 Swamp Children In a dream, you're in the car, driving some clifftop road in some mysterious coastal town, with the radio meandering in and out between three separate low-fi college stations. One is playing early Everything But the Girl, another is playing some heretofore unheard dirty demos of a pre-fame Sade jamming with a New York art-funk band, and the third is playing the most accessible Ludus tracks never made. You round the bend, and the stations fade out, only for a couple of new ones to fade in, these playing, alternately, Cocteau Twins and Astrud Gilberto. Waking up, you realize that you put So Hot by Swamp Children into your CD-player alarm clock. What a confusing wake-up call! This record was put out by Factory Records in 1982, and is now reissued by LTM Publishing, the connoisseur label that seems to be cataloguing everything that ever came out of Manchester, England, except for the few artists that had any success. It's a music scene preserved in sonic amber, full of discoveries great and small for the eclectic archaeologist who might care. Now, given that it took a number of rather esoteric comparisons to get at a description of this band and its sound, clearly Swamp Children is by no means any kind of essential. But if you have an affinity for those beautiful Factory records, or the diversities of Manchester's 80s music scene, it's a little gem … and a weird one. No Joy Division influence at all; rather, this band presaged the lounge music trend by ten or fifteen years. They're heavy on Latin-esque rhythms, mostly Brazilian, with slinky, sometimes quite flat vocals by dreamy Ann Quigley. It reminds me of the early-80s New York art world, the aural equivalent of Jean-Michel Basquiat strutting around trying to score some drugs. It's not properly jazz, any more than the Coctails were, more like a bunch of art school kids self-proclaiming an instantaneous ability to play jazz without really knowing much about it. Or maybe Swamp Children sprung up in another dimension where Stereolab's parents all had a band together back in the day. The chops are good (despite some off-pitch horns here and there), the songs mostly memorable (especially "Tender Game" and "Spark the Flame" … I like the prettier stuff), though there's quite a bit of aimless wankery and underachieved improv. Still, the main vibe is like washing down an unidentified pill with a couple of glasses of Cristal. Simultaneously woozy and disorienting, and warm and smiley. A seductive brew, though not one to drink every day, else you'll piss the bed on a regular basis.
Review by La Fée |