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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