James - Be Opened By The Wonderful
The sky of a thought is often made of metastases, of arthritis, of fatigues that cling to the rays to glide to earth.
When it happens above the one in Manchester, the chest swells with shivers: the city of the Smiths welcomed those who had been born before them, those James who opened the dances at the Haçienda on a rainy day in 1982. The following year they debuted with Simone, the first medieval smile of the musical capital of the north, to happily conquer anonymity, surrendered as supporters of Morrissey's band, only to return to the bench where the lights embrace, mute, with their feathers closed.
The nine members decide to write a new episode in their career: there is no room for nostalgia or commercial actions such as a Greatest Hits to fall into this sterile game. Then it happens that the memory of an unrecorded evening conquers space, generating the idea of entrusting their careers to the hands of that conductor who in 2011 had impressed, fascinated, trained the hearts by making James feel in a long dress, as if the theatre were allowing them to attend a play in which they themselves ended up on stage, doing nothing.... James have always been synonymous with magic, with small tremors in the neuralgic areas of the chest, where night and darkness are not relatives or housemates, but souls on a journey.
The album is actually the precise gesture of a fan who has built his reputation over the years as one of the most skilful conductors. A truly Mancunian, he involved the large group in integrating desires, planning and playing without a flag inside a recording studio for four intense days. Joe Duddell chose the songs, he watered without taking away the roots of those sound squirrels that have won the respect of the listener, right from the start. This is where the first miraculous phase manifests itself, the first chalice to be raised: do not spoil, do not sully, do not take away the sacredness. Good: not only the orchestra but also a choir, made up of shivers without chains, free to enter into the enlightened and illuminating words of Tim in order to walk above the clouds. The band consists of eight musicians, plus Booth on vocals. Many of them multi-instrumentalists, with a deep knowledge of classical and baroque music, especially Saul Davies, who, having arrived in 1989 as a guitarist, quickly revealed himself to be an excellent violinist. And of violins these songs have not only the sound, but more than anything else the elegance that makes harmony and melody two enchantments within kissing distance. The xylophone, the cello, the trumpet, the timpani, the accordion, a multicoloured bandwagon, ready to move to the crossroads to park their quality and wait for the right reflexes to rise again. Be Opened By The Wonderful is a bundle of twenty benches tilted towards sweetness, emotion, the orgasm of dopamine-distributing cries, conceived and developed to keep what happens at their concerts going: whipping, stroking, changing the songs all the time. That's it: a large enclosed space in a studio so that only the emotions, the artistic needs can fly out, in the carillon of pleasure seeking the right sound. James range through the sampler of talent, enthusiastically renting out their catalogue to the master and letting performance anxieties take a back seat. Once the set list was decided upon, everything calcified, with the imprints of mastery letting us know that the band known for being folk, folk-rock, indie, alternative, electronic, could solidify it all by diving into the aristocratic movements typical of classical music.
Some compositions retained their framework, others saw, through precise and showy arrangements (some joyful, others with the salt of tears in free fall), proudly take the road of loving effusion: all Mancunians' songs are angels with a single feeling...
