The Sound - Jeopardy
"The impact of a verse is enough to explode the debris that buries the soul."
Nicolas Gomez Davila
Love knows no defeat, even if it lives in a speck of shiny wounds, because its meaning is in any case a victory, often portentous, sometimes less so, but not able to lose.
In 1979 the record company Korova was born, it was in London and the first band to sign was Echo & The Bunnymen from Liverpool. Then one from Wimbledon, which had been active since before The Killing Moon's band, acting out its attempt to enter the music world under a different name.
The Sound.
By the end of the 1970s, the Sound was living a phase unfortunately convinced by a stolid approach, which did not allow for the dynamics of the debacle to be affirmed. Few channels of entry and the feeling of the beginning of disinterest in the surrounding that declared a loss of commitment at the beginning of the next decade. The music was not immune. But Borland's group had other priorities and distanced themselves. Nearly unique and well-blended qualities emerged with the stigmata of a clear-headed, if already bleeding, outlier.
The ripped soul that becomes screaming and at the same time subdued soars over every groove of the album. Streams of currents are made available and on display like flying ivy in hearts, where nails hold breath and the craggy content of thoughts in a state of siege. Beauty is also to be found in the complex eruption of a volcano that knows the method to attend with slowness and speed, in an enveloping dance of smoke and heat.
The grace of the writing envelops the disgracefulness of the state of the human being, here non-negotiable but made to become a weight to be balanced with necessary doses of instinct and balance.
Jeopardy is a graticule of wandering chiaroscuro, apnoea and momentum, like a continuous metamorphosis to embellish the fatigue and condensation of thoughts that become industrious through the musical channels set up to chop it all up. There is a spirit that is unrepentant, albeit suffering, and that dwells in the songs like an oblique and fearful mirror, for vessels of notes that await the courtesy of an attentive approach: every seizure has an armoured and closed place, but listening to the four's debut work gives one the chance to understand a precise trajectory, without digressions. What we find is a greyish magic that instructs and contemplates smoky zones, like sound parchments brilliantly stuck to the reality of these guys, earthquake-struck in affection and inducing our curiosity to a definitive embrace.
Touched on the apparent rocks of a sanguine Post-Punk, the puzzle instead reveals other majestic stylistic locations, a solid that fills the liquids of our days thirsty for mystery and beauty with the night dress.
The energy lavished does not smell fresh, nothing truly adolescent is recorded, as only adults are allowed to run away from themselves and lose themselves, to waste their time with dignity. But the Sound also distance themselves here: they pack songs like thorns with frothing at the mouth, unable to dry up because the gloomy existential poetry, once it turns into sound composition, meets infinity and eternity is a bitter fate to be consumed.
Dramatic, intense, hazy, dense with moral incidents (given by an acerbic but self-conscious writing, an aspect that both Punk and Post-Punk were incapable of creating), this debut establishes the starting point for the confusion of insiders, audiences and the music industry. Devoid of images, right at the beginning of the total turnaround of low cultural content in favour of disengagement and the nascent destructive engine of the look, the champions of diversity demonstrate not only an anachronistic will, but also that dose of indifference that made them invisible to most.
There was love to be experienced, the world to be discovered, the painting of notes like an adrenalin rush with a strong handbrake and unrebellious recklessness to guide them to Olympus, the dark one, because the visible one was stormed by groups that would bite their ankles just to be stationed there.
But Adrian, Michael, Graham and Bi were deaf, dumb, not inclined to bend the moral back of their need: they sought each other's sincerity and truth, receiving in return the exclusion 'from the upper echelons' of a bandwagon that proved that not even in Music does justice exist. The desperation, the tension of responsibility of a combo not wanting definitions but free hands, led to a highly acerbic, straightforward writing style, where sound came before the idea of any succession of chords and melodies: meaning had to be placed in something recognisable, and what better way than in the very name of the band?
