From NME, January 17, 1998

Hi-ELEGY!

Before we get to the heart of the matter: Mark Hollis used to be the singer in Talk Talk, a group who began their career as tie-tucked-into-shirts Duran imitators at the start of the '80s and ended it ten years later as the moodiest practitioners of avant-pop since Roxy Music.

Pop will remember them for a handful of classic singles, including the unimpeachably great 'Life's What You Make It', but an army of fans, hooked on the sort of intensity that makes Kevin Rowland look half-hearted, have dug in for the long haul. Their reward, a cool six years on, is an album that finds Mark Hollis armed only with an acoustic guitar, a bagful of free-jazz arrangements and a set of mood pieces that will have old fans striding through Elysian fields of delight and Aqua fans running screaming.

Let us not be shy: the mood throughout 'Mark Hollis' is as prickly and strangely foreboding as it ever was. Where once, it seems, there were the occasional shards of light in Mark's world, even on 1991's valedictory 'Laughing Stock' album, here he assumes the mantle of musical Luddite, shunning the illusory tricks of technology for a stripped-bare authenticity and a heart-rending self-absorption which allows him to have song titles like 'A Life (1895-1915)' without the merest thought for what non-fans may make of it.

Musically, an opening 'Colour Of Spring' boasts a twanging acoustic and huge orchestras of silence, while elsewhere we get the occasional midnight pulse of bass and sliver of harmonica (a positively epic 'The Daily Planet'), the odd tumble of jazz-club sleaziness ('The Gift') and Mark's ever-swelling voice, forever too intent on creating the necessary mood to ever afford more than the odd glimpse of a recognisable lyric.

So idiosyncratic is the combined effect that to liken the entire 47 minutes to anyone (or even a single genre) would be to do it a disservice, but in terms of mood; there are shades of the disembodied folk of John Martyn's 'Solid Air', the pop desolation of Radiohead's 'Fake Plastic Trees', and even the yearning spaciousness of Jeff Buckley's 'Grace', all enveloped in the sort of elegiac mood that quite clearly makes Mark a less than ideal candidate to organise the Millennium festivities.

Not so much a comeback album, then, after six years away, but a comedown album, free from the fleeting concerns of commerciality but built rather as a haunted symphony, as indefinable as time itself.

Be assured, then: this is strange and beautiful music. (8)

Paul Moody

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Last updated February 12, 1998