Two preliminary remarks about Mark Hollis' 1998 solo debut:
1) It was outrageously priced at $20 for a single disc at a reasonably- priced music store.
2) It was incredibly hard to find.

The coincidence of these two facts forced me to shell out the money; succinctly put, it was the only game in town.

Typically when people discuss Mark Hollis, the first thing that comes up is his time spent as a vocalist for Talk Talk. But I was never a fan of that band and I don't have much to offer by way of contrast and development from the '80s new wave band that Hollis fronted for the better part of that decade. But bizarrely, Hollis' new self- titled record is singular and bears little of the self- congratulatory triumph that marrs too many frontmens' solo debuts.

The solitude of this album is one of abandonment rather than liberation. It traffics in silences and painful proximity: the instruments are so intimately recorded that their flaws and weaknesses create much of the musical texture; the very mechanics of instrumentation seem to serve where the instruments themselves falter: the honk and spent air of the woodwinds, the scratching on worn guitar strings, the limits of Hollis' vocals. And the silences that seems to threaten the life of every song are poised as failures: the instruments or the voice or even the prosody of the lyrics simply give way into slight moments of emptiness. The refrain of "Watershed" seems a regretful admission of (and half- hearted apology for) all those inevitable silences.

On the whole, Hollis' lyrics read like Symbolist poetry: presented without syntactical scaffolding, or simply as unpredicated images, or fragments of passed conversation. The music runs from loping elegaic jazz to stark Nick Drake-ish folk and even to ambient passages reminiscent of Eno's aimless piano on Music for Airports. In short, Mark Hollis conjures the great emptiness and futility which it undoubtedly inherits from the life of its maker.

-Brent S. Sirota