A. Because it's the best thing that Iceland's sole famous pop group have ever done and because this is actually a brand new version recorded with the help of Jim and William from The Jesus And Mary Chain."
— Josephine Collins
People had been trying to warn us for a long time that there was this fabulously talented chanteuse from the tiny nation of Iceland who was going to be huge. The Sugarcubes had only formed in 1986 but hipster critics from the NME and the Melody Maker were already praising them to death just a year later. Twelve months on from that and they were the musical guests on an episode of Saturday Night Live and they still hadn't had a Top 40 in either the UK or US. Their fanbase grew but for the rest of us they remained this group whose debut album was always in the discount racks of HMV stores. Then it was 1993 and Björk was everywhere. It only took seven years but here she was, an overnight success. (Of course, no one knew what was coming for her but it was easy to see that The Sugarcubes were going to be something else — and this wasn't all down to their unique vocalist)
Rock guitarists were on the defensive by the end of the decade. Most of them found the eighties to be a cess pool of fairlight synths, drum machines and, more recently, sampling. The "real" music they had grown up on in their bedrooms, basements and garages no longer had a place alongside all this "manufactured" junk that was dominating the charts. They seemed unaware that hip hop had been every bit as D.I.Y. as punk and were similarly ignorant to their beloved Beatles having been masters of studio trickery which clashed with rock 'n' roll mythology. The remix had long been a staple of dance pop but Coldcut's groundbreaking retooling of Erik B & Rakim's "Paid in Full" made it a much more commercially viable option. So, too, did the Quincy Jones remix of New Order's "Blue Monday", once a brilliantly dark 12" sensation that the legendary producer/jazz musician turned into a glorious pop song (one that this writer prefers to the original).
Remixes were anathema to rock purists so it was a good thing that Jim and William Reid were anything but classic rock snobs. Rather than rope in, say, The Beatmasters or Frankie Knuckles to twist their 1987 single "Birthday" into a rave up favourite (something Björk would not have been against a few years later), they got their drinking pals from Scottish act The Jesus & Mary Chain to drench their trademark buzzsaw guitars and slop buckets full of feedback all over it. The results seem unnecessary on paper but proved to be exactly what was needed. While there's no denying that the version from a year earlier is outstanding, it still sounds like they were struggling to hide the influence of the Cocteau Twins. By making "Birthday" more of a Jesus & Mary Chain single, it ended up sounding like nothing that had ever been made.
As I have said before about J&MC, the Reids had patented a method of burying their vocals beneath layers of distortion rather than screaming and shouting over the racket. While this would seem to be exactly what you shouldn't do, it somehow worked and fans had to force themselves to listen closely to whispers among loads of chaos. This is somewhat the case here as well only Björk is a much stronger singer than Jim and William Reid. While it is much easier to appreciate her range on the original mix of "Birthday" (especially the way her voice pierces and wails on the Icelandic version "Ammæli"), her vocal seems all the more extraordinary as she tries to push her way past all that Mary Chain noise. It's impossible to say which is better but the two compliment each other not unlike The Beatles' electrified "Revolution" and its acoustic companion "Revolution 1" — one may prefer one or the other but they're best appreciated in tandem.
In a fortnight teeming with Stock Aitken Waterman releases (no less than four reviewed by Josephine Collins and that's not including stable king Rick Astley with an early stab at creative independence), as well as plenty of solid yet unspectacular pop from the likes of Michael Jackson and even the Pet Shop Boys (big a fan of them as I am, "Domino Dancing" has never been a huge favourite of mine), "Birthday" stands out as a testament to The Sugarcubes as one of the finest groups of their time, the Reids expertly transforming someone else's work into something they could have created and Björk as a generational vocalist and performer. It even suggests what she might have done in the nineties had she gone in the direction of indie rock. The Top 40 wasn't quite ready for them but indie kids were starting to catch on. We can't say we weren't warned.
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
The Pasadenas: "Riding on a Train"
Quite the contrast from a Sugarcubes/J&MC collaboration, it would be easy and understandable to dismiss "Riding on a Train" as derivative fluff. It's not especially profound or fresh but it's a highly enjoyable record nonetheless. All five Pasadenas have top notch voices and none of them resort to over-emoting the way R&B Romeos couldn't stop doing just a few short years later. (This was a time when people were still using the word 'soul' to describe this kind of music which I always felt was much more in line with top flight mainstream pop than the bulk of subsequent R&B acts who always seemed painfully concerned with 'keeping it real' and all that) I thought it was stupid when it began it's push up into the UK Top 20 that September but the earworm tune eventually won me over. We need more groups like The Pasadenas.
