I'm almost ashamed to say that Skyline
was my first exposure to the work of Yann Tiersen;
for reasons that I barely understand, I'd managed to avoid buying
Dust Lane, the album that preceded this one, and the album
which was Tiersen's first release on Mute Records.
Prior to the 'Monuments' and 'I'm Gonna Live Anyhow' singles, the
only Tiersen song I'd ever heard was 'The Gutter', included here,
which featured on Mute's Record Store Day compilation, Vorwärts.
If my comments on 'The Gutter' were tentative, that was because
I didn't have the foggiest idea how to describe a track which seemed
to contain so many inherent contradictions – was this low-key
industrial soundscaping? The soundtrack to a particularly strange
movie? Indicative of Tiersen's work generally or some tiny experimental
vignette filled with unexpected drama? All I knew was that I liked
what I heard.
The album is packaged in beautifully oblique artwork
from Frank Loriou which sees blocks of heavy black, monolithic colour
pasted over more quotidian imagery, creating a visual contradiction
which is the perfect expression of the nine very complex pieces
– I refuse to call these songs, or even tracks – contained
on Skyline; each of the pieces is laced with some sort
of unexpected, unanticipated sonic event – a drum beat coming
out of nowhere, harsh synth sounds, ear-pummelling guitar distortion,
layers of chattering voices - which totally destroys your perceptions
of the song up to that point. 'My plan,' says Tiersen, in Skyline's
press release, 'was to play with [the] contrast between electric
and quite dense parts and more sober and minimal quiet parts including
piano and strings.' Skyline, Tiersen's seventh album, was
recorded by Tiersen in places as diverse as San Francisco and the
tiny French island of Ouessant before additional contributions from
an array of adept collaborators was added, including Dave
Collingwood on drums and various vocalists inclusing Efterklang
on the closing track 'Vanishing Point', while Tiersen is credited
with, ahem, toy piano, bass, guitar, various synthesizers, vocals,
drums, mellotron, accordion, piano, strings, glockenspiel, vibraphone,
bouzouki, mandolin and marimba. The album was then mixed in Leeds
by Ken Thomas, who also worked on S.C.U.M's Again
Into Eyes for Mute.
That contrast between noisy and pastoral is showcased
brilliantly in the opener, 'Another Shore', wherein tinkling bells,
pretty acoustic guitar and a distant hip-hop style beat usher the
track gently forth; only just as you're getting comfortable with
the chilled-out atmospheres, angry guitar and aggressively beautiful
chord changes rip right through the mood, creating soaring waves
of emotional melodies. A track has no right to get this emotional
this quickly. The track suddenly breaks down into quietude again,
with rasping bass clarinets (played by Stéphane Bouvier)
emerging from the background like they've come straight from the
Screamadelica rehearsal tapes. 'Another Shore' is a busy,
noisy, densely-layered track fraught with conflicting emotions,
arranged around that midpoint between the harrowing and the rapturous.
At its conclusion, the track just falls away, leaving nothing more
than dirty drones before the seamless drop into the comparatively
pastoral second single 'I'm Gonna Live Anyhow'; that change of pace
is somehow a welcome respite as 'Another Shore' could take your
emotions too far. Similar effects happen on 'The Trial', which begins
with shimmering, pretty sounds, and almost cutesy textures, subtle
horns, and tender vocal harmonies. It feels like the component parts
of a raging Philip Glass sequence only taken apart with only the
slightest essence of the original work presented for the listener.
Halfway through, sharp noises prick the silence, euphoric guitars
and droning synths arrive and a plaintive vocal drifts in over a
distant beat, all of which reminds me of Neu! for some inexplicable
reason.
The album's closer, 'Vanishing Point', displays
a similar approach: the vaguest of motorik pulses, an essence of
a much more obvious Krautrocking rhythm, over which nervous synths
and tribal vocal sounds coalesce into a noisy, but not unpleasant
affair. Rapturous, almost wordless voices loop over the top as typically
clattering, disjointed percussion sounds drive a wedge through the
very heart of the track. 'The Gutter' contains haunting, creeping
evolutions, filled with delicate if ambiguous singing from Gaëlle
Kerrien and a sweet organic quality which is only marginally offset
by the grainy spoken word samples muttering away in the background.
Crashing drums and mournful violin back the futility ingrained into
the chorus – 'try to reach the sea' – while
Nineties techno synth sounds rise out of nowhere above plaintive
piano echoes to take the track to an unexpected conclusion.
Elsewhere things get sonically threatening. 'Exit
25 Block 20' contains distorted shouting, yelps and very unfriendly
industrial noise rising above music box sounds, folksy guitars,
whining synths, chattering voices (including swearing from Third
Eye Foundation / This Mortal Coil's Matt Elliott) and a beat that
spends the entire track fighting its way through the layers of sonic
sludge and layers of noisy sound just to reach some sort of crashing
closure. Yet despite its howling, dark depths, pleasant melodies
somehow fight their way to the surface.
