Echo and the Bunnymen

Thanks for the run-down, I'll spin a playlist of your picks and report back!

I love that Electrafixion album - the tracks with Marr are stands-outs, of course, but the real treat is all the live versions that came on the singles. In the mid-90s, it was really exciting to hear Mac (and Richard Butler with Love Spit Love) try their hand at a grunge-y sound. It was a welcome jolt.

I just realised that my Evergreen & WAYGTDWYL picks are all pretty slow tracks, as are two of the three Flowers choices, so if you'll go through them in chronological order it might be a bit of a (very pleasant) snooze.

To get some energy back in, you could replace a random Evergreen choice with the album's title track.
Alternatively, add 'Fish Hook Girl' to the WAYGTDWYL-mix (maybe as a substitute for History Chimes). It was a Rust b-side which made it to the setlists of that time.

You might also still check out the EP they did after WAYGTDWYL:

Avalanche
This EP features two pretty covers (esp. Hardin's Hang On To A Dream is gorgeous), three reworkings of old songs (nice enough alternate takes) and Avalanche as the one new recording - that one is a very good song.
I wrote earlier that I thought the not-so-great song Proxy was influenced by Roxy Music and Wire, but now I remember that they described Avalanche' title track, when it was a work-in-progress, as "Roxy meets Wire". (Proxy was definitely Roxy-influenced too - you could actually hear some Virginia Plain in it).

Absolute highlight: Avalanche (title track)

Yeah, I gave your original picks a listen today and it makes it seem like "Siberia" is when everything picks up. I made your suggested changes and will give it another go, but I understand why you like the "Meteorites" highlights so much.

OK, here's my run-down:

Evergreen/Nothing Lasts Forever/Forgiven - I own "Evergreen" and pulling it out for the first time in ages started this desire to catch up with the Bunnymen. But at this late date, I find "Evergreen" really patchy. I dig these tracks, though - "Forgiven" is really gorgeous.

What Are You Going To Do With Your Life/Rust - I found "Fools Like Us" to be unsatisfying so replaced it with the title track. These two are OK, solid but nothing special.

Fish Hook Girl/Avalanche - Damn, "Fish Hook Girl" is fantastic, full of interesting sounds and so much better than anything else I've heard from the album! And "Avalanche" is very good as well.

Flowers/An Eternity/Burn For Me - "Flowers" is OK but the other two are great, again pulling in interesting sounds and guitar lines. Mac's lyrics always seem incredibly personal and "Burn For Me" breaks my heart for him (and I love the double-tracked vocals).

Parthenon Drive/Siberia/Scissors In The Sand - "Parthenon Drive" is a rewrite of "Bring On The Dancing Horses" but since there are days I'd call that the single best thing they ever did, I love it. "Siberia" has that skittering beat from the early records and "Scissors" sounds like an Electrafixion out-take. Outstanding, I could probably go for one more from Siberia.

Everlasting Neverendless/The Idolness Of Gods - "The Fountain" didn't work for me so I jettisoned it, these two are much more interesting - the former is a great up-tempo number and the latter another one of their beautiful album closers. This is the point where I really start to notice Mac's voice going.

November - another fantastic b-side that should've made the album.

Meteorites/Constantinople/Lovers On The Run/Market Town/New Horizons - the psych touches hit you out of the gate, some of these tracks remind me of another band whose later work I cherry-pick, The Church. "Market Town" is a fantastic dance tune.

Overall, I really appreciate the help putting this together. There are lots of bands out there whose later work I find inconsistent but love to cherry-pick the best bits: The Fall, The Church, Pere Ubu. The Bunnymen now join that list.

Thank you for that nice feedback, that's a great read!

The WAYGTDWYL and Fountain tracks that didn't work for you so much, are all songs that Mac would put on his solo setlists... It wouldn't even surprise me if Will Sergeant dislikes the entire Fountain album (as he does WAYGTDWYL). You probably shouldn't bother with his later solo material.

