the THE
Ensoulement
(EarMUSIC)
"The London I knew has gone gone gone."
'Some Days I Drink My Coffee By The Grave Of William Blake' from Matt Johnson’s new the The album, Ensoulment, apparently written some years ago, includes that taxi driver pronouncement. Which London is he referring to? The gentrified, cafe-inundated, young people populated conurbation? Or the dread one of the EDL imagination, a ‘shariah state’, where all the pubs are mosques…?
The past few years have really laid waste to the loose agreement between what was once the progressive left and artists, independent journalists and activists. Where once we could all have agreed that secret bad stuff happens, all the time and that there is a shadowy ‘other’ government in charge of the world. now, for those of us who notice, it’s like a cat walking on gravel, looking for the safe stones on which to stand.
Matt Johnson, the ‘band’ that is the The, has long been considered a truth teller, from raw heartache to exposing the cadres of the cruel and powerful. He returns with his first new album in a long time, that voice, accent still archly occupying some un-mapped island in the middle Atlantic, still telling the paranoia, bringing the pithy descriptions that once seemed so, right, (‘your thoughts are thinking you’) to a background of extremely trad, light weight rock.
Although he long abandoned the bedroom-to-expensive studio electronics that established him in the 1980s, it’s disappointing to hear how unremarkable the arrangements and instrumentation are on this album. Something about the way he handled the sound of a ‘real band’ on 1990’s albums Dusk and Mindbomb meant that I could forgive him for reneging on the promise of his first, mad (and almost unlistenable) album, Burning Blue Soul, probably in order to make some cash. There was an edge and the songs hooked. Dusk soundtracked my daughter’s mother’s labour and we gave our CD copy to one of the doctors at the birth. That was Johnson’s special power, a kind of personal connection that meant you would trust him to brew you a cup of ayahuasca and accompany you on your flight. Now I don’t think I would.
Linoleum Smooth To The Stockinged Foot in particular lurks in the weird, lukewarm jacuzzi of frightened and angry anti-vaxxers. Why he chooses to be angry about the distribution of a vaccine but is, probably, happy to ingest tins of baked beans or fly in airplanes, trusting other humans with his life, is a mystery to me. He doesn’t strike me as particularly stupid.
But then, Van Morrison can sound like a growling angel and Eric Clapton can still play guitar like a demon. That’s probably the real societal damage of the convergence of Covid and an efficient internet; people who were once, mainly experts in articulating the speech of the heart now feel like they’ve been given the Dead Sea Scrolls and it’s obvious to them they were written by lizard aliens and they can’t help but tell us this, through tweets and songs.
So, what is the truth behind what’s happened to Matt Johnson? perhaps we will never know, but we can all certainly guess, publicly if necessary and, you know maybe we should. The power of big the The can’t be under-estimated.
