Ohrenschmaus

A recent post on Plain Or Pan reminded me of The House of Love, a band from London which started just when The Smiths finished and finished (more or less) when Britpop began. They tried to make a career starting from the third Velvet Underground album and failed though they had a following of die-hard fans. The song which was featured in four different versions on Plain Or Pan was their 1988 single Destroy Your Heart and I am totally enchanted by the demo version which is quite different from the Peel, the live and the single versions. The two guitars, apparently Gibsons are soaked in reverb and sound like two church bells chiming in stereo. They have an unreal quality to them like aural fata morganas which seem to lead somewhere but don’t. There is also something about the slow playing which adds an effect of estrangement, in places the guitars seem to tremble as if the recording has been sped up and sped down. Guy Chadwick’s voice has been sent through a vocoder or something, it is unusually low here, he sounds like someone very old and wise. The lyrics add more weirdness as they are about a love gone wrong, something you wouldn’t expect happening to such an honorable person. This version is totally enthralling, the guitars intertwine in a way that you can’t tell which is which, like in good sex when you don’t know anymore if you are up or down or when you have forgotten if you are the man or the woman.

This entry was posted on Februar 27, 2013 at 00:05 and is filed under 80s, ENG, musi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.