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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A very dark and very difficult album., 28 Jan 2006
Forget Blood on the Tracks, Blemish is the only album I can think of that truly captures the pain and discomfort of relationship turmoil. As a result, it's a difficult album to like, throwing the listener into a pool of fragmented self-pity and dissonant instrumentation, merging ambient, electronic backing tracks, with Derek Bailey's harsh and uncompromising improvised guitar work, to create a record that really evokes the feelings of loss and separation so rooted within the idea of marital, and, indeed, relationship strife. As Sylvian has noted in several sources since it's release, Blemish was his way of coming to terms with the slow disintegration of his marriage to former muse Ingrid Chavez, the woman who had been so instrumental to the sound and sense of warmth of his previous solo album, the soulful Dead Bees on a Cake from 1999. That sense of heart and soul is still present here... but it's been battered and bruised. Songs like The Good Son, The Heart Knows Better and She Is Not seem to want to repulse the listener almost as much as songs like Late Night Shopping, the title track and that hopeful coda, A Fire In The Forrest, seem to captivate and enthral.It's an album of contradictions then... which is fitting, given the atmosphere in which it was conceived, with Sylvian playing off the notion of heartache, loneliness and solitude by recording much of Blemish by himself in his home studio. The album, according to Sylvian, was written, produced and performed over an unbelievably short period of time (about six weeks) and that sense of urgency is apparent in the breathless delivery and the random stream of lyrics, which really seem to suggest the occasional sting of bitterness and remorse, as opposed to characters or scenarios. The whole album seems to be striving for a greater sense of discomfort, with the guitar often sounding like nothing more than the tuneless hammering of an amateur, who has taken it upon himself to bash against every one of the strings with a wooden spoon in the mad desire to make "something" approaching music (I have tapes and tapes of this sort of stuff from when I first took up the guitar... seemingly convinced that the noise I was making was great, because it was the best I could do. In hindsight, it's no more palatable than Bailey's acoustic doodling here!!). The electronic instrumentation employs a similar principle, and yet, somehow, works against the sense of dissonance to create something much more enjoyable... if such a word can be attached to such a wilfully dark and difficult piece of work. The references to the 1998 solo debut from former Talk Talk songwriter Mark Hollis, quoted by a few of the other commentators, are quite apt, with Blemish creating that same late night feeling, drawing on elements of ambient music and free-form jazz alongside the more subdued pop and rock influences. Also, as with Hollis's self-titled opus, it's all fairly minimal, creating a dreamy and reflective feeling for the listener. However, whereas that album seemed to drift by on an opium cloud, Blemish is a real beast to get through... easily as difficult as albums like Tilt by Scott Walker, or the Flowers of Romance by PIL. To put it simply, it DEMANDS your attention, only really making sense for me on the sixth or seventh listen. The easiest songs to like would include the closing run of songs; Late Night Shopping, which has a sound similar to Radiohead circa Hail to the Thief (right down to the dentist drill drones and the ominous hand-claps), the telling confessional, How Little We Need to be Happy, and the closing song, A Fire in the Forest, which, as noted above, brings the record full-circle, and seems to suggest the possibility of hope and a new beginning. The lyrics are often very stripped-down, with Sylvian leaving behind the literary references and opaque descriptions found on albums like Brilliant Trees and Secrets of the Beehive in favour of something much more personal and fragmented. As a result, the words can often be as uncompromising as the music, creating some snatches of thought that isn't always clear and *can* be miss-read or misinterpreted, partly due to how disconcertingly vague much of the album is in relation to Sylvian's more celebrated 'early works' (not so much vague in the dreamlike sense, but more a random collection of images culled from everyday life, with the real becoming something much more stifling, ominous and emotionally suffocating). It goes without saying that Blemish is a brave and uncompromising piece of work... one that shows a songwriter unafraid to veer off into strange and admittedly quite alienating directions, relying heavily on musical dissonance, abstract arrangements and uncompromising themes and motifs. Ultimately, Blemish is a difficult album to fully enjoy, becoming one of those albums you play occasionally, before slipping back into the rack in favour of something a little more "up-beat" (like the Birthday Party, or something!). It's an impossible album to love, but at the same time, is impossible to hate... with Sylvian showing a great deal of depth, flair and talent in the overall texture, arrangements and performance to go against the meandering pace, occasional bursts of self-pity and that tunelessly improvised guitar!!! An album to languish in then, particularly when you've reached rock bottom, as Sylvian seems to have done during the majority of these songs, managing to capture both the ugliness and the beauty of loss slowly giving way to a new found sense of hope.
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~ David Sylvian
~ David Sylvian
~ Nine Horses
~ David Sylvian
~ David Sylvian