War, mass discontent, death, constant striving, monarchy, remained intact, but with the enormous capacity to be better understood. It may be the dilation, the decrease in rhythm), the little presence of drumming (but when present, David Baynton Power is, as usual, outstanding ), the willingness to mix with world music as well. The fact is that, while listening to these spiritual guides, nostalgia ceases to make any claim whatsoever. Like a strange, peculiar birth, in which one knows the face and has already decided on the name of the unborn child, but with the story still to be written, it does not even seem to have incorporated them into our feeling and our need. One suffers a great deal in certain episodes and smiles even more in others, when every voice, every instrument, every word, every sound launches itself towards positivity, the only missing sky in this existence of ours. It is not a pop record, it is not an outing where commitment is absent: BOBTW is the sponge that swells the chest to release mineral water, full of proteins, vitamins and substances that dissolve in the ceiling of our understanding. In the saturation of inconclusive music, of great aligned flaws, of extravagances without content, listening to this complex work does not make it any easier for those seeking abstention. Exactly the opposite. The Bluesprint Studios in Manchester allowed the tracks to head inside themselves, among complacent vipers invited to leave those places immediately: with the usual refined elegance, the notes found their dimension, spread out, excited, realised, dragging the oxygen towards an unusual happy hour. The piano, an ironic and fundamental instrument, played by Mark, was flanked by that of the orchestra, for a repetition of butterfly flights, where the sweetest expressions matched the most ungainly ones of a guitar or bass. One track, recorded to be part of the next album, found its place as its electronic nature had no distance from the others, in a furious dance of joy with the stars in celebration. Tim has mellowed his human reception even more, giving his singing a way of presenting itself as a schoolboy in an apron, dirty with life, with games in his uvula, riots by assumptions that have managed to twist the listener's stomach. England is safe now, its path breathes a sigh of relief, for no band has the sense of modernity chained to methodologies stretching back to the 1920s like James. History does not trust the present, we know that, but in this record everything seems to separate itself from conventional and conservative practices. It is badly and too often thought that experimentation is an affair of modernity, of the present day. The quotas, the specifications, the ramifications that one touches with one's hand as one listens confirm Brian Eno's words: no one anticipates reality like the band born in 1982. Better even than itself, because it continues to surprise itself first. A waltz, a tango, a sensual dance seems to register residence by declaring allegiance. It is enough.
The slow strings lighten the anxieties and condense them towards exercises that the birds are aware of. Everything shifts, allowing the repetitiveness of the guitars to tighten up, to remove masks. Watery flights that make infant dreams already capable of a language and the consequential message: not only does Tim step on the toes of human history, so do the orchestra and the band, as each song has a direction, a task that arouses curiosity and creates confidence, resulting in a fearless overture of thoughts. Each sound fragment goes beyond the task of creating a showcase to display one's work, as there is a destiny to be assigned, a meaning. The oddities, the difficult moments, the misunderstandings (of which human affairs abound on a daily basis), also come forward here, generating a cloud of yellowish dust, which cheers and fortifies. The old songwriting has been put under pressure, besieged, but always with the cuteness that distinguishes them, for new impulses capable of generating amazement under the sky. The orchestra confirms the belly pop genius of many sound butterflies, sedates them, stuns them, pinches them and then lunches them together. If we take the band's two best-known songs as examples (we will see which ones later), we realise the courage, the absolute discipline of carrying within them a multifaceted identity, in which nothing is hasty or inconclusive. The obscurity of songs that inexplicably did not find a place on this album uncorks a bottle of champagne: cleaned up, connected to the magic of classical music's attitude, they do not even seem related. The work of the choir (above all the celestial Why So Close), filled Tim's voice with new rainbows, enriching the analytical geometries of the lyrics with additional support. Touching what one has memorised, loved, believed in, grown up with resembles a crime, a wrongdoing. Instead, the miracle is exaltation, measured, whispered, without shrieking, with that lightness from which they absolutely cannot separate themselves.
Now it is time to cross these clouds, the feathers, and feel the heart as a muscle capable of migrating to the joy of nameless places, but with the knowledge that the story of these compositions has been able to transcend, to cross over, to separate, to make its core a melodic laughter…
Song by Song
1 Sometimes
From the album Laid
The most frequently sung song in the pubs of northern England immediately demonstrates a willingness to strip away flesh and pulp and keep the skeleton: it is up to the voice and strings to determine the depth of a song that is an invocation to pay attention to the events in the sky and at the same time to the truth that establishes its perimeter in the eyes, where the soul perceives the value of people. When the piano in the second part enters, everything seems to settle into a secret kiss, until the moment when the explosion of the chorus raises the chills, making one lose strength, in the swamp of restless tears...
2 Love Make A Fool
New Single
The new track, excluded from the forthcoming work, is a slowed down, civilised techno machine gunshot, released on a Monday night for dancing alone. The carpet, the obsessive handclapping, Tim's vocals like the refined groan of a dulled orgasm, allow us to appreciate the vitality of the band, which retains the style, but gives itself permission to experiment again.
