Reviews

Is this music? - Andy Wood
The endless delays and dark rumours surrounding Saint Jude’s Infirmary’s second album, combined with the ominous tone of the album title may have you scouring the obituary columns but fear not. While the band may not have experienced many happy, lucky, healthy months since the release of their acclaimed debut album back in 2006 here they seem in fine fettle; perhaps a little battered and bruised but otherwise fairly hale and hearty. Rather than bitterness and disappointment after a rough ride once around the fair, This Has Been The Death Of Us is a joyful, adventurous and exquisitely beautiful work of art, a precise and compelling argument for the joys of music and its complex relationship to art, life and culture that sees it standing head and shoulders above the majority of their peers and predecessors. More than anything else, this is not the death knell of bloodied outsiders proclaiming through gritted teeth that they ‘coulda been contenders’ but a spectacular rebirth.

There has always been a scuffed elegance to Saint Jude’s Infirmary, a willingness, nay a delight, in mixing up the profane and the profound, an interest in the fringes of high and low culture and the areas in between. They can charm and seduce yet land hefty punches as well with great hooks raining in from all directions, often wrapped in a soft velvet glove. Live and on record they make me laugh, cry, dance and think. They beguile and bewilder me in equal measures leaving me all over the place emotionally and physically but always filling my heart and soul with joy.

This Has Been The Death Of Us leaves behind the sometimes muddy sound of its predecessor and revels in a sense of focus and clarity without losing any of the charm of Happy Healthy Lucky Month. It’s an album full of sharp tunes, lyrics and twists and turns, retaining a sense of adventurousness throughout its thirteen songs. The opening song ‘Little Sparta’ was the perfect introduction to the album when it appeared earlier in the year as a 7” single and it still sounds awesome. It’s an elegiac and beautiful song, an entrancing mix of bruising rhythms reminiscent of Joy Division/New Order topped with swirling strings and pretty flourishes. It’s the perfect pop song to open the album. Emma sounds like the baddest angel to be expelled from heaven and when her voice combines with Ashley’s to sing ‘If you fall I’ll catch you in the arms of love’ my initial thought was, that’s so romantic, so perfect until I remembered that the line that precedes it is ‘Our love is like a suicide’. The lyrics draw upon the extremes of emotions, the light and dark of love and wrap them up in the most beautiful, driven of tunes exploding into a rapturous blanket of white noise. Perfect.

‘Tap O’ Lauriston’ is a tribute to the now long defunct Edinburgh venue. Beginning with just a melodica, guitar and a sweet vocal and melody it grows into a fiery song, a paean to a friend lost to excess. Short, sweet and burning brightly it wonderfully mixes up light, catchy hooks with a nagging sense of despair and loss. ‘Tacoma Radar’ is a brooding song full of dark undercurrents and enchanting twists and turns. It’s a song of several parts, building up approximately midway into a feverish, frantic climax before dropping into a more genteel, measured coda with Mark’s voice to the fore, his deep, evocative voice combining with angelic backing harmonies, equal parts defiance and despair as he sings “It isn’t such a wonderful life/ It’s not much of a life at all’ while the guitars build up into a blurry, exhilarating crescendo. ‘Tacoma Radar’ also features the first of two spoken word contributions by the painter and fellow denizen of Kirkcaldy, Jack Vettriano. His contribution is a compellingly performed narrative about the joys and threats of an all-encompassing American culture as transmitted over the airwaves around the world.

‘I Am Skeleton’ is the second song featuring Vettriano. It’s an eery, at times spooky track with just a sound like a needle crackling on old vinyl, a voice and a gentle, chiming guitar. It’s sparseness adds to the atmosphere, words and delivery giving it a haunted feel with a sense that excess may not lead to the gates of wisdom but to the slow death of the soul. ‘Marked Heart’ in turn is gentle and sweet. Brushed drums and a delicately gorgeous picked guitar line looping over and over held together by grant’s melodic bass line. It has a gospel/hymn-like feel to it, airy and light but anchored. It feels like it could sit in a David lynch film with its noir feel and torch song singing, somehow as old as time and as fresh as spring. The vocals combine a hard-learned world weariness with an innocent feel, swooping and soaring around a gorgeous tune.

