Music Arcades: James: Stutter

The cassette version of this album that I couldn't find four years ago… still hasn't turned up. So maybe a second post for Stutter isn't warranted. But you know how it is in hidebound regimes: respect the database, not the facts.

I must have bought this LP in the late '80s, after I was reunited with my turntable but before a CD version came out. I know I subsequently considered getting a CD copy, which would have made this only the second album I'd have owned on cassette, LP and CD. But I never did, so Tormato remains unique in that respect!

I still like it a lot, possibly becuase it reminds me of the days I spent listening to it in a rented room at the top of large house up a steep hill where Crookesmoor turns into Crookes. The allmusic review is extraordinary.

More of a manic fever rant than an album, Stutter is so grotesque and spasmodic that it rams you into a corner until you can do nothing but choke down its home-brewed indie-guitar arsenic. Thin, spiky, jagged folk music…an extraordinary disaster of disagreement. As if a lunatic in his own home-built asylum, Tim Booth is a mere bystander to his wild vocals while the rest of the band watch [drummer] Gavan Whelan have an absolute fit…shoddy, shameless chaos. Nothing more than a terribly produced mess of tragic rock-star baiting and deliberate discordance. An amazing debut.

Makes it sound like it was completely out of kilter with everything else, but, the way I remember it, there was a lot of this stuff around in the indie '80s before the dance/rave crossover arrived. What I hear is the sound of a band making their first steps in finding their own language. Infants can hear a broader range of phonemes than we adults can: English kids lose the ability to distinguish phonemes used in the Chinese language because this ability atrophies through lack of use. And conversely for Chinese kids. It's a bit like that with James' first album. Some of the ideas were never used again and fell away; others got repeated almost ad nauseam. Here they still sound fresh. Larry's guitar has a fluid twanginess that got lost on later records. Jim's bass held everything together brilliantly from the beginning. And Tim's lyrics were startlingly inventive when they focused on psychobabble — which they mostly do — and trite shite, as they've been ever since, when they tried to deal with politics (Why So Close?). Tim also has a wider variety of yelps, hollers and screams than we've heard in recent years. The way he uses them in the tempo changes in the latter stages of Summer Song still gives me a thrill.