#Song sergeant torrent series#

Of course, it's not as straightforward as its two predecessors, 1980's Crocodiles and 1981's Heaven Up Here. While it showcases some of The Bunnymen's most aggressively rhythmic material, though, Porcupine also houses its share of strange, abstract material such as the title track and 'My White Devil', songs that lurch on Spartan rhythms and mix disparate textures like Spanish guitar and cravenly artificial synthesizer, a fact that's led many to inaccurately characterize the album as the band's 'difficult' record, something it's really not. Porcupine was loaded with songs like that, unfolding with the cascading stomp of 'The Cutter', one of the band's best singles with its weird, elastic synthesizer melodies.

The way the music drops out of the treble range and yields to a deep, miles-thick synthesizer groan behind McCulloch's frantically shouted chorus is disorienting and breathtaking- it's an anthem for adrenal glands.

'Back of Love' is simply the astonishing highlight of the group's career, featuring frenetic drumming, laser-focused basswork and Will Sergeant's choppy, heavily delayed guitar chords.

The epitome is 'Back of Love', from 1983's Porcupine, an album that initially wasn't even released stateside, but in hindsight proves to be the band's definitive statement.

#Song sergeant torrent series#

Listening back to the band's five original albums on Rhino's excellently remastered reissue series in an age when rhythm is returning to the fore of the underground, it's hard not to notice just how charged and visceral some of these records were. The Liverpool quartet created an absolutely huge sound on record to match their frontman's flair for grandiosity, and they bore it to you on the backs of bassist Les Pattinson and drummer Pete DeFreitas, a rhythm section whose sheer power and imagination is chronically overlooked. Ian McCulloch's (melo)dramatic, psychedelic crooner vocals and frequent forays into quasi-religious lyrical imagery are something you just have to accept without overthinking it, but the fact is that this band made that kind of stuff sound great. Granted, there are reasons aside from their moniker that people might shy away from Echo & The Bunnymen. And the fact is, they really were a good band in their day (and actually still are in their reconstituted form today), but it's hard to find anyone who really takes them all that seriously.

I can't count the number of times I've found myself saying, 'No, seriously, they're really quite good once you get past the name,' to someone unfamiliar with their work. I can see it sounding funny on a drunk Saturday evening, but to seriously go through with it and start releasing albums under the name The Bunnymen (Echo was their drum machine) is just beyond reason, not only because it's a silly name, but because it's a name that engenders skepticism immediately when you say it. So what kind of drugs do you think it was? I only ask because it seems fairly obvious that Echo & The Bunnymen were a band christened during a period of impaired judgment.