‘A Scottish Summer’ is a deceptive song. Initially I felt that this song was the slightest one on the album but hours later the chorus was still playing over and over in my head. It’s a pretty mix of girl-group sounds and buzzsaw guitars, a quirkiness mixed in with a darker kernel. The subject of American culture is strong here again, from the opening lines of

The rise and fall of the American teen
The fallen idols of the silver screen
But they don’t mean anything anymore, anyhow
All that matters is the here then the now

to the choruses subject, the author and poet Sylvia Plath. Like Happy Healthy Lucky Month’s ‘Saint Jean’ a song about the actress and activist Jean Seberg, star of Otto Preminger’s 1957 film Saint Joan who was hounded to death by the Ameican authorities, Saint Jude reference another tragic heroine:

Sylvia Plath wrapped in a summer
A bell is a cup
Until it is struck
A belljar is a window
Until you’re out of luck.

‘A Scottish Summer’ is a catchy, incredibly stunning song, managing the difficult feat of being both tragic and life-affirming. It’s full of sha-la-la’s, yeah yeah yeahs, spoken word passages and a chorus to simply die for. Saint Jude’s Infirmary here are a Scottish Shangri-La’s updated, equal parts existentialist angst and romantic yearning, both literate and pure pop. It’s a difficult path to walk but one that they manage with seemingly great ease over the course of This Has Been The Death Of Us.

‘If Love Does This’ has a buoyant percussive feel. A hugely uplifting song with another feverish, infectious chorus and a bittersweet feel to the lyrics, particularly well expressed in lines such as ‘If love does this then it’s no friend of mine’. Full of neat twanging guitar and heavenly pop hooks ‘If Love Does This’ is a sweet poppy song that harbours a darker underside; love as a cage, a trap, claustrophobic and destructive. ‘From The Arctic Star To The Southern Bar’ is a short, delicate spoken word piece, just a male voice and an evocative, fragile guitar line that lingers long after the song has ended. ‘The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea’ is a haunting song with Mark and Emma sharing the vocals and an accordion giving the song a modern sea shanty feel. The lyrics tell of journeying and loss, of growing old and falling out of love with youthful endeavours as the character looks back on his life where he

Raised the same flags
Fought the same battles
But his eyes are now drawn
His bones do rattle.

Throughout its journey this is a very graceful, at times stark song full of longing and a desperate sense of loss.

‘One Million Days In Fife’ begins with a very simple, pretty melody with Emma and Ashley’s voices combining perfectly as the song develops into a furious racket. I love the voices intertwine and play-off of one another at various points as the song moves from calm to fury and back again. The Fife of this song is a complex place, a place where ‘everything is wrong and nothing is right’ evoking the problematic nature of roots and belonging, the ties that draw and drag you back to your hometown. A place that

It should make you think
Make you think
Who needs a drink?
I need a drink.

‘Taxi To The Ocean’ is a gorgeous rolling tune that ebbs, flows and surges like the sea before drawing you into treacherous undercurrents. Driven by a gentle, lolling rhythm and keyboard the narrator tells of how

I stumble forward
Then to the light
Oh sweet Jesus
Do the right thing by me

There’s neat flourishes of guitar and Mark’s backing vocals add to the songs sense of serenity and hypnotic feel. As with most Saint Jude’s songs, the religious overtones are matched with by references to drink and potentially doomed love affairs:

When the bottle was empty
There was nothing between us
Oh sweet Jesus
Do the right thing by me
You get a little sadder
Life carries you down
But now do the right thing
Do the right thing by me.

‘Taxi To The Ocean’ is a seductive song, scooping you up in its arms, lulling you into a sense of peacefulness before depositing you in the ocean as the waves of sound build up into a stormy ending, washing over you.

