There has always been a unique sound emanating from Love and Rockets camp, whether it draped storming psychedelic rockers, acoustic ruminations or shape-shifting lounge numbers it was always… well… Love and Rockets. As defining as the sound of Bauhaus was it seemed to me that Ash and the Haskins boys seemed uniquely at home in L+R mode as a mellowness and just the tiniest bit of warmth snuck through from their Tones on Tail early incarnation. It was the kind of sound that would inspire folks like Shephard Fairey to design your tribute record cover.
I recall one of my college bands doing a cover of “No New Tale To Tell” once but quickly abandoning it, as we clearly had little to offer the song and our interpretation would always suffer in comparison. I have to think that many other bands crossed that path and turned back as well. Once you have tried to play a Love and Rockets song you immediately realize that the tunes only seem to really work in their hands. Few other artists cause such consternation but when you start to dissect their songs you realize the pitfalls before you. Where a band like The Cure or Joy Division fundamentally has a pop song structure as it’s bedrock and can be reduced to simple chord sequences, Love and Rockets builds their sonic palette through texture, rhythm and dynamics more often than fingers on a fretboard or plunking the ivories. Stripped bare, they are spectral – a “ghost” of a song if you will – and in that mode there is little one can add to bring them back to life.
It is that inability to find a strum and hum that plagues the new tribute record “New Tales To Tell.” These things are often hit or miss with limited budgets, leaving even the biggest names to cobble together a high fidelity submission. In most cases, those folks can be expected to do a serviceable job and we do have moments of that here. Frank Black (as Black Francis once again here) roots rocks an unhinged version of “All In My Mind” that has grown on me, but his delivery is almost too manic given the minimal thump of the percussion behind him. It’s when he dials it down to sing against himself for the chorus that he really nails it. The Dandy Warhols have never been a favorite and their weak dance floor take on “Inside the Outside” is a waste of five minutes in the middle of this compilation only to be outdone by The Flaming Lips hokey phone in performance of “Kundalini Express” that follows. As a song with an obvious snaking guitar hook it certainly deserved better and I am sure the producers thought this pairing to be magic on paper.
Film School coat “American Dream” in a nice hazy glaze and are the first band to treat the material with any reverence. A Place To Bury Strangers set their rattle and roll on to “The Light” and actually really hit the mark with their dynamic interplay of bass throb, drum thump and skittering distorted guitar flicking in and out. Better Than Ezra seemed to have amassed the bulk of the kudos for the record based on their bland take on “So Alive” but they don’t do much more than take a bar band rush through the only big hit of the band’s career. Lossy Coils with Ian Moore manage a fresh coat of dark paint and remind you that L+R still had a little left in the tank with “Sweet F.A.” and then Snowden close things out with a somber longing take on “No Words No More” to properly send you back into the night.
In-between are the forgettable (Dubfire, Monster Magnet vs. Adrian Young, The Stone Foxes, Vex) and the utter crap (Puscifier, War Tapes, Sweethead, Frankenstein 3000, Chantal Claret vs. Adrian Young) as well as the head scratcher that is turning over “No New Tale to Tell” to Blaqk Audio who play it like some sort of gay dance anthem. Head scratcher indeed.
