Talk Talk, Laughing Stock

Ever the optimist, I have a playlist on my iPod which is ironically titled �Feel Better�. It contains this album and Hex by Bark Psychosis, among other downtempo dirges for the downtrodden. But while a gloomy, exhuasted disposition is probably most suitable for this album�s audience, it is by no means a prerequisite. People have been talking about Talk Talk�s abrupt change in musical direction�from New Romantic avatars to the reclusive architects of foreboding, sprawling suites�for eighteen years now, so that�s all I�m really going to say about it. Besides, I knew the Laughing Stock Talk Talk before I knew the It�s My Life Talk Talk, and while the latter is arguably just as worthwhile as the former, I�m more interested in, and familiar with, the band who created Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock, who refused to hold live performances once these albums�whose alleged inaccessibility got them dropped from their major-label contract�were released; this is the band whose leader, Mark Hollis, dropped off the radar for several years after the band�s dissolution in 1991, and to whom the ultimate dictum of taste and restrait is credited: �Before you play two notes, learn how to play one note. And don�t play one note unless you�ve got a reason to play it.� Laughing Stock, even more than its predecessor, represents the successful application of this philosophy.

Back in November, on my first official night as a Chicago resident, I was drinking at the Beachwood with a large group of people and talking with Aden, who was repeating his emphatic demand that I procure and listen to Talk Talk�s Laughing Stock immediately, that my discovery of its beauty and magic was long overdue. He kept saying it all as one potent appellation: �TalkTalkLaughingStock, man. You gotta get TalkTalkLaughingStock.� Soon afterwards, I did indeed get TalkTalkLaughingStock, and I immediately knew why it had received his, and so many others�, endorsements. It's evident in the near-silence of the album�s first thirty seconds, the way �Ascension Day� builds to a chaotic crescendo before being abruptly cut off by another near-silence, the barely audible piano intro to �After The Flood��I�ll get to �After The Flood� in a moment�and then the denoument in the album�s last three songs.

Even if the other five songs here weren�t already compelling, I would still be overwhelmed and humbled by �After The Flood�, the geometric and aesthetic center of the album. How a person can prevent nine minutes of the same cyclical chord progression on a trembling Hammond from becoming monotonous or excessive is a secret only Mark Hollis and maybe a few other songwriters know. Over meandering piano and bass, and an almost lethargic drum part played with brushes, he somehow propels the song forward with carefully-placed guitar chords and his almost unintelligible lyrical pleas. The minute-long guitar squall in the middle of the song is reminiscent of the dissonant, grating connection tone a low-baud modem produces, but still somehow serves as a plangent cry of the disaffected, and the song's thematic core.

I�ve been living in Chicago for ten months now, and for the most part, it�s been grand. But for a boy who grew up in a small town, the city can at times be exhausting, dirty, and depressing. Now, for example, I find myself wading through a muggy Saint Martin's summer, wishing it would get colder like it�s supposed to, wondering if this is global warming or another innocuous meteorological bogeyman like El Nino. Arriving at my job sweating, sitting down to a workload in which I have zero personal interest invested: that�s when I listen to this album. Hungover, lying on my bed in a the humid air of a languid Sunday afternoon: that�s when I listen to this album. Walking outside in the single-digit temperatures of a Chicago winter, driving past barren Iowa fields on the way home for Thanksgiving: that�s when I listen to this album. Sometimes, at the end of the work day, I stand at the window by the elevators in my office on the 49th floor, looking at the buildings below and the lake beyond, and I envision the water rising, the whole scene swallowed up by the lake, with only the tops of the tallest buildings in this panorama�mine, the Aon Center, the Prudential building�rising above the surface. The soundtrack to this apocalyptic daydream is always �After The Flood�.

I might as well mention, here, that this is the last entry in my list of Fifty Big Albums. This is the last pedantic screed about music you�ll have to endure for a while (from me, anyway). This album was the most recent addition to my Big List of Fifty, and the first Big Album I embraced after moving to Chicago, after changing nearly everything about myself, from my name to my accomodations to my job to my band to my girlfriend. Laughing Stock acts as a sort of bridge between all those albums that were so formative for the first quarter-century of my life, and the music that I�ve yet to discover, the music I�m in the process of discovering this very moment. Its composite tone and color may not be upbeat, but its attendant connotations are uplifting, and ultimately forward-looking.

So, here�s to the next fifty.

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