No-Man – Flowermouth

April 1994

Flowermix, September 1995
Remastered October 2005

In the entry for Lovesighs: An Entertainment, I wrote the following:

“If I were to choose between those two sides of No-Man, I definitely prefer the trip hop side, largely because the failure mode of trip hop isn’t a formless mush the way it is with ambient music, so it was welcome to see an album where No-Man pulled together all the things they did in that vein, even if it wasn’t 100% successful. Might also explain my response to what they’d get up to later.”

This is, upon further reflection, not quite a true statement. Flowermouth sees the band upsetting that delicate balance, drifting more toward ambient-influenced music, and creating a stronger record for it. Part of the issue with what I said earlier is that the trip-hoppy aspects of their sound evolved largely from the time and place (80s/90s England) where the band was formed, whereas the ambient parts of their sound form an emotional core. It provides a path forward when trip hop becomes decadent and ossified. The other problem with that statement is that while it’s much easier to screw up ambient music, the reward for doing it right is something transcendent, almost spiritual. And god help me, they did it.

In addition, leaning on the ambient side of their sound short-circuits another concern I had. In the entry for Ocean Song, I wrote the following:

“Honestly, in a typical No-Man song the violin is doing quite a bit of the work […] He [Coleman] is, at this stage, the glue holding No-Man’s artistic output together, and I think I’m going to sorely miss him once he’s gone.”

Yes, at this stage, meaning that period between 1990 and 1993. His relative absence was deeply and profoundly felt in Loveblows and Lovecries. Not quite so much here. He’s featured on seven of the album’s nine tracks, but he’s no longer shouldering so much of the responsibility for making them good. Nor are they wheeling him out to do a violin solo when they need to fill space. (…usually. *Looks askance at Shell of a Fighter.*) His parts are actually accentuating the music now. So while I’m still going to miss him once he’s gone, especially because this album gestures in a direction their music would have gone if he stayed with the band, it’s clear No-Man isn’t going to fall apart without him.

In a 2000 interview with Anil Prasad, the band said that Flowermouth was an attempt to go back to making “pure No-Man music” after spending the previous four years playing the Music Industry Game by the rules with little to show for it except serious record label tension. In many respects the attempt was successful. However, in listening to this album it becomes quite clear that the trip hop sound didn’t come from their heart as much as their attempt to mold themselves in One Little Indian’s image in the hopes they’d sell more records. (But what about Wild Opera, you say. We’ll get to that next time.) The verses of You Grow More Beautiful and Soft Shoulder in particular sound forced, almost perfunctory, like the disintegration of their relationship with their old label left behind a malfunctioning autopilot and they’re still playing what’s expected of them. The choruses of both songs, however, are soaring and beautiful. If not for the characteristically melancholy lyrics, they’d sound downright anthemic. They sound like how No-Man want to sound.

It would be reductive to say that all the electronic performances were soulless or done without passion. Simple, for instance, is a taut, tense piece of trancey dance pop majesty. Richard Barbieri’s contributions to Shell of a Fighter are what make (or, less charitably, rescue) that song. Going back to the Soft Shoulder chorus, its almost shoegazey wall of sound is brilliant. As clear as it is that their wheelhouse is firmly on the organic side of things, and they know it, they can do something harsher when they want to.

Speaking of stuff that’s organic, Mel Collins. His soprano saxophone solo on the first track sounds like it wandered in from a Dave Matthews Band jam session, and in the twenty seconds it works its magic it injects more urbanity to the album than a million programmed 90s drum beats ever could. (The first track in general is excellent, really.) His flute solo at the end of Animal Ghost is no slouch, either, pulling the track it’s on in a different, more natural and ethereal direction. The horn boy only shows up on the album three times, but he contributes some of its greatest moments, and is arguably as integral to the Flowermouth sound as Ben Coleman.

And finally, there’s the last track. Things Change is a brutal, merciless, gut-wrenching portrait of a dead relationship’s very final moments, slowed down second by excruciating second. It is, to its credit, very hard to listen to, especially with Tim Bowness’ repeated, pleading refrain of “You’re leaving me behind” reminding us exactly what’s going on here. Twisting the knife further, this breakup is reframed as the culmination of a slow drifting apart, an occurrence as natural as changing seasons, underscoring that Bowness is powerless to stop what’s happening. He can only stand and watch as his lover moves on without him. Ouch.

The drums are by Chris Maitland, who you may know. It is, in fact, partially on the strength of his work on this album that Maitland was invited to join Porcupine Tree. Well done, lads.

1. Flowermouth
2. Loveblows & Lovecries: A Confession

*record needle scratch* We’ve forgotten something.

