Echo and the Bunnymen
What are You Going to Do with Your Life
[Mercury]
Rating: 6.4
We're all so much older now and everything has changed. For example, I
voted for Reagan in a mock school election in 1980-- the same year Echo
and the Bunnymen released their debut album, Crocodiles. As it
turned out, I wasn't listening to Echo back then; my first exposure came
via the beautiful single "Bring on the Dancing Horses," a song that played
during a key moment in the John Hughes film "Pretty in Pink."
I finally figured out that the reason John Hughes' shit hit so close to
home is that I was the exact age of the main characters in just about
every one of his 80's movies. I was just about to turn 16 when "Sixteen
Candles" went to theaters, and by the time "The Breakfast Club" hit the
big screen I already had three miserable years of high school under my
belt. So rather than being the time of my childhood, the 80's were when
I became a man. Legally, anyway.
In any case, it wasn't until I entered adulthood and cast my first real,
non-mock vote in a presidential election (Dukakis and Bensten in '88!)
that I became intimately familiar with an Echo and the Bunnymen album.
My roommate Eric, who covered our dorm room with Bauhaus and Depeche Mode
posters to balance out my Pink Floyd laziness, had purchased their
self-titled record. It came to be their last true album before they
broke up. It had a big college radio hit called "Lips Like Sugar" that
Eric liked to put on when we had parties. The sound of it still makes me
feel drunk and awkward.
Of course, that album couldn't compare to their "greatest hits" compilation,
Songs to Learn and Sing, which is still all the Echo anyone really
needs, and which also happens to be the first vinyl record I bought after
getting a turntable again in 1996 (the year I voted for Ralph Nader). Now,
in 2000, I'm almost certainly not going to vote at all, but I am going to
spend some time listening to the new Echo and the Bunnymen album. I never
would have guessed it, but it's actually pretty decent.
Fittingly, Ian McCulloch and friends have mellowed considerably on What
are You Going to Do with Your Life? The over-the-top, bass-driven rockers
of yore have been replaced with an album of introspective, acoustic songs
appropriate for these aging geezers. The title track nicely illustrates
this stripped-down approach, with gentle guitar strums and some light
brushwork on the drums providing the only backing for McCulloch's rich,
resonant voice. He sounds more like Bono here than I remember, but the
quality of his singing is perfect-- a weary voice transmitting from some
abandoned studio of yesteryear.
The strings on tunes like "Rust" and "Fools Like Us" remind us that Echo
were always one of the more classic rock-oriented of the new wave bands,
and there's something vaguely comforting and cute about their overzealous
reach. More startling are the scattered horn accents, like the stately
trumpet that gives "When It Blows Over" and "Get in the Car" their charms;
these songs sound like the AM radio-aping Jim O'Rourke's been into lately.
(Strange, yes, but it works well in this context.) And when McCulloch
brings it all back home with the melancholy piano tune, "History Chimes,"
we realize why we liked Echo in the first place: they wrote, and continue
to write, good songs. These old guys get my vote for most surprising
comeback of 1999.
-Mark Richard-San