Echo and the Bunnymen: Porcupine (1983)-Michael Tenzer
Echo and the Bunnymen: Porcupine (1983)
By Michael Tenzer
The distinct trouble with creating a piece of art largely considered to be a masterpiece is that any work by that same artist, created before or after the masterwork, will inevitably be regarded as lesser. Less pure. Less endearing.
So it is with Echo and the Bunnymen, an ‘80s band with weird hair and even weirder senses of musicality. Sure, you could say they were the original post-punk darlings, but then that wouldn’t account for many of their whimsical forays into psychedelic folk music, theatrical song structures or perhaps simply their incessant desire to confound any type of solid classification.
Yet, it seems eclecticism comes at a price. At once, like on Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain, the restless spirit of jigsaw aesthetics is charmed and engaging. Ocean Rain offers the Bunnymen in such a solid, indomitable form, that when lead singer Ian McCullough deems it “the best album ever made”, you’re inclined to agree with him, if only for the moment it takes you to realize that you aren’t actually insane. Eclectic dabbling doesn’t always equal satisfactory results and Porcupine is a beast in its own right.
The album sounds like a mash-up of bad ideas piled on top of good ideas, with a little pinch of intrigue thrown in for good measure. The cragged juxtapositions of whirlwind guitar and whining synthesizer, xylophones and string arrangements, lopsided bass and cavernous percussion initially make the album as absorbing as a decent detective novel. It’s got all the distinctive character and dramatic flair. The problem lies in the albums inability to remain as such. All the abstract soundscapes and shifting rhythms become extraneous and frivolous upon repeated listening.
In many ways Porcupine almost feels like a scatterbrain’s attempt to glue together all the interesting ideas they’ve been exposed to over the last five years. It’s just that here the band is the scatterbrain and the ideas are hit and miss. As a result, the album is full of wonderful -fragments- of songs.
The Bunnymen’s succinct post-punk backbone provides for some endearing moments of rapid bass figures and guitar chunks, but it isn’t enough to make the album shine on despite its flaws. The bonus tracks for the remastered release on Rhino Records only further prove this idea. Porcupine proves that varied musical concepts can just as easily meet with mixed results rather than dynamic ones.
Copyright C. 2008 Michael Tenzer