of the true state of the world. These lyrics have no power on this paper, but when you hear Mark Hollis aching with them, delivering them like it’s the only thing he knows how to do, they are perfect.
To be honest, the words are inconsequential, and Hollis’ delivery only emphasizes this. Like I said, he aches with them. They drip out of him like sap out of a tree. His delivery is slow, but it’s proud. He quavers, but he is content to do so. All this emotion coupled with the uniqueness of his voice to begin with often renders the lyrics barely intelligible. The vocals, then, become more of an instrument in the conventional sense rather than a vehicle for the band’s “message.” The only other group I can think of that have a similar effect are My Bloody Valentine. Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that when I first heard Talk Talk, they sounded to me like My Bloody Valentine on valium. My Bloody Valium.

The funny thing is that, in theory, I don’t really like Mark Hollis’ voice. In their early stuff, he just sounds kind of croony. It took me a little while to get past it, but slowly, as Laughing Stock fully unveiled its genius to me, I came to understand that there is no other vocal that could work there, if only because no one else could feel that music as personally, as genuinely as the man whose vision created it.

Talk Talk broke up after they made Laughing Stock. Some of the other band members went and did other things, but Mark Hollis pretty much disappeared, with the exception of one solo album he released a few years later. I think I heard somewhere that he became a monk. If this is true, it’s even more appropriate than it is funny, and again it emphasizes the natural qualities of the band. They started at near tripe, pop in the most absurd 1980s sense of the word. From there they grew more sophisticated and ambient, more natural. By their third album, 1986’s The Colour of Spring, they were still very rooted in traditional pop and rock forms, but they had developed a unique aesthetic, and organic subtlety was saturating their music like sugar stirred slowly into tea. The Colour of Spring is 80s pop perfection. They were standing on the verge of tradition, of what music tended to sound like. With Spirit of Eden, they finally slipped off, and by Laughing Stock, they’d sunk to the bottom of the ocean, immersed themselves in their naturalistic beauty as much as possible. Where could they have gone from there? It was done.

Most music is like a painting, a beautiful but unmistakably artificial creation. Talk Talk is a photograph, a snapshot of the world as it is, as it was, as it always will be.

-John Russell