The final ‘official’ song on the album is ‘Foot Of The Walk’, an epic journey through Leith, both old and new, narrated by the crime writer Ian Rankin. The narrator is full of ennui, loathing and love as he negotiates a Saturday night journey through the old port town.

He’s bored with his life
He’s just another self-justified sinner
On a street full of justified sinners
In a city of justified sinners
At the end of their tether.

‘Foot Of The Walk’, like other songs on this album, seem to both celebrate and deconstruct concepts of Scottishness and of the city of Edinburgh. It’s the centre of Scottish capitalism and culture, the home of the enlightenment and also Burke and Hare and James Hogg. A place of extremes hidden under a veneer of polite civility. The song features a choral swell of voices rising above the song, at times providing an elegiac counterpoint to the darker parts of the main narrative thrust while the music provides a swirling mesh of sounds and clamour much like Leith Walk itself.

Finally Saint Jude’s Infirmary sneak in a reprise of ‘Goodbye Jack Vettriano’ as a hidden track. It’s spruced up from the initial outing on the debut and sounds all the better for it. ‘Goodbye Jack Vettriano’ is a delightfully bruised soulful number with sweet female vocals swirling above and around a gorgeous downtempo song. Mark’s voice is at its bittersweet best, full of regret, humour and gravitas as he sings

It’s red and it’s bloody
Clenched tight like a fist
Love is tattooed along his knuckles
Cut here along his writst
And it’s lonely and strong
Still it beats on
Though I know not why
Now that your love has gone.

The words describe a certain kind of Celtic machismo; self-contained, repressed and after a drink or three prone to romanticism and self-destruction:

I know my liver
As it takes another lucky punch
I know my brain
But not a whole bunch
And I know this sad sack of bones
But I know not this heart that I own.

It’s a fantastic, dark yet beautiful end for an album that takes in lifes perennial outsiders – the bruised romantics, sinners and chancers – and sees beauty and strength in the harshest of circumstances and celebrates them without glossing over hard truths.

This Has Been The Death Of Us is an absolute dream of an album, one that is nigh on perfect. It encompasses a wide array of sounds, emotions and moods in a series of heavenly pop thrills. Many other lesser bands have attempted to marry the profound and the profane, the heart and the brain together so well and failed. That Saint Jude’s Infirmary succeed so easily and beautifully is a credit to their skill as writers and performers. They take age old themes and make them into something vivid, contemporary and delightful. This album is, in my humble opinion, an incredibly special record that deserves to be heard by the widest possible audience. They may be the patron saints of lost causes but this album is a love letter not a suicide note.

Terrible Love Songs - St Judes Infirmary - National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh , 22 August 2009

Good things come to those that wait. In terms of the second St Judes Infirmary album “This Has Been The Death Of Us” , a follow up to the 2006 debut “Happy , Healthy, Lucky , Month”, the intervening period has felt a long and frustrating gap. It is unclear how autobiographical the album title is as you can’t go two and a half years between recordings without the odd bit of wear and tear. However the album launch for the St Judes second offering couldn’t have been better timed and further confirmed the band’s ability to stand out from the crowd. Playing the National Portrait Gallery to the backdrop of an avant-garde “Rough Cut” exhibition of modern design pieces echoed St Judes commitment to doing things a wee bit differently. Playing a tea time slot during the Edinburgh festival may not be unusual however playing a free gig amongst the scores of underachieving, overcharging comedians was a welcome break from The Fringe turning Edinburgh into some sort of monstrous stand up comedy Disneyland.

