News From Babel - Work Resumed On The Tower

Oh, the wonders of the Internet. After once again watching spoonerstreet's brilliant mini-doc about the lovably awful Complete I decided to check Wikipedia and see if somehow these musical clowns had a page. On the "Complete" disambiguation page I see "Complete (album) by News From Babel" and immediately captivated by the band's name, I click it. Initial readover isn't compelling, compilation of some English group's only two albums. But when I read about the band themselves, I'm almost immediately enthralled.

A studio group consisting of members from avant-garde rock groups Henry Cow and Art Bears, News From Babel was a genre-defying experiment with only three consistent members (woodwind player Lindsay Cooper, drummer Chris Cutler and harpist Zeena Parkins) that recorded two albums with several guest musicians from 1983 to 1986. With intellectual if strange lyrics and an incredibly varied musical style, they didn't seem to get much notice back in the day and from what I can gather are still considered quite the acquired taste, which is something I very much like. I immediately set out to grab Work Resumed on the Tower (which also gets my vote for quite possibly the best album title ever) based solely on having heard a single song.

Everything about this track stands out to me as oddly brilliant. The hypnotic intro almost seems like a low-key trip-hop loop with its mellow horns and clattering, processed drumming. The vocals kick in and change the song's mood entirely, harmonizing over a simple bit of harp chording, which soon builds into a nice instrumental break (I really don't think I've heard any "rock" band use harps quite this well, frankly). The vocals return, their eerie harmony delivering oddities like "all art is beauty" and "can such economy be done?" before a piano-based variation of the intro brings an almost dreamlike mood to the song. Flutes squeal and flutter in the background. After another brief bit of vocals, the song closes with a fairly long and dark harp solo (insomuch as the harp is playing by its lonesome as opposed to being a "solo" by any conventional standards).

The rest of the album is loaded with this distinctly charming sort of unpredictability. The album opener "Odysseus" is a really freaky vocal-driven piece of wordless noise texture, it really must be heard to even fathom. "Auschwitz/Babel" starts off with some mild violin and is otherwise mostly quiet until the vocals arrive and a strange stomp (part funk, part funeral march) clatters in with the drums slamming and the piano building in speed and intensity until the only place to go is backwards and it grinds to a sudden halt. "Klein's Bottle" implements reversed samples and dissonant prepared piano to create this real mood of pure unease, which the depthy philosophical lyrics certainly do not aid. Cutler's lyrics are so dense that you must wonder sometimes if he's just fucking with you.

"Black Gold" blasts onto the scene with a fucking great drum intro and some excellent horns. This song has a real solid rhythm and is about the closest the album gets to being any conventional sort of catchy. "Devils" is a short, mostly spoken piece with some slight piano and horn backing. "Dry Leaf" by contrast starts off wordlessly with very quiet percussion exploding into a drum/piano freakout to rival "Black Gold" in terms of sheer power and volume. The final two tracks, "Victory" and "Anno Mirabilis" are by far the most musical, but nonetheless have the same kind of weirdness the rest of the disc packs. "Anno Mirabilis" in particular deserves points for having an utterly gorgeous and tightly focused melody, closing the album on a perfectly melancholy note without merely devolving into some sort of chaotic mess of noise. "This is the year of peace and was the year of silence" precedes the album's thirty eight second silent (naturally) conclusion.

It's rare that I find an album that I genuinely consider challenging to listen to and write about. While I know it is brilliant musically, I must confess I've not got the firmest grasp on the lyrics, but I have a feeling that's the intention. This is one of those discs that merits further listening and discussion. If the odd and artsy is your bag, it's hard to do better than this.

Here's a Rapidshare of it, if you wanna check it out for yrselves.