A big problem with pulling together the No-Man bits of this retrospective is that their supplemental stuff, remix albums, EPs, and such, are stupid hard to find. In contrast, I was able to listen to every single album in that JBK post all the way through. But No-Man has pretty consistently had the largest proportion of Stuff That Can’t Be Found On The Internet Without A Torrent Or A Paid Spotify Subscription, and it’s given me a lot of problems. And that includes Flowermix, this album’s now-deleted companion remix record.

Between the cassette and CD versions, there are twelve songs that are featured on this album. YouTube, as of this writing, has four: Angeldust, Faith in You, Sample, and Why the Noise. All four are worth listening to at least once, but Angeldust is my personal favorite, largely because it takes that lovely soprano sax solo (soprano sax is the true sex sax) and lets it permeate the rest of the track the way it wants to. It’s not quite its centerpiece, but it’s pretty dang close, and I love it for that.

I wish I could find the others.

[Update 10/12/18: Glory hallelujah, here’s the whole thing. Flowermix, it turns out, is about an hour of trancey goodness, sounding roughly like what would happen if Bowness had substantially contributed to Voyage 34. A lot of the songs on here are elevated when they’re presented as their own standalone thing instead of as a remix of something else. The first track is still the standout, although the closer, Born Simple, is no slouch either. I actually might like it better than the source material.]

No-Man – Loveblows and Lovecries: A Confession

May 1993; US Edition, May 1994

Sweetheart Raw, January 1993
Only Baby, March 1993
Painting Paradise, June 1993
Taking it Like a Man, April 1994

Couldn’t find the Hit the North session recording from 1992. Mea culpa.

This is not visible to you, the reader, but this one comes after Two. Solid. Months. of stalling because (a) lots of travelling bollixed up my writing steez for basically all of that time (Amsterdam and New York were both wonderful, though), and (b) I quite simply could not get a read on this thing. Even as this post goes live, a month and a half after I wrote it, I’m still not entirely certain I have the first No-Man album nailed down.

Let’s begin with first impressions. I was surprised at how not-that-bad it was. So surprised, in fact, that I had to go back and listen to all of No-Man’s albums and make sure that my initial negative impression of No-Man from way back in 2011 was artificially produced. And it turns out…it kind of was.

I probably shouldn’t have started back then with Schoolyard Ghosts, which (spoilers) I still think is a weak album. I also probably should have found a better way to listen to the albums than track-by-individual-track on YouTube, which seriously broke up their flow and forced me to think of them as a bunch of tracks all in a row, as opposed to coherent wholes. And—let’s be honest—part of it was me, and the expectations I had for what a Steven Wilson Thing should sound like.

So, some more spoilers. There’s good stuff here. They recovered pretty well from losing Ben Coleman, to the point where Together We’re Stranger is probably their best album. (Although this opinion may change by the time we actually get there.) Their shift away from trip-hop in the late-90s / early-00s was unequivocally a good idea, because if they were still trying to bring back the spirit of the early-mid 90s in 2003, it wouldn’t have gone over well. No-Man is still my least favorite of SW’s four biggest projects, and many of their songs still feel either unambitious or unsuccessful attempts at eclecticism, but I’m not nearly as dismissive of them as I was.

Also, Days in the Trees remains the best thing they’ve ever done.

Now, to the album. This is in many ways a stylistic continuation (I won’t say maturation) of what they were doing in Lovesighs – An Entertainment, in that much of this album is that slightly awkward mishmash of ambient music and trip-hop, only this time with not as much violin to save them when they flounder. This means that its high points are when it does something different. For instance: once in a while you can hear the occasional Porcupine Tree flourish, like in Sweetheart Raw, with the raw (heh) guitar work, the occasional sample lifted from Voyage 34, and that sweet solo at the end. The Voyage 34 samples return briefly in Beautiful and Cruel, and while they don’t exactly salvage what is easily the album’s worst song, they do give it a point in its favor.

Some other examples: Only Baby, the best song off the UK release, sounds like a slightly new-age version of Ebeneezer Goode, to the point where it seems like the song’s message is that the ecstasy of love is just as potent and revolutionary as actual ecstasy. Tulip has a fantastic flute solo. Break Heaven’s chorus is incredible. The US release brings back Days in the Trees yet again, at last giving it the stature and exposure it deserves. The thing is, though, the high points of an album ought to be when you’re taking the general aesthetic you’re going for and either pushing it to new heights, expanding it, or pulling it back and letting it breathe; not when you’re pushing it aside to let something else come in and perform for a bit.

