Aural Fixations

THE BEVIS FROND
New River Head
(Rubric)
Let's be blunt: it's impossible for me to be objective about the Bevis Frond's New River Head. This is an album that changed the way I heard and thought about music. This is a record that always appears on any all-time top ten lists I'm asked to make. This is also the record that made me really want to be a music critic, way back in 1991. Oh, I'd been writing about music for a couple of years before I heard this, but it was experiencing New River Head that made want to go tell it on the mountain, so to speak. This is the album that made me want to use whatever talent for writing I imagine I have to talk about music, to make others hear what I hear, to make them understand what amazing sounds were out there that they weren't hearing. (Special thanks to Luann Williams, formerly of the much-beloved Pop Culture Press, for assigning it to me all those years ago.)

Nick Saloman has
yet to disappoint,
but this album
is his triumph. That said, I've always had a problem with the 1991 Reckless Records version of this CD: it was incomplete. In order to fit the two (vinyl) record set onto a single disk, half a dozen songs were dropped—I guess a double-CD of a then-obscure artist wouldn't have been worth the expense to a small label. Rubric's reissue, however, restores not only the six missing tracks but also adds three demos and six more songs recorded around the same time. This, of course, means rearranging the tracks to fit the originally intended running order, which throws me off-kilter a bit; the tunes don't flow in the same fashion as the version I've come to know so well over the years. But that's easy enough to get over (though I'll always think of "God Speed You to Earth" as the final cut), and it won't effect a newcomer's enjoyment. (In fact, I envy someone hearing this album for the first time.)

I'm admittedly biased, but I'm gonna say it anyway: Nick Saloman, the auteur behind the Frond, is one of the greatest songwriters and guitarists to ever work in this business we call rock & roll. He's a prodigiously gifted musician and creator with a seemingly bottomless bag of memorable melodies and a genuinely sensitive, thoughtful outlook on the strange relationships formed by we walking fleshbags. Saloman has yet to disappoint, but this album is his triumph; he put every ounce of his talent and emotion into his greatest batch of songs to that point. Muscular yet lyrical guitar, unvarnished but moving vocals, dynamic arrangements, smart lyrics and superior melodies make New River Head, for me, an incredible album. It's alternately savage ("She's Entitled To") and gentle ("Thankless Task"), concise ("It Won't Come Again") and sprawling (the epic jam "The Miskatonic Variations II"). Whether creating driving rockers like "Undertaker" and "Chinese Burn," shimmering pop songs like the title track and the justifiably celebrated "He'd Be a Diamond," acid-fried monsters like "Drowned" and "White Sun" or (and these are the songs that still pierce my heart the most deeply) the epic ballads "God Speed You to Earth" and "Stain On the Sun," Saloman and friends never fail to inspire and amaze. Just as good as the old favorites are the rare tracks, like the rockers "Down In the Well" and "Son of Many Mothers," instrumentals "Solar Marmalade" and "Cuvie" and dirge poppers "Blurred Vision" and "Motherdust" from the original vinyl and the little-heard tunes "High On a Flat," "My Little Empire," the droning instro "Cracked Universe" and the budget-recorded but brilliant "Heavy on You." This edition of New River Head is simply overflowing with goodies—new artists of any era could fill two-and-a-half hours' worth of digital bytes with so much quality material.

As I said, it's impossible for me to be objective about the Bevis Frond's masterpiece. But my love for this record is boundless, and that's probably an insight to the creative mechanisms behind my own work, especially with this website. Beyond that, it's just fucking great music. Highly, highly, HIGHLY recommended. Michael Toland [buy it]