This Mortal Coil – It’ll End In Tears / Filigree And Shadow / Blood

4AD

It’ll End In Tears

Being the kind of guy to gravitate towards the melancholic, there’s certain records that stay with you, speak an (un)comfortable truth, live far beyond the era they were created in. Dreampop supergroup This Mortal Coil‘s It’ll End In Tears is such a jewel, a timeless beauty whose cover versions went beyond mere homage, opened up lots of extra-curricular exploration — Alex Chilton, Tim Buckley and the revelation that was Rema Rema.

Gordon Sharp’s re-weave of Chilton’s “Kangaroo” and the detached chill of Howard Devoto’s version of Alex’s “Holocaust” with it’s Elton John-esque piano both overshadowing the originals. The gaseous suspends of the photography, eating into the album’s atmospherics. Liz Fraser’s re-imagining of Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” tied to Pallas Citroen’s wind-whipped hair – a sound that even thirty-four years later still floors me.

Ivo Watts-Russell and John Fryer’s brain child spidering out, plucking the impressionistic out of the very air. Martyn Young and Mark Cox filling the canvas in flickering abstracts for “Fyt” as this trickling key shift is beset with transit lines and the odd mesmeric whiteout. A fencer’s rapier slicing the air, slipping effortlessly into the scythe-incised depression of “Fond Affections”. A fabulous revision where the harsh nihilism of Rema Rema’s original is given over to an exhaled softness as the disappointment and futility of a relationship’s dying light shimmers its dirgy hum. Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde’s sweeping headphonics lighting the match in the staccato tick of “Last Ray”, smashed things wide open in drum machine percussions and rivered arpeggio – like a blast of autumn light bleaching the horizon.

An album that pillows a rarely seen perfection, Liz Fraser flowing lyrically over the sombre warmth of those strings in Roy Harper’s “Another Day”, but she has nothing on the triad of tracks that follow, that shift the mood from the saltiness of dashed hopes to completely shiver-chase your spine in otherworldliness.Who else but Lisa Gerrard, your guide, her vaporous accordion on “Waves Become Wings” mining the cover art’s fleeting texturals, to shoot an exquisite wash of melody with “Barramudi” bespent in glittery Raymonde magics and watery woes. It’s the hammered creep of that Chinese dulcimer on “Dreams Made Flesh” that totally transfixes, flashes Autumnal copper and gold, swept in droning contours as the album’s other siren leads you mercurially back towards something mysterious and ancient.

Colin Newman’s “Not Me” sweeping you off your feet with a rush of guitar and slappy purcussives, courtesy of Xmal Deutschland’s Manuela Rickers, Modern English’s Robert Grey, and the Cocteau twosome Simon Raymonde and Robin Guthrie. An energy that leaves the last track “A Single Wish” to bow-out a little understated.

Flawless and emotionally true, It’ll End In Tears is one of those albums that defined a generation, and generations still to come.

Filigree And Shadow

A few years later came a follow up, a double helping which recruited some fresh faces to the fold — Alison Limerick, Dominic Appleton, Deirdre and Louise Rutkowski. However, Filigree And Shadow, apart from the excellent v23 eye candy, didn’t have the same depth as its predecessor, despite it having all the right ingredients: a floaty ethereal zing in the contouring, a choice of melodic covers, it even boasted better production values (the FX flourishes are quite the experience on headphones), but on the whole this didn’t resonate as much as End In Tears did (and continues to do). The pathos seemed a little forced in comparison, dispatched a little too conventionally perhaps, which was a shame as the package was a 4AD highpoint, all silvery and mysterious on crumpled bed sheets.

Having said that, the sounds are gorgeously strung out, soaked in plenty of phrasing with layered details so typical of late eighties studio advancements. Instrumentals like “Ivy And Neet” that needle in piano fallouts, others gently erased in curving effected cello or violin. The roomy drenching of Richenel taking on Buckley’s “I Must Have Been Blind”, the lustre-hung deliriums of Van Morrison’s “Come Here My Love” shimmer-caught in its own echoed reflection.

The stomping re-vision of Colin Newman’s “Alone” is a jolt to the fabric, bush-firing the repeats in splashy percussives. The noisy detours of the (excellently entitled) “Horizon Bleeds And Sucks Its Thumb”, with its curdling metallic clanks and SPK shanty delving the industrial. The surprise funkologies of “Drugs” with its Aretha Franklin-like glow. Not bad, but still in the first album’s shadow, until the early nineties when the last album stole the crown completely.

Blood

What a thing of beauty Blood is. The arts were saturated in golds this time round. Nigel Grierson’s black and white and Claire Lazarus’s splashes of photographic colour furnishing the album’s warm heart in a heady glow. Those piercing whites of Pallas Citroen’s eyes on the inlay lasering you, the distressed heroin chic of the cover eating into the sinewed sensuality of it all. You had a notion this was wrapping things up and the back of the LP seemed to seal that impression succinctly, a moody shot of Grierson’s (or was it Ivo’s?) bedroom, the wall adorned in an accumulation of This Mortal Coil photos, his dog staring back into the camera from the corner of the bed — but what a send-off.

If Filigree was a little too forced, the vocals on Blood sparked with sincerity. Deirdre and Louise Rutkowski really shine here, so does Shellyan Orphan’s Caroline Crawley. The unadorned quivering quality of her vocal on “Mr Somewhere” to shadowy strings and spidery glints. “Last Night’s” vocal focus burning lambent on a sustained simplicity. The Cocteau Twins may have left the label at this point, but the TMC continuum seemed in good hands.

Maybe it’s a better selection of songs (compared with Filigree) but things gleam, scenically shimmer like the Hiroshima victim of “I Come And Stand At Every Door”, or linger with you, like the duet between Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly on Chris Bell’s “You And Your Sister” to a simple picked fret and euphonious strings. There’s plenty of meat in this offering, and you even get a fat slice of rock action as the female-led vocals take a back seat for one of the few male voices on the album — a sterling rendition of “I Am The Cosmos” that gets carried away with itself, bravely time-travels back to the seventies for a toasty wah-fest.

It’s such a meticulously crafted affair, poetic even, full of haunting soundscapes that are tactile, spatial — full of cavernous curls and cracking icecaps —quite astounding really, especially on headphones. The way the pillaring guitars and lightning strikes gave you a good mental workout on “Ruddy And Wretched” as they pan the hemispheres in reactive recoils. Bitter split personalities and jigsawing javelins, an infant gooiness melding with chirping aviaries and ghostly lullabies on the trippy “Baby Ray Baby”.

In fact, Ivo’s instrumentals seem as important as the songs they surround, puckered with recurring thematics that burn new depths on every listen, their substance springing from the tangle of the track preceding it, as if the DNA had been re-ignited from the tiniest of suggestions to flow psychedelically refreshed. The fading chorus of “Til I Gain Control Again” that can be tasted in the whirl-y-gig sycamores of “Dreams Like Water” before drowned in drone, then opening up to some mighty fine balladry (penned by Ivo himself) that floats out on tinselled synth accents.

An atmospheric masterpiece through and through, Blood (for me) was a fitting epitaph to the man’s record collection, plucked out of obscurity and paper-planed straight to your heart.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-