The New Fast Automatic Daffodils, Body Exit Mind

In early 1993 there was a concert at the Harris Center in Grinnell. The bands were Consolidated and the New Fast Automatic Daffodils. Phil and Wes went to the concert, while Mark and I went to a youth group event held by the church at which our ostensibly Christian girlfriends were parishoners.

I think Phil and Wes got the better deal.

To this day, I don't think there is a show I regret missing more. Soon after that show Phil got a hold of Body Exit Mind and it made the rounds among the four of us. We eventually covered "Beatlemania" and by my senior year of high school it had firmly seated itself as my most-listened-to CD. Something about their dark, insistent sound, the oblique but vivid lyrics, the omnipresent auxilliary percussion grabbed me and wouldn't let go. I don't think the New FADs ever acheived the notoriety they deserved, fading away after another album in 1994. But I think they should be counted among the Smiths and New Order as representatives of the Manchester sound: their music is grimy, occasionally punishing, but at the same time celebratory. The bass is always way high up in the mix, a dancehall kind of cadence that goes well with the driving, hammering percussion. Anyone who has been caught up during the last year in the Manchester revival wrought by bands like Stellastarr* would do well to track down this obscure album.

"Bong" is among the best lead-off tracks of any album I've ever heard. Andy Spearpoint's vocals aren't necessarily always pretty, and he's not the best singer in the world, but he has such conviction that it doesn't seem to matter. His voice can be more straightforward and gentle, as on "Bruises" or "Patchwork Lives", but I think it's best when he's using the barking, excoriating holler that appears on most of the songs, like "Bong" or "American Money". The narrator of most of Body Exit Mind's songs is world-weary, wronged, but still ready for a fight.

That said, Body Exit Mind has some beautiful moments, such as the wall-of-sound raveup that ends "Bruises", the middle section of flanged-out, tremoloed guitar in "Patchwork Lives", the ambient interlude "How Much Longer Must We Tolerate Mass Culture?" and of course the joyous anthem "Beatlemania." I think that if I were to ever get off my ass, learn to play the guitar, and actually write some songs, this is what I hope they would sound like. Lyrically, the album was the thing I most wanted to emulate in my first desperate stabs at poetry. Few lyrics own up to everyman ennui like Stockholm's You'll soon be dust, your deeds already are ... I must be drunk, I feel unsteady / no monster me, sadly no saint either. And my favorite verse on the whole album might be the last one, harsh and final: So widen and fence off the gap between me and you / jobs for the boys and tips for the wrecking crew / truth of it is that it's plain you've not got a clue.

I put this album on just now, sitting at my desk at work at 9:30 in the morning, after an ennervating train ride, still tired after too little sleep, and within the first few seconds of the opening track it swept my head clean, emptying it of everything unimportant and leaving only the bold primary colors of these triumphant melodies I've known so well for the past ten years.

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