Bluebottle Kiss Doubt Seeds by: Greg Degraves Fri:02-Feb-07 Label: Nonzero Year: 2006 WB rating 70 out of 100

Prequel

Double albums are notoriously a hubris-filled, extravagant exercise in self-righteous buffoonery. McCartney bit back at criticism of the supposed masterful White Album with the schoolboy reply of: “It’s the Beatles White Album … Shut Up”. No, you shut up, McCartney! Go back to cuckolding your wife and singing the lame, meandering piles of decrepitude that define your post-Beatles career. Not even Nigel Goodrich could save your soul from the lamentable purgatory that defines you as the worst kind of has-been – one that is still peddling his seedy wares and shaking the poor corpse of former glories for any remaining teeth. Is there any further to sink? When there is a greedy, profiteering will, there is a back-scratching, dirt-faced way. So debase your friend’s memory for the sake of semantics, but get it right, it’s ‘McCartney and Lennon’, okay? Say what you like, The White Album is still a few tracks too many.

So when Bluebottle Kiss tried to shoot the moon with this, I couldn’t help but fall from my barstool into the pile of dirt and bloody debris that pile on the places I frequent. What is this about? Do they have no shame? No thread of common decency? No barking sense of lunacy?  This seemed like suicide of the worst kind, because you don’t put a knife to your own wrist and expect not to bleed. Oh, how the mighty can fall.

Act I

‘Your Mirror Is A Vulture’, a cacophony of free-jazz and golden-era rock, soaring and roaming like a blinded Oedipus lost and hunted after defiling his mother; chaos and confusion. Jamie Hutchings is at his best when his back is against the wall and he is scampering for safety: “Highways multiple/insects copulate/details are on fire/instinct disproves fate”.

Doubt Seeds I is an album that creates the impulse to smash little pieces of plastic prestige from the bridge of some yes-man’s four-wheeled chariot. It burns rebellion. Even the more buoyant numbers – ‘The Weight Of The Sea’ and ‘Sailors Knot’ – are engulfed in a murky mush, where thickets of reeds and coarse fog bring validation to the tales of little girls drowning here. ‘Scrub The Mist’ is the needed exception, a xylophone-laced slice of optimism that swims where the others sink.

The last word on Act I belongs with ‘Fire Engine’. This sickly sweet, rosy-eyed glaze of early childhood is of the consistency that brings girls to grovel and men to the trough: “Like kissing for the first time/and you walk home feeling ten foot tall”. Romance and love? Fire and Brimstone! The whole notion of finding an irresistible and all-consuming mate has inspired the most droopingly sadistic Hallmark-esque dribble. Prime time has made an industry out of both heartache and happiness, twisting romantic pairings round our throat like a slow-stranglehold. You are either one of the chosen few or you’re the browsing junkie, lost in the wilderness, and doomed to wander the planet alone – like some modern day Bigfoot. As the pores of my brow drip liquid adrenaline I doubt the existence of sanity, the madness in sensibility; why, oh why have Bluebottle Kiss forged such an unholy alliance with this Hallmark-like hypocrisy?

Oh, fool! Oh, imprudent strumpet! How quickly you judge. By songs mid-section it all floods back. The jaunty melody lifted by a sudden deviation, a down-and-dirty variation, a twisting revelation.

ACT II

Such rolls of the die, the dances with lady luck, are what separate master from minstrel. The raison d'être for artists being the road to the higher ground, the epicentre of art, rather than grovelling at the knees of the fickle, yet predictable, big-buying commercial drove, furiously consuming the fast-food music that is rammed into their gullets.

‘The Judas Hands’ is the devil’s seduction, the high road exchanged for the crossroads and we know what was traded there: “It’s no good being the wealthiest corpse in the morgue”. The spun circus piano in the middle eight provides the delicate touch; the tinge of varnish that is the work of the art purveyor.

But not all is rosy. In such a big and bountiful garden there is the need to pull up the weeds. A mossy, mousy and mediocre second half of Doubt Seeds II is the inevitable thorn with long-drawn yawners ‘Harold Holt’ (with its Lou Reed – ‘Walk On The Wild Side-inspired intro) and ‘Speak Up Memory’ delivering an evil-smelling and fetid stench.

The most horrendously, repulsive example of this thorny bastardry being album closer  ‘Silent, Golden’, which, in melody, has the sickening squelches of ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’. What haze of bad acid gave birth to this is beyond even the most sage-like of Buddhists, high on their proverbial mountain. Regardless of the deity that is too blame for this monstrous debacle the resulting discord is the problem with double albums, after a while even the brightest protégée cannot keep pace with their own ideas, inevitably they spiral uncontrollably into their own id.

The blotches on this cunning caricature are like the light but existent imperfections on this waitress’s face, devaluing prime estate. Thankfully, ‘The Black Birds’ returns to the earlier brilliance of Act I. It’s circuitous, labyrinthine start seguing into a vagabond ending more fitting of the Doubt Seeds continuum. It provides a beacon of respectability in a weaker second act.

The Grand Finale

Truly divergent – a jangle of jazz, the coarseness of garage, the seduction in soul and the devil’s temptation – Doubt Seeds is the blade of an insomniac’s waking nightmare, where thoughts run deeply throughout the night and day. If grandiose is out then second drum-kits, tenor saxophones, flute and cello would be left gathering dust in abandoned sheds, instead of rising to the top like thick, full-cream milk.

Ultimately, though, there’s really no point in dating your sister – you’re just wasting time. Could Bluebottle Kiss have given the authoritative account of their music in less than 20 tracks? Absolutely! Anyone who doesn’t realise this is a mute monk suckling on the tit of a unicorn. But they could not have said it with 10 or even 12 songs, which speaks volumes of scriptures about the strength of Doubt Seeds as a double album.

And thus we reach the dual-disc conundrum. Bluebottle Kiss is at once stating that this is their commanding address, their definitive declarative, their opulent masterwork, but with grand ambitions come huge expectations. Despite the flim-flam, wham-blam, cram and scam, jump and jive of song styles, Doubt Seeds manages to cement together like a coagulated cheese product. The metal and milk of the album is best extracted by single session listens and an educated patience.

DeGraves