There was some ancillary stuff released about the same time as the album; a few singles, a few remixes. I wasn’t all that impressed with what I could find. The Only Baby single release, for instance, can be streamed on Spotify. I feel like I’m talking about a favorite child when I bring up Days in the Trees again, but it seems like that EP spoiled us by how radically it reworked that song, several times over, bringing forward overlooked facets of the song or just using bits and pieces of its melody and dramatically recontextualizing them. In so doing it apparently set the bar extremely high for what a No-Man remix should look like.

In contrast, three-fourths of Only Baby is the same song cut up and rearranged, with sections added and removed, as if by a mechanical arm at an automated workstation. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—there’s a stretched-out mix of Perfect Life on the Hand. Cannot. Erase. Blu-ray that’s just as powerful as the original—but here I don’t get the sense that any new angles of the song were illuminated. I don’t think we gain anything from these different versions of the song beyond a temporary indecision on the part of Steven and Tim as to which version was definitive. It’s just there.

In that way, the Only Baby single could be treated as a synecdoche for the album itself, really: it’s there, it’s a decent way to kill some time, and it certainly isn’t as bad as I remember, but I don’t think it’s something that I’ll be coming back to very often.

1. Loveblows & Lovecries: A Confession

No-Man – Ocean Song

September 1992

Gotta say, after covering a little Porcupine Tree after three No-Man posts in a row, coming back to No-Man feels like coming home, in a weird way. Ocean Song is a three-track single thingy, so this joint is gonna be a bit shorter.

The single’s structured beautifully. You have the main event right front and center, and then after that is a shortish ambient interlude, and then the B-side. So, first up, title track. Ocean Song is based off the melody of Donovan’s “Turquoise.” This is literally the only thing the two songs have in common. I listened to Ocean Song and Turquoise back-to-back and I can only faintly hear Leitch’s influence, probably because the bits from Turquoise are so radically altered from their original context (60s folk vs. 90s trip-hop) that they may as well be original to No-Man. (This is in contrast to Colours, where more of the original’s essence was retained in the transition.) The song itself is quite good; turns out that if you don’t have an ambient expanse to give your song a soul, a few acoustic guitar bits and Ben Coleman’s violin will do almost as well.

The ambient interlude, Back to the Burning Shed, is small and sweet and gets the job done. The B-side is Swirl, an eight-minute wander that is decidedly not single-worthy. Much of it proceeds in typical No-Man fashion, but this time with some decidedly Porcupine Tree touches like the guitar solo in the first half and the feedback swells accentuating the “let it all hang out” spoken word piece at the end. And actually, suddenly throwing PT in there like that was a bit jarring. 90s No-Man sounds very little like anything else Wilson’s done, and at this point I’m so used to the two bands’ sounds being so different and—more importantly—discrete, that I have to consciously remember that Wilson isn’t just there to look pretty.

But the song’s high point, once again, is the violin that kicks in at four minutes. Honestly, in a typical No-Man song the violin is doing quite a bit of the work; Ben Coleman has the superhuman ability to salvage a terrible song and kick a good No-Man song into the upper atmosphere. He is, at this stage, the glue holding No-Man’s artistic output together, and I think I’m going to sorely miss him once he’s gone.

But of course the absolutely best part of this record is the drag queen on the cover. How could it not be.

No-Man – Lovesighs – An Entertainment

April 1992

This is another collection of stuff from 1990 and 1991, some of which we’ve seen before, some of which we haven’t. Technically not the band’s first EP, if we assume a continuity between No-Man and No Man Is An Island. But we’re stalling.

Let’s get the OK tracks out of the way first. Heartcheat Pop is kind of a generic trip hop thing. The violin’s nice, the Your Woman-esque sample is very nice, but (once again) I’m not entirely sure what Tim’s trying to do with his voice here. It seems like it’s trying to be almost lascivious, especially in the first verse, but Bowness’ voice is fragile and vulnerable, better suited for high notes, so listening to him stick a toe into the lower half of his vocal range, in this context, makes him sound like a kid trying to wear his dad’s clothes. The not-quite-a-remix, Heartcheat Motel, is a bit better, largely because the verses are jettisoned and the instrumentation is given more space to unspool itself. Kiss Me Stupid runs in a similar vein to Heartcheat Pop, but without as much to distinguish itself. And I once again find myself wishing the closer, the Reich mix of Days in the Trees, was two or three times as long as it was.

