Virgin Prunes - Over The Rainbow

Happy Christmas dear reader, and to celebrate this rare moment in time, where I actually take the time to talk to you directly, I bring to you the Virgin Prunes. Back to your family, stop neglecting the little issues and open some more presents...

Time to get off the Pooter!! 

Do I have to come round there and SLAP you?

Wrapping up Mute's series of flawless reissues of the Virgin Prunes' neglected back catalog is this two-disc collection of odds and ends. Over the Rainbow compiles long-lost singles and compilation tracks from various vinyl and cassette releases on Rough Trade and the Prunes own Baby imprint. When this was originally released on LP back in 1986, the album only contained the material on the first disc. Mute and Gavin Friday have generously reached back into the past and dug up enough material to fill a second disc.

The music on both discs easily ranks among the best of the Virgin Prunes, showcasing a breathtaking artistic range never exemplified better than here. Most of the material dates from 1980-1982, the most fertile creative period for the cadre of flag-flying freaks. Listening to the sheer breadth of insanely adventurous approaches on Rainbow made me wonder just what exactly they were putting in the Lypton Village aqueducts; whatever the mysterious chemical was, it's a shame they stopped. It seems that the Prunes often saved their most experimental moments for the odd flexi-disc or cassette compilation, from the hypnotic ambience of early tape piece "Red Nettle" to the psychedelic cacophony of sampled birdsong on "Mad Bird in the Wood." "Jigsawmentallama" is a compelling piece, a slowly evolving sequence of overlapping rhythms, nebulous industrial noise and eerie graveyard vocals. "Greylight" and "War" are prime examples of early 80s post-industrial experimentalism, combining layers of droning, oppressive synths with primitive drum machine and mutated vocals. Tracks on the album reminded me variously of Dogs Blood Rising-era Current 93, Death in June of Brown Book, or the tense abrasiveness of This Heat. The previously unissued track "The Happy Dead" is a stunning 13-minute collage of experimental music intended as the soundtrack to the never-released Prunes film A New Form of Beauty. It's an intense combination of dissonant, improvised piano fugue, richly evocative ambient soundscapes and warped passages of dark, discombobulated Krautrock. "Third Secret" takes a crack at the low-fi industrial klingklang of early Neubauten, with a brief track constructed from the arrhythmia of randomly struck metal pipes. Not all of Rainbow is quite this abstract, however, as the collection also offers its share of the Prunes' post-punk compositions. A pair of extended dance mixes of two classic tracks off ...If I Die, I Die — "Pagan Lovesong" and "Baby Turns Blue" — provide plenty of bat-swatting, tombstone-kicking fodder for those who, like me, can't get enough vintage goth thrills. Without a doubt, Over the Rainbow provides the most bang for your buck among Mute's five reissues, as well as a serving as remarkable evidence of the band's uniquely expansive vision.

Virgin Prunes - If I Die, The Faculties Of A RE-Broken Heart, Pagan Lovesong

Produced by Wire's Colin Newman, If I Die, I Die is Virgin Prunes' proper début album. The album's 14 tracks are the epitome of post-punk adventurism. Here, tribal drums and edgy, spooky, detuned guitars and bouzoukis cross paths and meld with synthesizers and primitive drum machines in an onslaught of off-kilter creativity where everyone from the Fall, PiL, New Order, Siouxsie And the Banshees, and even Bruce Springsteen are called in for reference in a brew that is dangerous, primal, and excessive. Two androgynous frontmen in the foppish Gavin Friday and alluring Guggi create alternate ambiances from warped yet sweet Irish balladry to shrieked poetry. And while the set is messy to be sure, it is far from off-putting. In fact, it is easily the band's most consistent and enduring effort. The albums opens with the haunting, nocturnal minimalism of "Ulankulot," an intro with tom toms and drifting keyboards layered carefully in the background, wordless chanted backing vocals and an electric bouzouki courtesy of guitarist Dik. It immediately gives way to its antecedent "Decline Sand Fall." It's the same tune, only Friday is out in front of it digging deep into the temporality of childhood and what remains of it. Its effect is startling, nocturnal, and tense. In "Sweethome Under White Clouds," the theme is given dimension as Guggi and Friday wail like muzzeins over a reverbed guitar coming from the netherworld and augmented by a soprano saxophone and a synth bassline.

"Pagan Lovesong," the album's proper single, is one of the most angular cuts on the set. Here, the Prunes employ a riff straight out of early Gang of Four, chant their refrains, and swirl the keyboards and drum machines à la Devo yet keep everything so gothic and strange; it's not only compelling, it's infectious. The rest of the album follows suit, with the raucous new wave of "Baby Turns Blue," and the mainstream rockist "Ballad of the Man" that sounds like a wrong-speed outtake, Springsteen's The River and the Mott the Hoople version of "Sweet Jane!" This is a wonderfully confounding and sometimes campy and often disturbing exercise in unfettered creativity that has stood the test of time very well. It is the most necessary Virgin Prunes record of all and captures best what they were capable of when focused.