The frenzy broken and exhausted by a change of rhythm, in the economy of a set list that is made up of eleven songs, means that it is not balance that balances the specific weight of the work, but rather a determinant intentional with whimsy and capacity for imposition. Everything flows in the crash of a unique feeling: the comparisons and references with which the four have often had to live. Uniqueness is within our auditory apparatuses, if our sensory and emotional ones have been cleared of the imbecility of comparison.
The political tensions, the places emptied of brushes to expose the will to live, the ambassadors of a time (that of the English capital) that had become cases of redundancy but lacking in quality and content, give this album the role of an often covered mirror. Others had to exhibit fictions, the Sound was interested in investigating, bringing out and highlighting abstruse human incapacities.
Jeopardy is, thus and without a doubt, a fierce unicum, in which the stunner kidnaps the heart and dismisses it, to make even dreams run out of breath. The lyrics, still tied to subjects that many wanted to talk about, show ferocity and a great irony, a fighting spirit but already contaminated by the feeling that it was worth little to manifest different and opposing ideas. The frantic and crazed people, the irresponsible children, the careerists, the power-hungry eagles had other aims. Only Joy Division was saved in that year, not the singer, who had fallen into despair.
All the other bands (The Police, The Cure, Bauhaus, Siouxsie & The Banshees) had other shores to reach.
Adrian wanted love. To give it.
Full stop.
They didn't come early with this stratospheric cluster of songs, nor late: there was simply no favourable time for their supremacy. Listening to it, the heart and legs fold in definitive despondency.
The eleven sparks are places inhabited by a frenzy that knows no moviola, let alone the people who walk and run in those swirling spaces, as the entire limit of thought is painted by raw, truthful, unbearable compositions, even when they are dragging. Everything hurts, the will to believe perishes, leaving this almost hour of music with the impression that one could very well confine it to repeated listening, without wishing for anything else. It is all here. Everything.
Creative flair explodes unabated, as if the computer of the future foresaw that uniqueness would only pass into the boundless sensibilities of Adrian and company.
Imagination supports a serious difficulty: not having a decent budget available (a few pounds and the hurry shouted in the face of the four), and then the talent, unmatched, that freezes and petrifies a world that did not expect this result. The content is not screaming or walking death, but the class of a maturity lived in a powerful way, never overbearing. There was no room for these missiles, these flowers of light that made Jeopardy the most disorienting moment since Closer.
Now we are plunged into the real beauty of the four Londoners' whirlwind: where not an ounce of its resounding epicness is allowed to be wasted.
Song by Song
Side A
1 - I Can't Escape Myself
"All my problems
Loom larger than life
I can't swallow
Another slice"
The guitar's fade-in is already an explosion of astonishment, a shy presence that exposes the instruments in gentle cohabitation, where Bi's synth needs only a single note to condense the skeleton of a song that does not want adrenalin sprays to dull, wound, involve and unsettle. The bass is obsessive, the guitar a scalpel, the drumming a melancholic and sombre stretching in beating the rational sledgehammer of the lyrics' protagonist
2 - Heartland
"A chemistry of commotion and style
You're thrown in
You've got to lose yourself before you find yourself
Back in exile'
The big bang comes in the second episode: Post-Punk radiation flirts with a much more historicised melody. The harmony disrupts the practice of the musical genre, and the keyboard enhances the bass that sounds like a postponed Joy Division escape, but with more seductive impact. Adrian's voice is a hare searching for food, finding just the right amount of oil in his vocal chords. It manifests the power of the guitar that can cross the melancholies of the sky in its powerful solo but with an impressive romantic vein
3 - Hour of Need
"I hate the quiet times
I need some company
I miss the noise of life
The silence deafens me".
A fierce contemplative demonstration deals the blow: intimate, elusive, with rhythm changes that accentuate its power, the song keeps any kind of comparison at bay. Everything reveals an intensity that seems to close the short guitar notes leaving space for the bass and drums, adopting the system of two voices to sing the verse. Redundant, sombre, it plays with mood and with a lyric where hatred is put on the school desk of a behaviour to be developed over time...
4 - Words Fail Me
"My need gnaws at me
My need claws at me
My need lurks inside
It won't be pacified'.