'Hesitation Wound' consists of echoing Spanish guitar,
buzzing bass synths, and stuttering, disembodied vocals. It feels
like an early wax cylinder recording picking up voices from the
afterlife and recorded in a particularly cavernous cathedral. 'Hesitation
Wound' is spooky, maudlin and unpleasant, and if it wasn't for the
layers of reverb and general air of strangeness, it would probably
sound quite operatic. A similar sense of feeling disturbed or uncomfortable
comes through on 'Forgive Me' which rides in on grungey guitar strumming
while plucked notes from what sounds to me like the neck end of
the guitar ping away to themselves. Whining guitar textures cruise
in over the jangly rhythm, and for a brief moment I can't help myself
and, despite not wanting to labour any sort of cheap point about
Tiersen's music being 'filmic', this feels like a soundtrack to
some sort of epic moment in a Western they haven't made yet. At
that very point, the nucleus of the track is revealed, with a repeated
request for forgiveness from a massed choir of voices, almost as
if this whole longform, chaotic, hyperactive, shambling piece was
just created to say the simple words 'I'm sorry'. There is a towering
grandeur to this, one of the album's longer pieces, and as the song
progresses toward its conclusion that need for forgiveness feels
ever-more desperate and insistent.
In addition to LP+CD, CD and digital formats, Skyline
was released as a luxury 500-copies-only boxset available from Tiersen's
own website. The boxset includes a signed Skyline LP+CD,
an exclusive T-Shirt featuring a Skyline 'Monolith' print
in bright orange on white, a Skyline 'Monolith' stencil,
a hardback photo book featuring an exclusive collection of personal
behind the scenes photographs and Skyline artwork by Frank Loriou
and an A4 poster, all housed in a numbered box.
'Monuments' is the first single to be lifted from
Yann Tiersen's new Mute album,
Skyline. Unlike most recent Mute singles, this one was
released as a limited 7" single (signed by Tiersen, if you
were an early purchaser) and is wrapped in beautiful organic-meets-industrial-meets-apparently-floating-minimal-block-artwork
by Frank Loriou.
Getting the 7", and actually holding and being
able to look at the detail of the intriguing sleeve reminded me
once again of how much I prefer a physical product over a digital
one. That tiny square image you get on iTunes which acts as the
'sleeve' image just doesn't compare. Having the record also means
you get information about the songs. For example, for 'Monuments'
we learn that Tiersen played guitars, mellotron, accordion and synths.
'Monuments' also features Dave Collingwood on drums and was mixed
by Ken Thomas (who also mixed S.C.U.M's
Again Into Eyes). This stuff is important to know.
Enough of my luddite attempts to reverse the progress
of the music industry; on to the music. 'Monuments' is a fragile,
delicate ballad, featuring shimmering vocals, echoing, slowed-down
'Tomorrow Never Knows'-style drums, droning mournful accordion passages,
gentle guitars and tinkly bell sounds. It has a quiet, reverberating
drama and is quite uplifting to listen to, even though it doesn't
necessarily feel like an upbeat song. It could be the background
music to a pivotal scene in an indie film, probably starring Ellen
Page, probably dealing with adolescent love. I know that making
a 'film music' connection with Tiersen is somewhat lazy on my part,
but if I was going to direct an indie film starring Ellen Page that
deals with adolescent love, I'd probably have this as the soundtrack
to a pivotal scene; maybe where the two youngsters realise that
they really do love each other and make amends. Call it an epic
drama disguised as a three-and-a-half-minute pop song.
'Love Me' is an alternative version of the track
'Fuck Me' which appears on Dust Lane. With vocals shared
between Tiersen, Gaelle Kerien and Syd Matters, 'Love Me' has a
pure, almost folksy pop sound with what sounds like a banjo plucking
away in the background over some rousing, quietly-thundering drums.
It's plaintive and slightly desperate in its repeated plea for affection,
but more than anything else this a pretty cute little song (with
more accordions I'm pleased to say; there aren't enough accordions
in pop music these days).
First things first: in spite of this not being anything
more than single-length, the 7" of 'I'm Gonna Live Anyhow',
Yann Tiersen's second single from Skyline
should be played, confusingly, at 33rpm. I say this because the
label doesn't say anything, and so, because this is a single, and
I always associate 7" singles with 45rpm, dI played it at 45rpm.
The ghost of that John Peel-style inadvertent mistake
haunts my thoughts as I listen to 'I'm Gonna Live Anyhow' at the
correct speed. At 45rpm, the deeply effect-laden vocal sounds like
Pinky & Perky, and try as I might to shake it, an echo of that
high-pitched babbling persists at the wrong speed. That aside, the
subtly defiant 'I'm Gonna Live Anyhow' is an oddly moving affair,
'odd' because of those weird, layered vocals (I would love to hear
a version without the effects, but that's a personal preference);
the emotion comes through the combination of the vocal with a muted
guitar line and some simple beats. On the surface it seems whimsical,
and those strange vocals tend to mean that some of the detail of
the musical backdrop gets lost, but it's all there if you listen
closely enough.
The B-side contains an instrumental version of Skyline's
closer 'Vanishing Point', whereupon the absence of the vocal reveals
lots more of the track's colour and drama. And, incidentally, though
it occasionally feels a shade too fast for an emotional piece, when
played at 45rpm it sounds pretty good too.
