Mark Hollis

Mark Hollis
Mark Hollis
1998 Polydor

Produced/arranged by Mark Hollis & Wayne Livesey with Phil Ramacon, and Dominic Miller

Mark Hollis - guitar and vocals
Dominic Miller, Robbie MacIntosh - guitar
Lawrence Pendrous - paino and harmonium
Martin Ditcham - drums and percussion
+ various others

A long time ago (1982 to be precise) on a Billboard chart far away was a slightly odd new romantic band called Talk Talk. They made an album of fluffy, questionable pop. They then went a produced four more albums in a progression that is all but unheard of in rock. They willfully chose to move from Simmons drum pads and precise, elastic electric bass figures to what has been described as the birth of post-rock or at the very least, a parallel to the developments of other compositional heavyweights as David Sylvian and the less accessible side of Peter Gabriel. A group, led by Mark Hollis, that decided --much to the chagrin of their record company EMI-- that they had music to make. It would be beautiful, it would be personal. It would be brilliant. But it will not pander to anyones marketing plan.

And then they were gone. By 1991 it was over for Talk Talk and Hollis went largely into seclusion. The seven years later he very quietly released a self-titled quiet album which quietly faded into the ether, along with Hollis. He has not been heard from since 1998 musically and barely otherwise.

It starts off with The Colour of Spring, a sparse but structured piano figure and Hollis, that fills the space fully. Elegaic and earnest. The second track, Watershed, has Hollis delving into a melancholy cponversation with no one he is willing to sepcify, but the delicate percussion and woodwinds provide a somber backdrop to a fractured, repeating acoustic guitar. It is loose, informal and by the time the muted trumpet kicks in, staggeringly beautiful to the ears. This feeling is somethingthat will follow you throughout the length of the album, which is painfully brief at under 50 minutes. But maybe that sense of wanting makes the album that much more worthy of its intentions. There is no waste. This is stripped to only the most essential elements. And that purity is a lavish affair for the ears.

It is not coarse sounding, but some of the emotions are quite raw, even when the presentation makes it appear as if one has resigned oneself to their fate and is only reciting the narratives for the record. If anything, the album is so quiet as to make the only real place to listen to it properly is a very still night when you want the appearance of personal serenity but are in fact using the album as a means to plumb the basements of your private self. It isn't dark or even depressive necessarily, just melanchoic to the point of seemingly distilled to that feelings essence. Songs like Westward Bound and Inside Looking Out carry an earthiness and almost pastoral simplicity that bely the complexity in the arrangements. Instruments flit in and out of focus in fragments and meandering phrases. Nothing bombards you; bassoons, cor angalis, clarinets and brass mix with a core of guitars provided by Hollis and Dominic Miller and percussion by Martin Ditcham, all of which sound out of character from what their dayjobs working for people like Sting, Sade, Level 42 and Chris rea would suggest. What they help fill out against the deeply personal, but pithy, subtle lyrical structures Hollis provides is admirable.

This album is so beautiful, so pure, so without any blemish that doesn't belong there.

Find it. Buy it.