3 We're Gonna Miss You
From the album Millionaire
Taken from from the penultimate album with Brian Eno's production, WGMY reveals its Eighties nature (guitar in the odour of The Police), but with that lightness that gives the sound system the chance to benefit from the cadenced violins, the tuba, the simplicity of a four-quarter drum that seems to be a stick swimming smoothly in the sea of this delicate extension of the lack of affection. The final chorus, repeated, without instruments, enters as hard as a halfback tackle: the song must be freed of all misunderstandings, and it is essential to end it in full melodic explosion. A diamond it already was, now it has taken on even more light...
4 Tomorrow
From the album Wah Wah
For the old scribe, masterpieces are few, often useless, in the welter of ever less recognisable beauty. But Tomorrow.
Invigorated without increasing its watts, found the crevice where to insert an approach that verges on perfection, this version is a tear in the eye as it awaits its execution, its last breath. James kisses it, gives it a warm peck on the cheek and launches it straight into pop verticality, with the care to keep its sacredness preserved... Chloe's backing on vocals is a feather that intoxicates the lungs of Tim's trembling timbre. If there is a song to say to life 'I won't leave you', this is it...
5 The Lake
B-side of the single Laid
The b-side of the single Laid is by far the most brilliant, touching, thrifty, sweet moment of this album. Everything turns to ice with arteries full of dreams as the orchestra's storm of thunder-driven strings seem to measure the moon's patience. As if the 1950s were compressed into a song, everything goes further back, further away, with the ability of the arrangements to make us feel the waters of the Mississippi. Thunderous, slow, tepid, a gluey thrill will enter your curtains...
6 She's A Star
From the album Whiplash
Joe Duddell sensed back in 2011 that it was possible to combine the song's sweetness with the drama of a misunderstanding: the lyrics are a trap, and the conductor understood that. A different pathos has to be given, to remove the somewhat rough patina of the original version and colour its walls with chills and fears. The cello hides, bends its back, leaves room for the violins, but then, slyly, arrives and decrees the apotheosis, leading the story's couple to flee into a music that seems to create the same effect (though it is not) as Fado, with the sadness that does not pull its nails away from happiness…
7 Lookaway
From the mini album The Morning After
A few electronic diamonds open the dance of awareness: slowly the song arrives at the stoplight, gaining courage, first with small electric guitar cues, then managing to pierce any resistance with vehemence. And the pop soul caresses 1970s folk, with a guitar arpeggio that is swallowed up by ravenous yet sensual strings
8 Sit Down
Single from 1989
The manifesto of empathy, of communion, of sharing, of faith hanging on insecurity, knows a different spirituality, changing the approach, refusing the repetition of one miracle to create another, all new, all so ancient... Sit Down here is a rubber band on Tim's warm syllables, a curbed waltz, a legal theft towards the melodies of the smoky Manchester clubs of the 1950s, where every song was a poem full of blood. With the rhythm section removed, it all sounds like a 1400s fresco with the absolute cunning of being able to overtake time…
9 Alaskan Pipeline
From the album Please To Meet You
What weapons does the beauty of timeless enchantment use? Those at the disposal of the awe-inspiring vapours coming out of a revisited ballad, brought to the ER, where the Doctor of melody operated in the channels of one of the most touching performances ever. James overdo it here: they pilot the mud-filled sludge eager for a bath inside this miracle, laying it down with xylophone drops, a trumpet embrace and Chloe's vocal, as the last razor's edge to make poignancy the sweetest of defeats...
10 Someone's Got It For Me
From the album Millionaire
The victims who sing of suffering are all pressed together in this modern funeral march, in which there is no lack of brushstrokes of thunderous colours ('To be born again', in the refrain), but the epidermis plunges in a plunge into the pain that here is accentuated first by the toxin-filled violins, then by the impact (again in the refrain) of the distorted guitar and the drums that seem to make everything die even more, until Tim in the finale raises his singing beyond the miracle, which not even the song can accomplish, however, surely, his is the movement of a soul that has been able to incline its uvula towards the earthly zone of perfection... Like a ball that deflates with dignity, so does the song in its fade-out...
11 - Hey Ma
From the album Hey Ma
Mistakenly referred to as the interpretation of 9/11 (also, but not only), Hey Ma, besides being the title of an unfortunate album because it did not get the reception it deserved, is also the title of an impressive intellectual vector, with its polite rock nature, and in this case the orchestra had less need to alter the original version. Slow, without a drop of sweat, it manages to make you dance towards the end, like a bubble playing with the grim reality, that stage of unconscionable violence, which Tim tries to educate to dissolution...
