Send "The Raincoats " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Treblezine |
 In June of 1993, Kurt Cobain extolled the virtues of The Raincoats' first album, a scratchy little record that gave him moments of peace at a time when he was feeling unhappy. Indeed, The Raincoat's self-titled debut is an odd sort of feel-good record full of shuffling guitars and off-kilter vocals joined by violin. The all-girl dose of post-punk quirk was akin to a blend of The Slits and Public Image Ltd. with a sound that would be echoed in groups like The Vaselines and eventually Nirvana. The band's oddness, as much as their emotional honesty and immediacy, were a big part of their charm and the album's appeal. Who would follow a cover of The Kinks' "Lola" with guitarist/frontwoman Ana da Silva's alley cat mewl on the dirge-like "The Void"? The lyrical content as well as the frank, minimalist sound was what likely prompted Cobain to comment that listening to The Raincoats' first album was more like sharing the same space with them, being there with the band and listening in on them like some kid secretly looking downstairs with his face pressed between balusters. That said, when compared to their self-titled debut, The Raincoats' second album, Odyshape, is something different. It's a challenging recording to be admired (like its predecessor) for its unbridled emotion but also to be admired for its songs that topple over themselves. The songs on Odyshape continue in the same minimalist vein, but they are more chaotic and strewn about. It's for this reason that Odyshape is such a difficult album to describe. The closest thing I can come to is this: rather than a clandestine peer downstairs to catch a conversation, Odyshape is more like listening to disjointed voices that come and go in a hallway or on a city street below; you're still listening in, but the voices are jumbled and even more off-kilter than before. For instance, on "Go Away," the bass and drums and guitar and vocals and siren squeals of violin move at once independently and yet in some anarchic order like the frantic motion of an octopus' tentacles. Any superlatives of avant-gardism bestowed upon the band's debut are more aptly applied to Odyshape. Take for instance the dazed, dizzy hints of dub on "Dancing in My Head" or the wails heard on "Red Shoes," the latter like "The Void" in a state of sheer chaos. It's like taking the first album and putting it through a Velvet Underground filter that's equal parts "European Son," "The Black Angel's Death Song" and "The Murder Mystery."...full text |
| Pitchfork |
| It's well documented that plenty of oddities were snapped up and issued by major labels during the grunge era, but the fact that DGC released four albums by post-punk artists the Raincoats (including re-releases of their first three records and the then-new Looking in the Shadows) remains a confounding footnote of that time. David Geffen clearly didn't swell his already sizable bank balance by reissuing the band's second album Odyshape, as it quickly became as hard to find as the original 1981 Rough Trade version. It must be frustrating for the group to have their music fading in and out of time like this-- the preceding The Raincoats and the following Moving have been treated in the same manner-- but it helped cultivate a mystique around Odyshape. That feeling is partially shaped by the distinctly un-rock approach, with the core trio of the band (Ana Da Silva, Gina Birch, and Vicky Aspinall) occasionally utilizing African instruments including a balophone and a kalimba to get the job done. A big part of Odyshape's charm is derived from its backwards construction, with the band leaning away from the spikiness that made The Raincoats such an inviting listen, and writing many of the songs without percussion. The tribal drumming of original member Palmolive was forcibly removed from the mix-- she quit the band by the time of this record, causing percussion to be added after the fact by a variety of guest players including Robert Wyatt and This Heat's Charles Hayward. Coloring in the songs in that manner might sound like the band were shoving a square peg in a round hole, but it undoubtedly contributed to the uniquely disorienting air that Odyshape thrives on. It's from a place where the Raincoats' best ideas stem-- throwing orthodoxy out of the window, playing on instruments with which they weren't familiar, assembling all the parts back to front because the standard way of doing things held little or no interest....full text |
| Bbc |
| If The Raincoats’ beautifully scrappy self-titled debut seemed to hail from a different territory than most of its post-punk peers, then its follow-up, 1981’s Odyshape, was from an entirely different planet. While the first album had employed a traditional guitar/bass/drums set-up bolstered by the plaintive and dissonant violin of Vicky Aspinall, Odyshape added instruments such as balophone, shruti box and kalimba to the band’s panoply. More than the exotic instrumentation, though, it’s the extraordinary structures of Odyshape’s songs that distinguish it. They don’t so much begin and end as ebb and flow in a way that, historically, seems to have bewildered at least as many listeners as it’s beguiled. Take album opener Shouting Out Loud, which begins as an aching mid-tempo ballad carried along on an intricately picked bassline. Aspinall’s torrid violin shifts it into more uneasy territory before the song recedes into an extended instrumental outro of pattering drums, harshly plucked strings and spidery guitar work of the sort Marc Ribot would employ a few years later on Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs....full text |
The Raincoats lyrics
|
| |||||||
