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Melody Maker (November 7, 1987)


From the splinters of The Birthday Party and Crime And The City Solution come These Immortal Souls and a debut album 'Get Lost (Don't Lie)', David Stubbs meets the mask behind the panic, pain and pleasure of moonshine.

ROWLAND S Howard: "In Crime And City Solution I felt I wasn't the right person for the job, I felt like I was out on a limb. I got very frustrated playing with Crime because it seemed so incredibly laboured and unstructured at times. We were aiming for a trancelike music but it didn't turn out as expected."

Hence These Immortal Souls, a splinter group of a splinter group, consisting of Howard, Harry Howard, Epic Soundtracks and Genevieve McGuckin. They see themselves as a "reaction" against the abrasion of Crime and even The Birthday Party before them, against the will to abasement or consumption that characterizes wracked creatures like Swans, with whom they're implicated out on the left. I suggest that their new album, "Get Lost (Don't Lie)", is spectral, parched, fleshless, and they're up in arms.

"That's not true. A lot of the sounds aren't very hard at all. In fact, it's quite fulsome; I really like groups like the Shangri-Las, music that's immediate in its effect. True, the sentiments were corny but every one of their songs has a sli slight surreality, a massiveness about it, an added dimension like Phil Spector. It's like the difference between Cinemascope and 8mm film."

So let's adjust - These Immortal Souls are a sandy, torn, bloodlet rush of sounds, a panoply of abrasions with conspicuous traces of bubblegum adhering to the bones. Yes, there is a wall of noise, a pop sensibility - but it is wistful, a gaze at a "pop" that died with The Saint, located in the year 196X, as all of those elegant, metallic keyboard figures.

"Yes, I think that's true. Vague references to other musical styles are filtered through the individual players."

Are things as bleak as your guitars?

Epic: "I would say the new single was very ... happy. We're not into miserablism, we do intend an input of optimism."

These Immortal souls do not want to be regarded as unrelieved, desolate, or inhumanely inconsolable.

"People either write about love in the terms of radio pop, in terms of either outright joy or sadness or in those left-field terms of disease and abasement," says Rowland. "It's obviously all of those things at the same time, or at given times. People don't seem able to write like that, encompassing all the aspects."

These Immortal Souls aren't the first band to protest at a perception of themselves as remorseless, blackened by grief or pessimism. I remember The Band Of Holy Joy offering a similar lament. But, the problem is, these bands begin at such bleak premises that their pertinent flecks of optimism deployed to leaven their worldview are really no match for the hearty, exclamatory up and now pop. In material terms, they will be taken as sceptical, surely.

Epic: "Well, that's the trouble with being subtle about things, I suppose. We do present a lot of contradictions."

The band present various polarities. They are at once ornate and elemental - songs such as "Blood And Sand" and "One In Shadow, One In Sun" boast the stateliest of textures and yet are couched in a somewhat thirsty, elemental imagery. They wallow in Spectoresque magnification.

Rowland: "The name These Immortal Souls was chosen to suggest that exaggerated sense of self-importance. Because if you don't celebrate yourself, nobody else will."

I'm interested in their panoramic sense of soundscape, in which their sense of self is diminished. But These Immortal Souls are also concerned with honesty.

"The difference between us and, say, U2 is that while they are epic, they're anxious to portray a nobility, a sense of injustice, 'why are these terrible things allowed to exist?'" explains Rowland. "Whereas we would say that it is necessary for those things to exist."

Aesthetically necessary, to make for a moral balance, a tension, a relief.

This is These Immortal Souls: "These Immortal Souls of ours/You left the scar of your kiss/Burning on through this flesh/ Forever too slow/Burn the heart and the brain/Fixing broken spells/Start as death waltzing/Down bloody trails of stars/ We spit and are broken."

Obsessively retrospective, spilling free from a broken body, stalking a depopulated, denuded terrain, pestered by a recurring set of images. Rowland, is this fantasy or grit?

"The songs are an assortment of my obsessions, like demons I'm trying to exorcise. I'm not interested in real-life dramas. Having said that, it's not like The Bad Seeds, writing about fantasy figures. The songs are about events close to me."

So it's introspective, as opposed to projected?

"I see no reason to write songs unless you're in a moody, introspective frame of mind."

So are you "yourself" in your songs? Or nothing outside them? Is this vast, over-dramatised panoply your entire reason for being? Or can you detach yourself, go off and do some fly fishing after a day in the studio, or performance?

"Our lives don't stop when we stop playing, but I must admit we don't do much else. The thing about songwriting is that you get a chance to express things that otherwise you simply wouldn't talk about. Which means that when I'm not playing, I become incredibly tense, aggressive, even. It's only through writing and playing that you get that release."

For some, there's a problem with Rowland S Howard's voice. It's not a fulsome warble - it's wracked, sluggish, irritating to some, inoffensively prosaic to me, a believer in the weak voice.

"The point is, nobody else could sing those songs but me. And nobody else would be prepared to, either. I know where all the little inflexions and ironies lie, all the nuances."

"Get lost (Don't Lie)" is These Immortal Souls' debut album. It's at once lush and barren, delirious and desperate, a mirage of pop, scabrous and seductive by turns. I don't think it will bring any sunshine into anybody's lives, for it's effects that count and the obscure efforts at "optimism" are unlikely to register at this stage. But it will bring velvet, sand and moonshine, which are things worth opening the windows at night for.