Talk Talk (RIP Mark Hollis)

No, it's needs vocals, I'm just not a fan of his voice.

Hollis' vocal were not amazing to listen to at first! The band attracted me.

Later I learned I had to go to him, not vice versa.

*vocals

I like his voice, but I could see the same singing/vocal melodies seeming a bit trite in a more conventional instrumental setting.

I like the way his vocals interact with the instrumental parts in particular -- it sounds like his band was a ship that was destroyed in a storm and now he's mourning over the broken pieces of it that washed up on shore.

that's how I learned to listen

Laughing Talk

LOL, that's a dumb mistake on my part.

I thought the part about 'preciously rockist admiration' was the bigger mistake.

Unless Morton Feldman was the ultimate rockist, in which case, my mind is blown to smithereens.

So many friends of mine who idolize Talk Talk have attempted to create music in the same vein as their latter-day albums and they never succeed, as nice as the results are, because nobody sings as good as Hollis did

super otm

Barely anyone I heard take direct influence from TT managed to capture the dynamic, the energy, the chaos, the dissonance. They mostly just made lovely (and boring) quiet, sparse, spacious music. For me the exciting bits came from the push-me-pull-you dynamics, the way a groove would be so luscious and inviting but there'd be distorted elements. That's where the catharsis and excitement comes from. Otherwise it's just ambient. That's why the solo album, as much as I like it and as lovely as it is, never did it for me as much as the band albums, because it didn't have that volume and dissonance.

The music and the voice are absolutely as important as each other, for me.

Hollis's voice is a big part of it, for sure. But those copycat bands also tend to lack his (and Friese-Greene's) profound understanding of composition. I doubt it's the kind of music that can be replicated anyway, you have to betray it on some level if you wish to approximate its secrets.

i didn't like his voice in the beginning but now i love it, without it the music would be incomplete. i find it sounds like the cry of a shot deer. not that i know how that sounds...

Yeah, to the extent post-rock albums imitated him, many approximated at best. I think a lot of them lack not only the compositional understanding, but the emotional depth and the sincerity of intent. Spirit of Eden, Laughing Stock and the solo feel like records Hollis needed to make, as though he had musical ideas and feelings he had been frustrated he couldn't express in a more pop setting.

Then there are guys like Jim O'Rourke (who I like a lot, tbc), who have the compositional understanding but sometimes feel hampered by a need to constantly be clever and to not risk vulnerability.

i think the thing with his voice is that it's someone a showing a great deal of control and sensitivity with what seems at first to be quite a rough and unschooled instrument. sometimes he reminds me of weller at his gentlist but thank god he mostly avoids that horrible barkiness that PW inevitably slips into

(Weller, fwiw, another big Traffic fan!)

come to think of it, winwood played on both stanley road and colour of spring

anyone know where mh was living btw? there's a comment under this piece in the guardian that's been bugging me all day but i can't work it out at all:

I’d love to know which bit of W he lived. I’m from RP - I’d love it if it was there x

Barely anyone I heard take direct influence from TT managed to capture the dynamic, the energy, the chaos, the dissonance. They mostly just made lovely (and boring) quiet, sparse, spacious music. For me the exciting bits came from the push-me-pull-you dynamics, the way a groove would be so luscious and inviting but there'd be distorted elements. That's where the catharsis and excitement comes from. Otherwise it's just ambient. That's why the solo album, as much as I like it and as lovely as it is, never did it for me as much as the band albums, because it didn't have that volume and dissonance.

The music and the voice are absolutely as important as each other, for me.

― Hey Bob (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, February 27, 2019 11:11 AM (thirty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Quite fucking true - my otm was re: the idea that sheer character of vocals is one of the biggest things sinking the aspirant TT hommager before they even start. They can get closer on the timbral/compositional front, are at least not prevented by their gross physical bodies from getting closer on that front, but there too no one has come within a league of what MH/TF-G achieved. The thing that knocked my head off about laughing stock when it came out was the sheer PROFILE of it - this was music with a real skyline to it. A skyline which has then been artfully ruined in the most astonishing way. For years i hunted for more things anywhere in rock and its mutations that could give me that sense of horizontal profile. That was the main thing that drove me into classical music really, I couldn't find more than crumbs of it anywhere else.

agree that the solo album does not have as much of this quality despite its wonders.

