Michael
Bracewell,
Frieze Magazine, Issue 113, March 2008:
Buried deep in the arcana of Morrissey Studies is the fact that it
was guitarist and songwriter Ian Devine – then playing with post-Punk
free pop ensemble Ludus – to whom Morrissey first turned as a potential
collaborator when he was forming The Smiths in the early 1980s. A
quarter of a century later, on the evidence of
Wheels
To
Get To Heaven
– written and performed by Devine and recorded with vocalist Amanda
Griffiths – one can instantly recognize the charisma and artistry that
so attracted the author of ‘This Charming Man’ (1983).
From the opening
bars of its title track – as though the portentous drum beat from The
Jesus and Mary Chain’s ‘Some Candy Talking’ (1986) had been spliced
with the tonal luxuriance of a Roy Orbison guitar line, played
half-speed –
Wheels
To
Get To Heaven
is an album
that declares its own intensely felt and defended world: a weaving of
invincible charm in the lineage of not just
The
Smiths
(1984) but
also Joni Mitchell’s
Blue
(1971) or
David Sylvian’s
Brilliant
Trees
(1984).
The common denominator of these iconic releases is the tension they
maintain between profound romanticism and lightness of touch: the
achievement of such poise, musically and lyrically, that the faintest
instrumental or vocal inflection acquires massively amplified emotional
resonance. ‘You’re the 20th century,’ sings Griffiths on ‘Prince of
Light’, in a voice at once seductive, detached, gentle, boyish and
weary, ‘without the wars or the death of the Kennedys …’
What you hear on
Wheels
To
Get To Heaven
are nine
songs
concerning the emotional ultimatums established by love. Like that of
an evening in early spring, the atmosphere they convey is both
entranced and alert – alternately brooding and enchanted. (‘Well, the
dreams I’ve had would make anybody sad,’ Griffiths sings on ‘Lucky
Day’, ‘and I have to say you’ve got in the way …’)
Musically, each song
makes a forceful virtue of apparent simplicity. The delicacy of ‘Lucky
Day’, for example, is heightened by its framing within a barely audible
top line of silvery notes (echoing the celesta chimes that open The
Velvet Underground’s ‘Sunday Morning’ from 1966); the caressing fall of
Griffiths’ vocal, from impassive sweetness to a deeper and warmer
intonation, likewise creates a presence that is both acutely intimate
and held at arm’s length.
Devine’s bewitching guitar lines (occasionally exchanged for
mandolin or even the burnished Eastern drones of a Mohan Veena) possess
both urgency and quietude, further shaped and made more complex by
touches of percussion, trumpet, double bass and flute. Devine’s own
voice – as deep as that of Lee Hazlewood –
shadows that of Griffiths at about a single beat’s delay,
its tonal darkness somehow suggestive of spiritual insomnia.
Over the last twenty years Devine has made two albums with Alison
Statton of Young Marble Giants, recorded with Blaine Reininger of
Tuxedomoon and collaborated on improvisational performances with Can’s
Damo Suzuki and with Linder from Ludus. With
Wheels
To
Get To Heaven
(its packaging gorgeously designed by the legendary Benoît Hennebert of
Brussels-based label Les Disques du CrÍpuscule) he appears to have
written his masterpiece – with a mesmerizing vocal performance from
Griffiths (who with truly disarming radicalism describes herself solely
as ‘a housewife’) that completes and enhances the rare and astonishing
circuitry of this electrifying recording.
Read
full review at frieze.com
