Disc of the day
Heaven 17 - Penthouse And Pavement
From Sheffield, synth pop and funk to stick it to Thatcher. Currently being played live!
Features Disc of the day
Simon & Garfunkel
Sounds Of Silence
(Columbia, 1966)
Two-man choir wrap up warm, but dispense with seasonal empathy.
It’s the scarves that give it away. And the way Art and Paul are seen legging it down the road, in search of digs with a log fire and a warm bluestocking. Accordingly, Sounds Of Silence is full of cold sunlight and a quality of crispness, aloneness and alienation (albeit the choosy, slightly superior alienation of the undergraduate) that make it perfect, in the words of the resounding I Am A Rock, for a winter’s day in deep and dark December. In Dylan/Cash producer Bob Johnston’s musical womb, S&G turn their collars to the cold and damp, a seasonal choir of two. Acoustic guitars make a thorny bed and the odd augmentation (a trumpet here, a harpsichord there) offers cold comfort. Simon the writer is distracted, diffused – the warmer feelings smothered, self-sabotaged or in exile, in England where his heart lies. And while some of these songs are epic, they are somehow also parsimonious (the title track feels like an opera, but it’s only 3.05), as if Simon is loath to give everything he’s got, and in truth the hotter-blooded songs – the off-the-peg folk-rock of Somewhere They Can’t Find Me and We’ve Got a Groovy Thing Goin’ – are the least convincing. That’s Simon for you – no warmer now than he was at 20, and somehow most at home shrouded in a New York winter, or lashed by sleet on Widnes station platform, surrounded by silence.
Danny Eccleston
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 01/01/2009
Further Listening
Simon & Garfunkel – Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme (Columbia, 1967)
Leonard Cohen – Songs Of Leonard Cohen (Columbia, 1967)
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