12 Hello
From the album Millionaire
At last many can appreciate the magic of that fairy called Chloe. The perfume comes out of her mouth, with the gills of the orchestra working almost in the background, in a whisper, as the end of human existence is greeted with extreme grace and respect, in the din of a waning dream first, dying later. So does the music, in its jerks, but not bothering the text, remaining in the background to bear witness to another jewel...
13 Beautiful Beaches
From the album All The Colours Of You
Having eliminated the electronics (the only song on their wonderful album two years ago), the song picks up the flames that threatened to burn down the singer's house, only to extinguish them with a propensity for slowness that benefits everything, in a spiral that certainly knows the mode of the Parisian streets of the 19th century. Princely, warm, it exerts a precise will to give the text the sceptre, without disdaining a melodic approach that eventually bewitches...
14 Why So Close
From the album Stutter
Perhaps for many less convincing than the original (from their 1988 second work), it certainly has the ability to filter the nature of the folk music to deliver harmonious tracks in an a cappella mode, like a challenge between Tim and the choir. A pacifist song, anomalous in both lyric and musical mode, it finds its way by making the old medieval nature its own and brings it to the feet of heaven in the resounding finale…
15 Medieval
From the album Strip-Mine
The only survivors from that period are Tim and Jim, the bass player. The musical zones of the time were firmly in the folk lane, old-fashioned, with martial metrics, allowing the drumming to manifest strength and hold a firm pulse. Through it all, the singing sounds like the heralding of the victory of peace...
16 Hymn From A Village
From the James II single
The first James song to be written.
Manchester is a cursed treasure chest: how many enchanting secrets lie in the chambers of selfish listening... This is no exception: a carnival, a harlequin descending into the notes to bring the life of a village in the 1500s into view. A dance, a revelry, a celebration, and the tribute to the preservation of positivity...
17 Say Something
From the album Wah Wah
Dialogue as a vital beat, the proportion of values leaving home. James decide to take away the impetus, to rely on the subtle sting of the orchestra and thus see the magnetic trend of a track that finds itself within the hourglass, whose component is not salt but love.... And the final guitar is the sweetest of handshakes...
18 Top Of The World
From the album Gold Mother
Remember. One of their albums ended with this muted firework, the shampoo to melt the grease of a vertigo, to reach the top of the world with obstinacy and conviction.
Well: almost everything preserved, small shifts, small torches to illuminate, like a polite breath, the brilliance of a timeless text. The flavour finds its blanket, the strings knead the rhythm and it swings ...
19 Movin On
From the album La Petite Mort
"Leave a little light on," sings Tim, at the moment when, in the lyrics, a breath knows a first pause, then a second, then the elegant exit, where the silence blends with the silent tears of the singer who decides to write the sweetest song about the handover, between the breath and its absence... He and Chloe stroll between the words, while the psychedelic guitar sounds like a choked cry, and the violins, for their part, seem to want to hasten the moment of the passing. Then Andy, the human being whose mouth inflates the air with magic, blows into his feather-filled trumpet THANK YOU MY MOTHER, and plunges us into the least corrupt cry ever. If perfection has a light that fades softly it is among these notes...
20 Laid
From the album Laid
'A disease without a cure': if that were the case we would all be out of breath by now. Instead, James surprise again by finding it: a gem that polishes the fear and makes one return home, to continue every disaster with the relief of a faith that dwells in the soggy soul of a lyric that, dropped in the warm notes of the acoustic guitar and a resounding cello, finds the place to suggest a story where the psyche seems like a scare in the mad lane of the wind. Insecurity ("Ah, you think you're so pretty") does not invalidate, does not harm the hidden enthusiasm of a man who still wants to caress the skin of his beloved. The band, the orchestra, tune in to the stave of chance at any cost and everything is filled with emotion, and, as the falsetto comes in to stun us, it becomes the perfect way to end the listening to a miracle that can be repeated whenever the love of beauty finds itself in reserve.
There is a delivery coming: leave the door of your heart open, because this album will take care of it...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
11th June 2023
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