Now then, the good stuff. First up, the cover of Donovan’s “Colours.” Here No-Man does their civic responsibility as a band in 1992 and makes it sound to a 1992 audience what the original sounded like to an audience in 1965. That is to say, they turned it into a trip hop song. And it sounds great as a trip hop song. The acoustic riff in the original translates surprisingly well to the drum loop in the cover. And Bowness’ voice is actually put to good use here; attempting to give his vocals the same slightly sinister edge as in Heartcheat Pop but here actually succeeding. The video is great, too, largely because we learn that Bowness had Brian May hair in the early 90s and dances like he found himself behind the wheel of a large automobile. The early footage of Wilson intensely but emotionlessly playing guitar in the background doesn’t hurt, either.

And, of course, there’s the Mahler mix of Days in the Trees. In the context of the album, if the first track is the warm-up, the second track is the Statement of Purpose, and there’s no better Statement of Purpose than this brilliant little number. Here’s why.

At this point in No-Man’s career they’re oscillating between two different poles—the ambience of Speak and the trip hop of this album—but not quite feeling comfortable with either. But this song manages to reconcile both sides of their musical personality, and allows them to build on each other. The trip hop gives the ambient side a pulse, and the ambience gives the trip hop side a personality. This right here is the platonic ideal of an early No-Man song. Savor it, for I don’t think we’ll see anything quite like it again. (And, of course, the violin solo at four minutes is still amazing.)

Come to think of it, Days in the Trees actually works better in the context of Lovesighs. On its single of the same name, it functions as a base mold, existing only to be manipulated into different forms. Here, though, it’s with other songs that are trying, with varying degrees of success, to do the same thing. It’s among peers.

If I were to choose between those two sides of No-Man, I definitely prefer the trip hop side, largely because the failure mode of trip hop isn’t a formless mush the way it is with ambient music, so it was welcome to see an album where No-Man pulled together all the things they did in that vein, even if it wasn’t 100% successful. Might also explain my response to what they’d get up to later.

Next up, something we all know.

No-Man – Speak

Recorded 1989-1991, remixed and released 1999

As the recording information makes clear, this album exists in two places at once, chronologically. The original recordings of all these songs were done in in the late 80s and early 90s, and released on cassette tapes that are no longer readily available. Then, almost ten years later, Wilson and Bowness dusted off all those old songs, remixed and rerecorded them, and released them in their current forms. Nevertheless, enough of the material on this record dates back to the early 90s that I’m comfortable covering it now.

Ambient music is a deceptively tricky beast. Done right it can be contemplative, expansive, even spiritual; something that’s able to crystallize broad swathes of emotion and experience into a few notes, washes, and textures. Done wrong it can be a dull and lifeless chore to sit through, made even worse by this feeling that we should be feeling something in this moment but aren’t. There’s not a lot of room between the two. Some of the tracks on Speak do manage to reach those sorts of heights, but as the album goes on, most of them collapse into a vaguely pink taffy mush.

For instance, the title track, first song off the album. The violin, the singing, and the bass (especially the bass), all lovely. Or Pink Moon, the Nick Drake cover, which switches out the acoustic guitar for something more meditative, and chops up and reverses the original’s piano bits and sends them gently floating down to earth, like snow. It’s also a minute longer, allowing the ambient swells to take center stage and nudge the song forward. Thing is, those are the only two songs I’d unambiguously recommend off this album.

Songs like Iris Murdoch Cut Me Down, though, don’t work quite as well. In that one, for instance, the instrumentation doesn’t really go anywhere, and the vocals sound like they came from a completely different song. Curtain Dream seems half-finished (ironic, considering that was one of the ones completely re-recorded in ‘99). The instrumentation in River Song is identical to the original, with the same ominously pastoral atmosphere, but the No-Man vocals don’t have the same punches and harmonies that Donovan’s do. The Ballet Beast is just kind of…there. Death and Dodgson’s Dreamchild doesn’t cohere at all.

I get what No-Man are going for here. This is supposed to be a record that documents small, quiet moments both positive and negative. And many of the songs do have moments that capture that sort of feeling. For instance: the harmonica in Heaven’s Break; the violin in French Free Terror Suspect, and Night Sky Sweet Earth (god bless Ben Coleman); and the piano in Riverrun and Life With Picasso. But those are all moments. Otherwise, much of Speak seems oddly half-finished, like they were a collection of sketches more than actual songs (which would have been fine if that’s how it was advertised), and pale especially in comparison to the more developed stuff they’d release later on.

No-Man – Days in the Trees

July 1991

“A great philosopher once wrote, ‘NAUGHTY NAUGHTY, VERY NAUGHTY.’” —The Shamen, Ebeneezer Goode, 1992

I’d have said something about their cover of Donovan’s “Colours” from November 1990, which has been described as proto-trip-hop, but the only version available online is the Lovesighs version from 1992.