The good news for the dedicated fans and the toil of the band is that on the evidence of the showcase on Saturday, it looks as if the wait has been worthwhile. The ambient and comfortable surroundings allowed the new material to shine and the elapsed months since work begin on this record has seen the group mature in terms of sound and individual ability. Hearing the new material live, and then later on an advance release copy of the album, the patience and precision in all the songs shines through. Compared to the populist “record it quick and pile it high” thrills and spills of “slagheap” indie , the endurance delivered in “This Has Been The Death Of Us” sticks to it’s principles - an almost unique approach at the end of this decade. The detail and delivery of every song has always gained St Judes respect from a devoted and appreciative few rather than the adoration of the masses. The band have always been appreciated in the highest circles in Edinburgh with top crime writer Ian Rankin and acclaimed artist Jack Vettriano keen supporters . Both do parts of narration on the album building on the eerie darkness of the lyrics and contrasting with the melodic and melancholic vocals. Saturday’s show started with a loop of Vettriano as Jack had preferred to go to Leonard Cohen in Monaco than be at the launch in person. (Bet we had better beer) Where other bands have tampered with this type of format in the past these interjections, and poetry between songs from Ryan Van Winkle, the in house reader at the Scottish Poetry Library seemed natural and seamless.

Moreover the sound of St Judes has grown and potentially the band are now close to being able to recreate the genius of their writing on record and during live performance. Despite the band using three guitars, Emma Jane’s voice continues to mesmerise and outfox anything more commonly heard at present. Duets with Ashley, backed by contrasting guitar styles, show a melody and range that more popular outfits can only dream about (sorry Florence). Another original step was seeing a band who had shown enough thought of how to write proper parts for the cello in their songs rather than some trendy notion that a string section will add something while complicating a lick more suited to rhythm guitar. This coupled with a more up tempo approach to drumming by Catherine Myers stops the risk of some of the slower numbers running down the cul de sac of country.

It is very difficult to compare the sound and approach of St Judes with anything commonly prominent at the moment and, like highly acclaimed acts of the recent past such as Silver Jews, Secret Machines, etc , the band run a risk of being musicians musicians. However one of the clever outcomes of doing a free gig in an unusual location is that folk who previously may not have made the effort, stumble across the venue and leave impressed. The short set made sure that happened with an original version of the opening track from their debut “The Church Of John Coltrane ” where the opening verse was recited by Ryan our poet in residence. Adding to this and giving a sense of symmetry not often seen in a Portrait gallery, the band closed with the final track from the new album - “Foot Of The Walk” where the lyrics had been penned by Ian Rankin. The bottom end of Leith Walk perhaps being as far as one can get from the opulence of the Edinburgh International Arts Festival and has been the setting of many a Rankin story murder. The distribution of songsheets, meant that we could all join in with a rousing conclusion. Despite being tucked away as track twelve on the new disk, the song deserves has an anthemic quality and deserves prominent airplay. St Judes are probably the most melodic band I’ve ever been encouraged to join in with. A risk I can’t see many others taking however if Florence Welsh reads this and fancies a pub sing along and a pint please get in touch.

“This Has Been The Death Of Us” has an official release date in September. You don’t need to be an acclaimed Scottish Painter or a multi million selling crime writer to enjoy it. Rankin’s famous character Rebus may advise that its “worth investigating”…

Written by Ian Campbell

Album review: St Jude’s Infirmary
Published Date: 24 August 2009
By Fiona Shepherd
SAINT JUDE’S INFIRMARY: THIS HAS BEEN THE DEATH OF US
****
SEVENTH REALM OF TEENAGE HEAVEN RECORDS, £12.72
TITLED in deadly earnest, this Edinburgh quintet’s second album arrives bearing few scars from its veritable soap opera of a gestation and offering instead a selection box of cosmopolitan delights – a Phil Spector beat, the jangle of a New Orderish guitar, 60s girl group backing vocals – and local reference points, both playful and romantic. The sweet country soul voices of Ashley Campbell and Emma Jane and the rich baritone of the boys come together seductively on Taxi to the Sea, while celebrity patrons Ian Rankin and Jack Vettriano (who also supplies a self-portrait for the album sleeve) deliver their spoken word contributions with drama and relish.

Friday, November 17th, 2006, by treefell, Filed under: Archive| |