It
wasn’t easy to know what to make of The Phantom Band’s debut album, Checkmate
Savage. When it was let loose into the world a decade ago care of Chemikal
Underground Records, it seemed to have appeared out of Scotch mist. From the
opening synth fizzes and hypnotic motorik beat of the record’s first track, The
Howling, its rich mesh of absorbed influences defied all expectations and
perceptions of what a Glasgow-indie-DIY-artrock-band could be.
As a
tone-setting calling card for everything that followed, The Howling was a
perfect evocation of the sextet’s textured pick-and-mix approach that seemed to
have been born fully formed.
As
well as a kosmiche pulse picked up from 1970s German iconoclasts, Neu!, also
bubbling away in the band’s musical melting pot were shades of backwoods
Americana and wonky Beefheartian atonality tempered by crunchy college rock melodies.
Added to this were John Carpenter vintage synth film soundtracks, primal
chorales and more.
All
this framed vocalist Rick Anthony’s doleful baritone declaiming a form of
arcane Scots gothic. This seems to have been absorbed from the rainy graves of
ancient bards and put through a filter of dervish-like latter-day sooth-saying.
Anthony would go on to pursue this avenue even more by way of his solo records
as Rick Redbeard.
Such
hidden depths look set to be brought out even more on the tenth anniversary
double vinyl edition of Checkmate Savage. Released with love once more by
Chemikal Underground, the format should allow the songs to breathe enough for them
to sound both ancient and unremittingly modern.
On
paper, at least, none of The Phantom Band’s wilfully eclectic approach should
have worked. Yet the combined result of Greg Sinclair and Duncan Marquiss’
guitars, Andy Wake’s keyboards and the bass and drums of Gerry Hart and Duncan
Tonner wrapped around Anthony’s voice was a powerful and cohesive sprawl. It
also made for a very grown-up sounding record. Rather than tugging awkwardly in
several different directions at once to the point of collapsing in on itself,
its nuanced post-genre mash-up was sculpted into shape by knowing pop-song
structures. It was a collage that gelled with a masterly sense of its own
intricate widescreen construction.
Given
some of the various musical and artistic predilections scattered throughout the
band, it was a hybrid that perhaps should have come as no surprise. The vaguely
surrealist-looking 1970s styled poster-art cover image does likewise. As does
the nod – conscious or otherwise - to the original Phantom Band, formed by
former Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit and late period band-mate Rosko Gee alongside
other German experimental musicians, and who released three albums in the early
1980s.
So
often do the songs on Checkmate Savage lurch into new dimensions within the
same song that it wouldn’t be too fanciful to describe some of them as triptychs,
flitting as they do between acoustic balladeering, minimalist electrionic
sprints and extended guitar longeurs.
The video
for The Howling takes a similarly multi-faceted approach. To illustrate the
second single from Checkmate Savage following Throwing Bones, the duo of Martin
Wedderburn and Bronagh Keegan’s might easily be read as a tribute to The
Prodigy’s iconic clip for Smack My Bitch Up. Adopting the point-of-view of an
unseen protagonist, The Howling video takes the viewer on a bender through
Glasgow pubs, Saturday night city centre streets and the potentially
life-threatening confines of the Clyde Tunnel’s pedestrian walkway. With the
joyride narrative cut up and pieced together in a non-linear fashion a la
Nicolas Roeg, at various points a spectral looking quintet appear, overseeing
and perhaps manipulating the action.
Elsewhere,
the record carves out its own mythology even more, setting itself against a
windswept landscape of wide open spaces where grand gestures cast up elemental
science-fiction runes on land, sea and air. Burial Sounds; Folk Song Oblivion;
Throwing Bones; Island. Every song sounds like an adventure, heroic in intent
without ever becoming overblown.
Then
there is Crocodile, a dinosaur-sized instrumental, which draws inspiration from
the title theme to 1986 feature film, Crocodile Dundee. The track had
originally appeared in an earlier form on a self-released CDr, but somewhere
along the way lost the second word of its predecessor. Maybe that had something
to do with some of the band’s roots as students in Dundee, or maybe it was a
double-bluffing distancing effect, but the rumble in the jungle that ensues
embarks on an expedition of musical exotica before exploding into full-on rock
riffage.
Finally,
The Whole is on My Side is a slow-burning but propulsive processional that
confesses all before wandering off into a brave Scottish sunset, all but purged
of the demons that drives such a spellbindingly timeless set of incantations.
The remastered edition of Checkmate
Savage is available from January 25th on Chemikal Underground
records.
Product, March 2019
ends
Comments