Where the Police had failed, the Sound win hands down: the vocals, reminiscent of John Foxx's Ultravox, are the lamppost that lights up the fast pace of a structure that breaks away from Post-Punk and leans towards well-structured Pop, to win thunderous applause with a few blasts of sax, then repeated by Adrian's sanguine guitar...
5 - Missiles
"Missiles cause damage
And make an eerie sound
Missiles leave carnage
Where there once was a town"
Can one cry out for peace in the face of the power of selfishness, of a social class that hijacks well-being and harmony? Yes, if you are Adrian Borland with grief and rage in your soul and uvula. Missiles is a heartfelt affront, which launches itself with an outrageously beautiful synth (the sound, you know, the sound!), to join the fear and despondency: when the refrain is reached, everything becomes fire, a fire that bends the eyes into generous tears, while dancing the dance of concession to the struggle. The cold war, which lived in those years the second half, shows how Adrian's young age did not mean disinterest. The whole song is a huge siren call to take a stand and embrace a desire in the form of a question.
Unattainable...
Side B
1 - Heyday
“Find yourself all at sea
Never thought they'd let you drown”
Il secondo lato è uno spazio pieno di strazio e appelli, di rifugi illuminati dall’intelligenza di quattro anime battagliere.
Inizia il lotto Heyday, diamante sotto pressione, in cui Adrian riesce a duellare con il basso, e dove la batteria e la tastiera si stringono nella velocità trascinante di una pietra che non rotola, bensì si frantuma e, quando arriva l’assolo, il glam rock strizza l'occhio…
2 - Jeopardy
"We are young
But are we strong?
We've held out
For so long"
Slyly, like a woman who slyly steals from shops full of glass bottles, the track is a jewel of semi-light, which protects, with its striding in the vicinity of fear. As if apnoea lives within a ray of nocturnal light, it highlights a musical theatricality that will never occur again, establishing its uniqueness
3 - Night Versus Day
"A switch is snapped, and the borderline
Between night and day is gone".
The music label took its name from Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. And it is precisely in these minutes that one can feel the edges of a violence that is hinted at, measured, guarded, not yet in need of crashing into the din. But you can feel the symptoms, in a delicate sonorous sparkle...
4 - Resistance
"Half-dead, but I hope it's not too late
To take some action and change my fate'
Here is the chase, the need to defend by attacking, with chameleon-like, sprightly verses and notes: the melody, lively and almost cheerful, is instead a punch in the stomach unleashed by the band to get rid of the competition with a softened but capable of wounding violence. Mancunians Magazine and Joy Division themselves could not have done better than this surface-to-air missile...
5 - Unwritten Law
"We could go anywhere
It would still be the same
A change of climate, a change of air
All the pressure would remain'
The lyrics are an impressive gash, an atomic bomb that adopts little noise to better deceive and surprise. Melancholic, daring, poignant, parsimonious, the song is also elegant in its willingness to respect the ignorant who will struggle to understand the genius of Adrian, here on the sceptre but without power, because his soul in this circumstance becomes sour and cautious
6 - Desire
"Keep in touch, keep in track
Of this thing called desire
There'll be times when we'll do
Anything for desire"
Let there be light to the No-Wave, let there be coldness. No, we are not inside Joy Division's Irwell Canal, but rather inside the Thames, ready to see life frozen, to see every escape from the cruelty of living repressed. Lugubrious and murderous, it carries nuclear material to deposit, through bitter and stunned lyrics, in the minutiae of a composition that seems to have come out of the Arctic Polar Circle. The four take their leave with an unexpected solution, to remove all doubt once and for all: we have listened to an album not worthy of being experienced without emotion and continuous reflection.
Add to this a dutiful consideration: without Jeopardy, the world would have been completely free to express emptiness
Adrian Borland - vocals, guitar, production
Bi Marshall - keyboard, production
Graham Green - bass guitar, production
Michael Dudley - drums, production
Nick Robbins - production
Label - Korova
Year - 1980
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
18th September 2023
https://spotify.link/H6Te4UQLbDb
