Mazzy Star - She Hangs Brightly

In memory of David Roback, guitarist and songwriter with Rain Parade, Opal and Mazzy Star. I still own and treasure the debut albums by all three. A special musician.

There are few things quite as sad to me as friends lost who shouldn't have been lost. People you met at certain points of your life who occupy a specific space who you had important  conversations with that you've lost contact with. It feels like something of a death to remember them years later. Especially when you play a piece of music that reminds you of them

I woke up this Sunday morning intending to write a review while having my breakfast and ended up thinking of Paul Burnand, a university friend of mine from the late eighties. He was from Leeds and was resolutely Northern in every respect so stood out a bit in a rather Southern university and faculty in Norwich. I think he looked at the rest of us with a certain amount of cynicism and detachment but for some reason seemed to except me from that judgement and we became good friends. We shared common interests. In literature and culture most obviously, as that's what we were studying, but also in politics, in music, in sport. Generally there was a bond there and I wish we were still in touch. I imagine he's back in Leeds.  Paul was not the kind to go on Facebook and all other internet searches I've tried have been in vain. I'll keep trying to track him down but in the meantime here's a review that thinking about him has partially inspired.

In my final year before I graduated I was still lacking the direction and drive to go trotting down the career path that life tries to condition you for. At that time Paul was working in a Record Shop in the middle of Norwich and it seemed as desirable a place to be as any other. I would pop in and chat to him during the day and he'd put on choices like Pere Ubu's Non Alignment Pact to keep the customers lively while we did so. Generally he would talk about Neil Young who he had developed a consuming passion for and was in the rapid process of buying each and every album by, a brave pursuit given some of the records that Young had put out.

But I also  remember us discussing and studying the wonderful cover sleeve for this, the first album by Mazzy Star, an LA band featuring David Roback and Hope Sandoval. It seemed like something quite exciting given our shared musical tastes, particularly in the music of the American West Coast.  Roback wasn't a totally unknown quantity. He'd been in The Rain Parade in the early Eighties, along with his brother amongst others. They'd been part of the Paisley Underground scene, a group of bands who'd taken my fancy after I'd discovered R.E.M. and was looking around for something else to follow in a similar vein. From the Rain Parade Roback had gone on to form Opal with Kendra Smith from the Dream Syndicate, another group from the same movement. In retrospect, they were very much a prototype for Mazzy Star. Spectral, spacy vocals. Psychedelic, West Coast guitar with a touch of Velvet Underground steel and menace.

But She Hangs Brightly really did seem to be offering something different even from all that Roback had done before. An updated sixties classicism for a new decade. A spooky, haunted Californian response to the Jesus & Mary Chain's doomed imaginings of what it must feel like to be in America. It seemed fitting when Sandoval and the Mary Chain's guitarist William Reid got together a few years later. Of course, the romance was doomed.

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The album is still a highly effective construction of sound, voice and pure atmosphere almost thirty years on .It's an act of evident fandom,, the love of its influences drips from every moment of it, influences most obviously from music but also from art and literature quite evident in the songs, their titles and lyrics,  and the packaging of the record and the band. The cover photo, of a stairwell at the Hotel Tassel in Brussels is key in conveying the mood the record inspires. A deserted stairwell going up, a deserted stairwell going down and a lift-shaft. The architecture gothic and ornate exits and departures. They're evidently aspiring to create a classic. Within the parameters they set up for themselves, I'd say they succeed.

Sandoval, is clearly, a key ingredient in the success of the record. She adds something new to the mix. A Hispanic dash of romance and exoticism and pure sexuality that no-one on the Paisley Underground scene of white sixties obsessed musos could offer. Kendra Smith came pretty close on some of the Opal records, I recommend them highly if you can track them down, but Sandoval's voice was incredibly affecting and fresh when you heard it first in 1990. Time and countless subsequent releases, where she effectively does the same thing, has lessened the impact. Play her next to Caitlin Rose for example who I've posted just below this on the blog and Sandoval is blown away like a wisp in the desert wind. She has a specific range which she's almost pathologically reluctant to go beyond. It works here though for me subsequent Mazzy Star releases came to be a bit repetitive.  But for the purposes of this album she and Roback are a perfect fit.

