From Q, October, 1988

TALK TALK

Spirit Of Eden

EMI

 Talk Talk's fourth LP is the kind of record which encourages marketing men to commit suicide. Mark Hollis's outfit are nicely poised for major success this time around after spending the best part of a decade gradually building up a ground swell of support for their quirky, sophisticated pop. 1986's The Colour Of Spring had the obligatory hit single in the shape of Life's What You Make It and contrived to go gold on Britain while expanding their substantial European following. But two years later Mark Hollis has designed a record whose six songs flow into one another like one long mood piece without a hint of a single and with a peculiarly old world feel to the subdued orchestral mutterings that accompany his faltering high-pitched musings.

Spirit Of Eden strives for a totality of mood in the manner of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, or Neil Young's On The Beach. Like the Young LP, these six songs are largely downbeat and drowned in introspection. Fragments of keyboard lines or sudden bursts from a guitar or an oboe break through the contemplative calm that suffuses Hollis's brave new world while his vocals barely pick out the lyrics, occasional phrases drifting into earshot like the delayed echo of a cricket ball against bat somewhere in the hazy distance.

Apparently these songs touch on everything from paradise to heroin addiction yet all remain within the record's overall mood of calm won from the storm. If Spirit Of Eden often recalls the pastoral epics of the early 70's, it has a range, ambition and self-sufficiency that enables Hollis and co to step out of time and into their own. No hit singles then but a brave record that is not afraid to follow its own muse and damn the consequences.

**** (out of 5)

Mark Cooper



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