Attention revellers.
What with summer finally here, Europe cooking in a heatwave, and you and yours sprawled out languidly on the grass, eating picnics, drinking wine (spo-dee-o-dee), or otherwise trying to stay cool in the pool, you’re going to need a soundtrack, right? Something fitting for that golden end-of-afternoon sunlight. Something to give the end of a perfect day that slightest hint of a bittersweet aftertaste.
Well, have no fear, trust your old pal David. I have just the thing for you. In fact, I have just the Shang for you. For The Shangs are here to paint your pop-sike pipe dreams a deeper shade of gorgeous.
Back in the mists of time, singer and co-songwriter Dave Byers was a member of Canada’s mighty art psych proto-punks Simply Saucer. Having parted company with them (amicably), he walked into a party in downtown Hamilton one night in early 1974, and there met the estimable Pat O’Neill. Beside the punch-bowl, the two bohemians bonded immediately over the copy of the second Shangri-las album which Byers had bought with him, finding that they “had a mutual interest in 60’s girl group and surfing sounds and all things kitsch.” I know, I know. This is the part of the rock and roll story in which the two amigos immediately form a band. Am I right, or am I right?Well, in this case the narrative took a slightly more tortuous turn. For, due to the vagaries of friendship, work, travel and life in general, the star-crossed friends didn’t actually end up forming the band that destiny so surely decreed until the late 1980s. One advantage of this glacial formation, however, was that it allowed Ed O’Neill, the considerably younger brother of Pat, to catch up with the others, be noticed in his own right, and join their hallowed ranks. It was thus constituted as a trio, that the band – christened The Shangs, after a longstanding fan’s nick-name for their beloved Shangri-las – began recording their first album A Little Bit of Semi Heaven in late 1990.
From this first recording, over the course of the next three decades The Shangs would – off and on – work at their core mission directive, adapting the timeless unchained melodies of the Sixties, adding their own unique and slightly macabre spin, and honing everything into their inimitable “songs of pop culture tragedy”. And nowhere is this better represented than in these Golden Hits, something of a deliberate and cheeky misnomer, given that these are the first new Shangs compositions in over a decade, following a sleepily hiatus which the band took throughout the twenty-teens (“We never had a big bust up or such – we just needed to put things aside”).Imagine a world in which Sharon Tate, in a diaphanous white gown, walks through an op-art party, past Kenneth Anger, and then stops in order to stand pouting breezily on top of a deep cream shag-pile rug. Wait, did someone put something in that punch? Everything seems to be going slightly blurred at the edges. And who is that creepy guy with the beard and the wild staring eyes waiting outside in the car? This is dream pop, but with the dusty desolation of the Spahn Ranch ever so slightly visible in your peripheral vision, a Brill Building in which eerie elevators travel endlessly up and down, stopping at every floor with an echoey ping to pick up and discharge the faded ghosts of long-dead Hollywood starlets.
The album kicks off with the tragi-beauty of “Adore”, its delicate melody counterpointing the surreal cannibalistic fury of its subject matter, the dark Hollywood of Nathanial West’s savage Day Of The Locust. “The Majik Love Machine”, meanwhile, is a pop riff so perfect that The Pizzicato 5 are banging on the door, demanding to stop being made to sound so dissonant and unpleasant in comparison. “Patch Of Blue” is so narcotising that it’s like floating in amniotic fluid, whilst “The Spell Of Arlene Tiger” could be Suicide if they had been formed for a month’s residency in the lounge of The Sands Hotel in Vegas rather than in ratty late ’70s New York.
“Blue Star” (dedicated to Peggy Entwistle, the doomed young actress who threw herself to her death by leaping from the H in the famous Hollywood sign in 1932) is what you get when you play Big Star‘s Sister Lovers at 16rpm by mistake, and end up liking it even better that way. The album sees us out with a vocal version of “Pam’s Thing” (the instrumental versions has hit us earlier on as the fourth track), a psychedelic tribute to Pam(e) Stephens and her all-female 60s garage rock outfit The Feminine Complex. Surely that’s a vintage Lucio Fulci movie, isn’t it..?
Like the finest giallo, Golden Hits mixes strange colours, tragic women, soft focus and unsettling ambience, wrapping them all up within beautiful and beguiling melodies that stick in your head like all the very best earworms. There’s something wonderful about the vanished world the album revels in, a time when La La Land was no less cruel and venal, but somehow also managed to seem more innocent. To The Shangs, that world is utterly irresistible, and their championing of the sad, the disappointed, the forgotten and even the self-destructive, is somehow infectious.And so, this portable Hollywood Babylon is the perfect accompaniment to your summer days ahead. Do yourself a favour and equip yourself with these golden greats. Shang-a-lang, baby.
-David Solomons-
