album // Life
Life, the debut album from the Inspiral Carpets stands apart from their 'Madchester' contemporaries, mainly for its lyrical themes. Social commentary is high on the agenda here, reminding you that for all Manchester's redevelopment as a trendy city, it still suffers from crime, poverty and a grey misery, especially in its Mosside and Sackville areas.
Take 'Sackville', the closing track here. How's this for an emotive lyric perfectly summarising life with nothing better to do? 'The last time we saw you / We were laughing at you / We were hanging on the side of a Cortina'. The track captures the boredom that led to joyriding, that famous social menace, hitting the headlnes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The track also features a fantastic bassline from Martyn Walsh. 'This Is How It Feels' and 'Song For A Family' deal with concepts of extreme desperation, hope and loneliness experienced by some working class families, and also the struggle to find an identity.
If the Carpets shared one characteristic with bands like The Happy Mondays, it was their ability to write catchy, off the wall alternative pop classics, and 'Life' has plenty of these, 'Directing Traffik' (sic) and 'Monkey On My Back' being just two strong examples - exciting upbeat songs driven by fuzzy guitars and bass, flailing drums and Clint's classic organ lines. Their sound has never really dated, simply because it never really fitted into a particular period - at times the tracks have a punk sensibility, while the use of organ - the addition of which made the band instantly quirky - recalls a sixties, Isle of White psychadelia. And yet, for all their 'strangeness', the Inspiral Carpets were serious musicians, and none of the tracks here are in any way 'throwaway' or novelty-bound. And, as they proved successfully on Life, you didn't have to sing about going out and getting wasted to be part of the musical output of Manchester at this formulative time.
Aside from the classic singles 'This Is How It Feels' and 'She Comes In The Fall', some of the best tracks are the more upbeat. The album opener 'Real Thing' is a case in point, beginning with some gorgeous bassy keyboard noises and returning to these at the track's conclusion, while inbetween the song is fuelled by an intense - but not aggressive - energy. On Life, the band capture this combination of speed and lightness incredibly well, with rousing terrace choruses ensuring that they remained distinct from the Baggy massive -just check the variable speeds on 'Many Happy Returns', featuring some heavily phased instruments and some uplifting chorus hamonies from the guys, ending with a frantic instrumental reprise.
The album features the pastoral folkish ballad 'Sun Don't Shine', which is a semi-psychadelic love song where Tom reveals himself to be a thoroughly impressive emotional singer, and on the CD and cassette the pre-Mute single 'Move' is included. The short instrumental 'Memories Of You' is fantastically sombre and uplifting at the same time, a sort of funeral song for the once prosperous English Norh.
This album, produced by the band and Nick Garside, is the
sort of album you can return to time after time even, as now, over ten
years on.