In Praise of....Bizarro by the Wedding Present

Inspired by Chris Ott's revival of Ned R's "136 Albums of the 90's" thread, herewith another In Praise of... thread. `Tis been a while.

I can hear it now: "B-b-b-b-b-but Alex, surely you mean Seamonsters, right?" Wrong! A fine album, that, but it's no match for Bizarro and I'll tell ya why. Feel free to disagree, but tough tits, toots! Start your own thread.

Summer 1989, and I'm interning thanklessly (and paylessly) in the chilly confines of SPIN magazine, dutifuly rifling through issue after issue of Brit music periodicals for the sake of the reference library, finding out about bits and pieces of new British bands. My friend Rob comes back from a trip to Europe and is raving about a track he heard a couple of times there that he thinks is called "The Wedding Present" by a band called Kennedy. He describes it as an army of frantically strummed electric guitars like the Buzzcocks on crack covering the Smiths. Having only heard of the band due to my rampant anglophilia and my article-clipping for SPIN, I correct Rob's name/title switcheroo and we go out searching for the album. Rob tracks down the cd-single (an artefact I wouldn't be able to put my hand to for a couple of years, appended by a beautifully hot-wired cover of Tom Jones' "It's Not Unusual") and plays it for me. WOW! Having been consoling the loss of my beloved Killing Joke (they wouldn't re-surface without warning until later on that year with the flexidisc of "Beautiful Dead") with the vaudvillian-goth shenanigans of the Mission UK (who I'd somewhat inexplicably become unduly fond of), "Kennedy" was a fresh blast of energy I'd not encountered in some time (hardcore having become rather staid for me by then, and the radio airwaves choked by either Tom Petty and the last gasp of hair metal or the transient likes of Rob Base and/or Technotronic). It was indeed a frantic electric strumfest...pinned down by a hyperkinetic drum pattern and an infectiously relentless bassline. As it built to a crescendo, it DID sound like an army of guitars. It was sheer magnificense (and still is, dammit).

Hooked in just like Rob, I went out searching (this was well before the age of downloading music, much less ordering it "online"). Finding only the full album, Bizarro on compact disc only as an import, I sprang for it (who knew if it'd ever see the light of day here in the States?)

Alongside the completely cryptic cover art (a seemingly random crayon scribble) there was precious little information to be had other than song titles. Throwing the disc on once I got home, I was immediately treated to the opening frenzied jangle of "Brassneck." Score! Next up, the simillarly frantic strumming of "Crushed". Yeah! Wait a minute! I'm diggin' this, but I'll be damned if all these songs are sounding dead alike! Phew! Track #3, "No", downshifts into a more conventional tempo, though that Dave Gedge's voice isn't exactly breaking new ground (nor in subject matter, concentrating almost exclusively on realtionship-problems). Skippng around the rest of the disc, I was initially put off by how nearly identical in formula and execution these ten tracks were.

But, at the same time, it simply didn't fuckin' matter! They all sounded that goddamn good! Along with the majesty of "Kennedy," there was the amped-up chug-along of "Granadaland" (another obscure allusion, like "Brassneck", it'd take me years to learn the meaning of) the brooding, feedback-drenched "Bewitched", the blissfully ecstatic "Take Me," which skipped along for a giddily exhaustive nine minutes and fifteen seconds!

Suffice to say, I was instantly fixated by the band, relegating the Mission's sad circus (then promoting the flaccid Carved in Sand album and succumbing to in-fighting) to the back-burner of an entirely different stove. The Wedding Present themselves were often lambasted for being chinless Northern schmucks with no sense of fashion, but that was the beauty of it. Like Gang of Four (also from Leeds), the Wedding Present didn't dress like conventional punks or sport any immediately recognizable sartorial/tonsorial identifiers, but they played with an energy and ferocity that made a lot of 'hardcore' bands sound positively sluggish.

Of course, they'd later go onto work with Steve Albini, who'd summarily pound the shiny, crisp sharpness of their sound into a dull, comparitively colourless bludgeoning tool. Produced by Chris Allison, however, Bizarro is imbued with a bright, airy clarity. It's fast, frantic, clean and sharp without being necessarily weighty or at all heavy (no one could ever accuse the Wedding Present of having any roots in Heavy Metal at that point). They did sound like a hybrid of the Buzzcocks and the Smiths, but that was just a lazy journo tag to help market them. The Wedding Present had a sound of their own (though lumped in with the gormless C:86 gang). When Albini got his arthritic-with-hatred mitts on the band, he'd try to Big Blacken them into something they weren't. The result, Seamonster is still a great album, but it was an entirely different breed of cat than Bizarro. Maybe that's a good thing, but I still prefer Bizarro.

Later albums/singles were up and down. Watusi doesn't seem to get enough love, and I've all but forgotten the album(s?) that followed it, but nothing they did would ever touch Bizarro's greatness (itself needlessly re-released with appended tracks a couple more times by the end of the 90's).

Anyway, raise your goblets and sing high the praises of Bizarro. Or tell me that this busy, bristling cocktail of sexual frustration, unrequited love and shredded guitar picks isn't worthy of such merit-extolling.