1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 419. Siouxsie And The Banshees – The Scream (1978)

 

It’s an interesting juxtaposition, having this album right after X-Ray Spex, since both bands are punk/post-punk groups with a female vocalist and yet are very different in feel. While Poly Styrene is like a bolshy younger sister, Siouxsie Sioux is more like a cooler older sister, and the music is much darker and adult compared to X-Ray Spex. Heard within historical context, it’s as if this album spins the music off in direction of goth, while X-Ray Spex is the start of riot grrrl, and yet are clearly related still. It’s quite a nice evolutionary metaphor.

The way that the tracks are mixed makes all components – vocal, guitar, bass, and drums – at the same relative level, so for the most part Sioux’s vocals don’t stand out, nor are there flashy solos. This is entirely deliberate on the part of the band, all four members having production credits along with Steve Lillywhite. The drums, in particular, are mixed high on the bass and the low toms, to give a kind of ominous rumbling thunder to the tracks, but without becoming sludgy and indistinct.

The album opens with Pure, a short and oddly ethereal instrumental, like a sinister version of The Cocteau Twins, which plays almost as an extended intro to the next track Jigsaw Feeling. This is more representative of the sound of the album as a whole – driving, almost mechanical beats that owe much to krautrock bands (also felt a little like Hawkwind), and this one has a great finish where John MacKay’s guitar thrashes away, then drop out leaving only the pounding, almost tribal, drum beat to finish from Kenny Morris.

This particular style is continued to good effect in Suburban Relapse and Switch, at the end of the album, but the stand-out to me is Metal Postcard/Mittageisen, a highly mechanised track very strongly reminiscent of the krautrock style with the dystopian chorus that

“Metal is tough, metal will sheen
Metal won't rust when oiled and cleaned
Metal is tough, metal will sheen
Metal will rule in my master scheme”. 

Sioux’s vocals are generally pitched in a low range, almost monotone, but with flicks up to high squeak, especially in the ending refrain where the two syllables of the word “metal” are sung with an octave jump. It’s a style repeated by female post-punk vocalists like Lena Lovich or Hazel O’Conner for many years to come.

Forget the rather twee novelty of Hong Kong Gardens (not on this album apart from some re-issues), these are delightfully dark and grown-up, sources of inspiration for a whole slew of later artists. This is one of those rare albums where I had to listen again to get my thoughts in order, but also because I wanted to. It's strange – it doesn’t do anything, component-wise, that hasn’t been done before, but it also sounds like nothing that’s gone before.