From Q, February, 1998

LAUGHING BOY

Talk Talk have shut up, but - hurrah! - they live on through their leader.

Standout tracks:
The Watershed
A Life (1895-1915)
The Daily Planet

Outstripping even The Stone Roses, it's been seven years since his last album, Talk Talk's fifth and final outing, Laughing Stock, and it marks the return of someone who has had more influence (Bark Psychosis, Spiritualized, anyone vaguely freeform) than sales.

This time around, he's using solely acoustic instruments which rules out the possibility of the sudden explosions of single note guitar noise that cropped up on the last album. But this isn't some hollow exercise in MTV Unplugged, rather it's a culmination for someone who is as fascinated by the spaces between the notes as much as the notes themselves. Sometimes jazz, sometimes pop and sometimes classical but never quite any of them, Mark Hollis the album could equally be filed next to The Modern Jazz Quartet, quieter Radiohead or Erik Satie.

Rather than doing the pop star thing of hanging out with supermodels and checking into rehab, he's spent the seven absent years re-learning composition. This, coupled with dissolving his songwriting partnership with Talk Talk's producer Tim Friese-Green and severing the loose ties which bound Talk Talk, has resulted in a radical change of method for Mark Hollis.

Gone are the Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock days of recording hundreds of hours of material and then searching for elusive magical musical moments to pare down to a CD-friendly size. Every note, recorded on a mere two microphones, was written by Hollis and various partners before he entered the studio.

His verge-of-tears voice, only rivalled in its appealing emoting by Tindersticks' Stuart Staples, remains unchanged while the music itself is more sparse than before. Rhythms are tapped out on cymbals, guitars gently caressed, woodwind stalks the background and the piano becomes an instrument of pure atmosphere. The closest he gets to rocking out is The Daily Planet, as a single harmonica threatens to burst the bubble of serenity.

This exploration of space is, paradoxically, an introverted experience. Understated and moody this is, perhaps predictably, the accompaniment to 3am and a bottle of red wine but there are many worse crimes.

***

Anthony Thornton

Like this? Try these...Erik Satie - Sept Tableaux Phoniques (Nato, 1986) / Talk Talk - Laughing Stock (Verve, 1991) / Tindersticks - Tindersticks (This Way Up, 1993)

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Last updated February 4, 1998