The first two songs on the record Halah and Blue Flower are the ones that have stayed with me most over the years. It's a blistering one two that the rest of the record sustains without ever really topping.. Halah  emphasises the sense established by the album cover that this is a song about doorways. It's a track I'll happily listen to for the rest of my allotted days.

'Surely don't stay long I'm missing you now.
It's like I told you I'm over you somehow
Before I close the door I
Need to hear you say goodbye.
Baby won't you change your mind?'

The lyrics don't really convince as true expressions of heartfelt misery, more resigned, detached ennui but having a woman like  Sandoval sing them to you is always gratifying. A moment later she mutters, 'Baby I wish I was dead', and you know immediately she doesn't mean it for a moment. She's a femme fatale, but a strangely reticent and non-forthcoming one and its a concise expression of the cool reserve that comes to define the album.

Blue Flower I'd maintain is the best song on the record. Ironic, as I recently discovered it's not actually a band composition but a cover of a Slapp Happy song from the early Seventies. Perhaps this an indication of the rest of the records lack of lyrical depth because it's the one moment where they break out of their cool reserve and really strike home. The Waiting For The Man steal of the opening riff and the mention of the unsheafed knife are the closest the album comes to actually drawing blood.

'Waitin' for a sign from you
Waitin' for a signal to change
Have you forgotten what your love can do?
Is this the end?

Walkin' through the city
Your boots are high-heeled and are shinin' bright
The sunlight sparklin' on the shaft of your knife
Flower in the morning rain
Dying in my hand
Was it all in vain?

Superstar in your own private movie
I wanted just a minor part
But I'm no fool
I know you're cool
I never really wanted your heart

You're keeper of the key
Nothing seems to bring you down
It's not that cool when I'm around
Flower in the morning rain
Dying in my hand
Was it all in vain?

Superstar in your own private movie
I wanted just a minor part
But I'm no fool
I know you're cool
I never really wanted your heart.'

From here, as I've suggested, they maintain the pace and mood without achieving any particular peaks. It's almost as if their in-built detachment forbids them from doing so. There's not a weak track on the whole album as such and some of them have revealed new depths to me during the writing of this  but they're working within a formula although Roback is too versatile a musician and arranger to really let it show. Although they talk of highways and the open road this is really deeply interior music and generally quite disengaged, evoking and anticipating the decade it came out at the beginning of. This makes it both comforting but also vaguely disquieting. You can't help feeling that David Lynch would have fully approved.

Roback stretches his repertoire beyond The Doors and the Velvets to folk, blues and country and with embellishes the songs with all kinds of assured sixties touches over the course of the record. Generally it's his inventiveness that makes this a ground-breaking album. It's possible to focus solely on his constantly inventive playing and arranging and the layers of the record begin to unfurl and resonate and Sandoval drops to the back of the mix, becoming another instrument rather than the lead. He's one of the best and least feted guitarists of his generation and it's his expression and versatility that make this work so well for me.

By the time the warm, gorgeous, gospel organ of  Free kicks in second song from the end of Side 2 it's clear the record has cast its spell. It's chugging away in an assured narcotic groove all of its own. Closing song Before I Sleep kicks in with the opening flourishes of Nico's  I'll Keep it With Mine and the two clip clop off towards the sunset, their job done.

She Hangs Brightly was one of Kurt Cobain's favourite records and though it's lower down on most people's lists than on his it's well worth owning and revisiting from time to time. It evokes a particular vision of the West of America as an interior space, is perhaps the best representation of David Roback's particular virtuosity and despite my occasional slightly disparaging remarks in this review, Sandoval plays a full role too in the making of a very fine record. Listening to it on a Sunday morning has been a rewarding, immersive four hours.

Now, whatever happened to Paul Burnand? I need to talk to him about this.