W = Wimbledon
RP = Raynes Park

xp

That was the main thing that drove me into classical music really, I couldn't find more than crumbs of it anywhere else.

Great post, Jon; cosign (the whole thing, but this bit in particular).

ah, i guessed it was something park! thanks anag.

At the risk of being fairly obvious, if you compare Hollis's solo record with the contemporary Orang releases it's fairly easy to make the case that they demonstrated in different ways how the members apparently -- emphasis on apparently, the truth is likely more muddled -- showed which members brought which sounds and approach to the fore.

I feel like tagging Talk Talk as a post rock band is like tagging MBV as shoegazers: neither of them had anything to do with those things. Sure, their influence on those genres is felt, but they are light years apart from it.

there are multiple strains of post-rock and multiple ideas of what post-rock is and was, it is much foggier than "shoegaze"

completely ridiculous to suggest mbv had nothing to do with shoegaze btw

post-rock is just a loose, after-the-fact term that was applied to a wide range of bands that in some way or other use rock instrumentation and some element of a "rock ethos" in combination with modern compositional influences (modern classical, jazz, minimalism, musique concrete, etc.) I think it fits Talk Talk just fine.

fits can too

To me, shoegaze bands all came up in the wake of MBV. MBV themselves had nothing to do with it.

Mentioned earlier, but wasn't the term "post-rock" originally devised to describe TT specifically?

I thought it was for Disco Inferno

reynolds used it to describe DI and bark psychosis and moonshake and laika and seefeel and all those bands, but specifically mentioned talk talk and the cocteaus as antecedents

So really DI and Bark and Moonshake/Laika is ... Post-Post-Rock.

MBV looked at their shoes when they played!

MBV looked at their shoes pedals when they played!

i listened to colour of spring while watching yesterday's monochromatic grey sunset and when 'time it's time' finished, i realized i had been weeping most of the time.

i first heard spirit of eden and laughing stock when i was nineteen. i'm thirty eight now. half my life he's been there.

x-post for those pictures of the interior of his home and the "people who have figured out how to live" thread.

i listened to colour of spring while watching yesterday's monochromatic grey sunset and when 'time it's time' finished, i realized i had been weeping most of the time.

― Totally different head. Totally. (Austin), Wednesday, February 27, 2019 1:02 PM (forty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

def been seized by tears listening to this and to The Rainbow over the last couple of days

mbv wore their pedals on their feet!

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2135/9893/products/normal_bloody-love-riding-my-bike-t-shirt_800x.jpg?v=1527547019

I Bloody Valentine

This is a very good discussion everybody otm

yes excellent, just the place for it.

I don’t think volume has been mentioned, but to me the only way to listen to Laughing Stock etc is absolutely cranked. I’ve had a few instances where everyone has left the house and I’ve put it on and turned it up and up and UP until it blooms into a giant space of music. It’s because it was so well recorded of course, but what an experience.

Not to universalise my own experience but I wonder if there's something emblematic in Hollis' 'journey' that satisfies a certain type of music listener. We're all looking for the transcendent and unearthly (holy?) in our listening, and his move from the early decadence through the studied cathedral spaces of Eden/Laughing Stock, into the near-erasure of the solo album feels from this distance like watching an archetype in the making. That he never came back and effectively completed his monkish disappearance is all the more perfect.

one of the few albums directly inspired by spirit of eden that i think absorbs that influence correctly is fumbling towards ecstasy by sarah mclachlan ok i'll show myself out

New Grass I've listened to a lot, but it wasn't until relatively recently that my ears even locked on to the baseline.

Bassline, goddam autocorrect.

At the risk of being fairly obvious, if you compare Hollis's solo record with the contemporary Orang releases it's fairly easy to make the case that they demonstrated in different ways how the members apparently -- emphasis on apparently, the truth is likely more muddled -- showed which members brought which sounds and approach to the fore.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, February 27, 2019 12:19 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes! Also anyone ITT who has never listened to the Orang albums needs to go do so rite now.

Those photos of his house a guy tweeted... it occurred to me this morning how they might have been obtained. the Hollises just moved recently right? These might have been photos used by a realtor to sell the house they were moving out of.

ah shit I bet that’s it!

...cos I really couldnt imagine Hollis inviting hello magazine round