10,000 Maniacs: The Wishing Chair

I remember liking this album when I got it in 1995, but listening to it this time it sounded bloody fantastic.

I don't really know why I came to 10,000 Maniacs so late — not until after I got Natalie Merchant's first solo album — since I'm sure I heard plenty of their music on John Peel and Andy Kershaw, particularly from around the time of this album. This is the period when their songs and attitude are still quite spiky.

You can hear that the music and words have been written separately and the latter slightly shoe-horned to fit the former. But somehow the friction this creates is really exciting. The lyrics are a bit like John Cale's in the way that they hint at images and meaning (and even historical events and people), but never quite deliver anything you can get a handle on. That's good, too. As with the out-of-nowhere exclamation "Amaze me now" in Scorpio Rising. Or how about this lyric from Everyone a Puzzle Lover:

I pressed flat the accordian pleats
that had gathered in his cotton sleeves
while he thumbed
yes thumbed I wouldn't say caressed
the final piece
a mountain's crest
soon to reply assuredly

Puzzle Lover, indeed. No idea what it means, but I like it.

I liked this album so much, that I dug out the 10,000 Maniacs DVD that I won in a competition on Phill Jupitus's programme, eighteen months ago. Which in turn made it clear how this era of 10,000 Maniacs was mining the same rich seam that Patti Smith had explored, and which James went on to explore a few years later (Nathalie Merchant's unhinged dancing is even similar to that of Tim Booth from James). And with this album being produced by my new hero Joe Boyd (a hero since I read his great book), you could say that 10,000 Maniacs sound what might have happened if Fairport Convention had been fronted by Patti Smith rather than Sandy Denny or Judy Dyble.

MusicBrainz entry for this album