One more from Siberia? Try 'Of A Life', it's the heaviest rocker on it besides 'Scissors' & was featured in the 2005 setlists. It has a lovely reference in the lyrics to their original best-of compilation, 'Songs to Learn and Sing'. While the rest of Siberia might be slower/softer, I think Of A Life might capture the spirit of the album best.

New album "The Stars, The Oceans & The Moon" is out. A couple of new tracks and a mess of re-recordings of stuff that didn't need re-recording. The new tracks are ok ("How Far?" is the better of the two) but Mac's voice continues to deteriorate.

The version of The Killing Moon sounds like one of the sentimental glove puppet renditions of songs you hear on a bank advert or when a supermarket is telling you about Christmas. Also Mac seems to have forgot the melody.

Whenever I hear of this band, I think of Rik from The Young Ones writing his letter -- "DEAR MR. ECHO..."

Finally got to listen to the new album, heard it three times now, I'm really loving it!

Disagree with Gerald here. I don't think it's a mess, there might not have been a necessity to re-record stuff but why not have some new infusions in old songs, possibly reaching a new audience.
The two new songs are pretty good IMO, both are growers.
Mac's voice: he sure doesn't sing like he did in the eighties, but he changed his approach and style to match his current voice, I think it's still amazing (see also my post upthread from Sept 4).

I'll admit that 'reworked classics' weren't something I was especially looking forward to, as Mac already did something similar with Holy Ghosts (a solo live show which got produced afterwards with additional strings and effects). And also, debates on the necessity are unavoidable; with that, you could bet beforehand that most people would negatively compare the new versions to the original classics.
There are indeed some similar approaches here as on Holy Ghosts. But I find the whole thing sounding remarkably fresh and good. There's a lot of beauty in the strings and things and everything is infused with the spirit of their live shows of the past decade.

Better than the originals? I think that should really not be an issue. These are different takes, which can perfectly exist together with the classics, without any invalidating the other. I'm also reminded of how Neil Young sometimes puts two different versions of the same song on the same album.

Nicky Wire wrote a great piece on the Manics' history with Echo & the Bunnymen and his very positive thoughts on the new album:

01/10/2018
“I’m lazy in every way apart from writing songs. I think I’m looking for the song that loves me back …”
Ian McCulloch // Mojo August 2018
Bands rarely ever arrive as the full package. Some manage to achieve that status through a lot of effort and a bit of luck; often though, there’s a magical element that sits just out of reach. Echo & the Bunnymen were the full package – maybe the first band of my youth to achieve that. They had amazing songs and lyrics that provoked and inspired; stunning wit and a look that was just perfection. There was no weak link visually, no bad leather jackets or mullets. And they had the ambition and the confidence to attempt unconventional ideas, whether it was heading to Iceland to do photos or getting their fans to do a group cycle ride around Liverpool for A Crystal Day. There wasn’t one piece out of place. This was a band to believe in.
The Bunnymen arrived in my world slightly later than they did for James, Sean and Richey. Heaven Up Here was totally James and Sean’s album; Porcupine was Richey’s – he used to play it to me all the time in university, Heads Will Roll and Clay particularly. I can remember being obsessed with the advert that ran in the NME declaring Ocean Rain as “the greatest album ever made”. It was such an incredible act of arrogance that was magnificently backed up by the record itself. That self-belief, the idea that you could create your own myths was hugely influential on me as a teenager. I can still smell the hairspray I was using at the point that Songs to Learn and Sing came out. Every kid who was interested in alternative music (there was no ‘indie’ music back then) had that album and Standing on a Beach by the Cure. It was an era when a greatest hits album was an actual landmark statement that really meant something to cherish and obsess over.
I’ve always thought of Ocean Rain as a cross-genre, cross-generational album, like ABBA’s Arrival or Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours. The songs transcend styles or trends; they were records your parents could learn and sing. That’s something that applies to much of the band’s rich catalogue. The run of singles from that album – the Killing Moon, Silver and Seven Seas – were staggering. For me, Silver connected so perfectly – the flow of words is real poetry. It’s the track that made me realise there was a deep, ice-cold mystery to his words. Coming to the end of school years, I’d become immersed in poetry, working from a starter kit of Larkin, Eliot and Dylan Thomas at that point. Here was someone writing words for music that had a natural poetic rhythm to them. No one else was doing that at the time – arguably, not many have managed it since either. Even with the Bunnymen’s peers, it was never quite the same.
Mac’s lyrics felt more like they’d been lifted from a 19th century poetry book by someone like John Clare or even Edward Lear; a kind of Victorian psychedelia, something almost arcane. Often, they seemed as if they were quoting from a life I just couldn’t understand yet:
“Stab a sorry heart / with your favourite finger
Paint the whole world blue / and stop your tears from stinging
Hear the cavemen singing / good news they’re bringing
Seven seas / swimming them so well
Glad to see / my face among them / kissing the tortoise shell”
One of the reasons the Bunnymen have endured over the years is their untouchable ‘otherness’. As a listener, it never felt like you could quite penetrate or puncture the lyrics. That was always a huge part of the appeal – a reason for diving back in, time and again into the lyrical vortex that Mac had created at the heart of this complete sound. He’s always had an incredible way of rhyming odd words, and of using a mass of words to create unique rhythms. They’re a hard band to dissect in terms of how they wrote – the genius myth-making of the Killing Moon arriving in a dream makes it hard to work out how they actually sat as a four-piece and worked on songs. And I’ve never known whether they’re natural or whether Mac wrote reams and reams of lyrics and tried to shoehorn them into songs.
That otherness is a reason why the Bunnymen – although an inspiration on so many artists (including polar opposites like Liam Gallagher or Chris Martin) – aren’t a band that are easy to emulate. Their sound is so perfectly mercurial, it’s hard to imagine anyone trying to recreating it without falling flat. Even though we channelled a lot of orchestral sweep of Ocean Rain for Everything Must Go, the Bunnymen’s biggest inspiration on us was always more stylistic. We borrowed imagery from them so often, whether it was the scene in the video for Seven Seas where Mac rips the wig off and smudges his lipstick which I directly ripped that off in the original You Love Us video; the severity of the Apocalypse Now-look uniforms they wore around the Shine So Hard era for the Holy Bible or just the bleakness of a Welsh beach for a photo shoot [Porthcawl for Heaven Up Here and Black Rock Sands for This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours].
Somehow, on the Stars, the Oceans & the Moon the Bunnymen manage to brilliantly reset the lyrics to some of their greatest songs, changing context, adding a whole new depth. Gone is the arrogance and towering self-belief of youth; in comes a deeper significance – at once a backwards gaze at life and a forward look at one’s own mortality. Until I met Mac, I’d assumed there was a massive streak of self-confidence running through everything he did; when I met him, it seemed like it actually was a real warmth and a fair amount of insecurity – as he himself once wrote, “Self-doubt and selfism / Were the cheapest things I ever bought.”
It’s a feeling that’s carried on this record. You can hear the pain, smell the cigarettes, taste the alcohol. It’s never any less powerful in this new context, everything now seems so much more direct. Where before, it seemed as though he was gazing outwards, at turbulent waters or at some monumental glacier, now he’s gazing in the mirror, looking in on himself. That aloofness has faded, to be replaced by a brutal honesty. To be able to hear a band you’ve lived with for most of your life reframing some of their most loved songs – it’s a very special privilege.
Nicky Wire, July 2018

Wait, I never said it was a 'mess', I just was down on the idea in the first place. And I especially like the new song "How Far", that's a winner.

But I abjure my negativity, better to embrace your enthusiasm for an old beloved artist, Valentijn!

the 4 songs they did on jools were ok (sonambulist and seven seas on the tuesday, sonambulist, killing moon and rescue on saturday). KM was very slow, almost croony, but it still worked.

Ever since I compiled the post-Reformation playlist, it's been my go-to Bunnymen. It really shows the power they still retain and Mac is still a hell of a singer.

One track not mentioned in our catalog review is "Scratch The Past", a fantastic overlooked b-side of "It's Alright".

Wondering if there's anything forthcoming...