Anyway, Days in the Trees. One song, four mixes. Six if you were in Japan in January 1992. It’s gorgeous.

I was actually kind of surprised, given (here we go again) I’m not into No-Man, but the Mahler mix—which is the first version we hear and is the most conventionally song-like—is incredible. The standout bits here are the piano and Ben Coleman’s violin, lending some serious pastoral brightness that contrasts with and overpowers any artifice inherent in the song’s trip-hoppy skeleton. It’s all very pleasant and soothing, and then four minutes in the shuffling drumbeats drop out and the violin is given free rein to hurl itself toward the clear blue sky. The first time I listened to this I was coming off a really bad day, I was exhausted and stressed out, and I was amazed at how the song seemed to literally wash away all the crap I had been freighted with. It was like some much-needed therapy.

If you were in most of the world, next up would be the Ives mix. If you were in Japan, the Bach mix would be next. Either way, the song that comes on immediately afterward functions almost as an epilogue; a distillation of what made the Mahler mix great. Ives places the violin front and center and lets it cut loose right from the start. Bach may not have a Ben Coleman in it but it ramps up the song’s ambient qualities, resulting in ninety seconds of solid chill-out goodness.

The Arthur Askey mix, from the Japanese release, is another animal entirely. It’s still chilled-out the way the others were, to an extent, but Bowness now sings over some properly 90s bleeps and bloops and a nice crunchy drum machine and hang on a minute.

This was made by the Shamen? No, no, The. Shamen. The guys responsible for “Ebeneezer Goode,” that delightfully demented love letter to ecstasy, one of the most gloriously 1992 dance songs ever written. That Shamen?

Really?

You’re kidding.

I shouldn’t be too surprised. Wilson got Alex Freaking Lifeson and Robert Freaking Fripp to guest on Fear of a Blank Planet. He did a guest vocal on a Pendulum song, of all things. Since this was released in July 1991, I’m willing to bet this was done during that liminal period between the release of En-Tact in November 1990 and the first single off that album and their first big hit, Move Any Mountain, also in July 1991. And, most importantly, No-Man and the Shamen were labelmates. This collaboration makes sense, given where everyone was at the time. But No-Man and the Shamen are nevertheless two groups that I would never have imagined would ever come in contact with each other.

That said, I’m honestly not sure if the Shamen aesthetic works well with what No-Man were doing here. The end result definitely feels like one thing grafted uncomfortably onto another thing and is otherwise uninteresting.

Bartok is a bit better. The sitar, flute, and violin samples better enhance the song’s naturalistic feel, while the trancey bassline gives it both momentum and room to breathe. The last remix, Reich, sounds like it could have been on an ambient music album twenty years later. The instrumentation makes it sound like she’s telling the story while relaxing by the side of a river, under a beautiful canopy of cherry blossoms. It really sounds lovely. But right when she says “it was the first time I fell in love,” right when we expect the song to launch into something more breathtaking and expansive (Chicane’s So Far Out to Sea is instructive), that would communicate both the ecstasy and intimacy of falling in love for the first time…it stops. The song is over. It’s all very frustrating.

That said, the Mahler, Ives, and Bach mixes are all excellent and definitely worth your time.

Intro to the Space Era: 1989-1999

Here’s where the disparate strands of Wilson’s musical DNA finally start coming together. The Space Era is named for Porcupine Tree’s predominant aesthetic sensibility—a spacey psychedelia—from its inception to the release of Stupid Dream in 1999. In the meantime, what did we miss, because your author couldn’t find much of this stuff online?

• In 1986 Wilson participated heavily in Coltsfoot’s demo tape Action at a Distance, performing on some tracks and producing others. The tape would be released in 1988.
• No Man Is An Island released a single in 1987 called “From a Toyshop Window,” which Wikipedia describes as a hybrid of progressive rock and synthpop.
• Also in 1987, Wilson was briefly the keyboardist for Pride of Passion / Blazing Apostles (they rebranded and renamed themselves right around when he was there).
• 1989 saw two No Man Is An Island EPs, The Girl from Missouri and Swagger. Wikipedia describes the title track of The Girl from Missouri as a “waltz time ballad” that would later be disowned, and Swagger as “aggressive synth-pop,” indicating a band (befitting, considering the relative turbulence its lineup was experiencing at the time) that didn’t quite know what it wanted to do yet. Evidently once No-Man stabilized they felt that some of the stuff off these two EPs were good enough to be re-recorded and re-released, and we’ll get to those versions eventually.

I couldn’t find a whole lot from anything up there. From Blazing Apostles, all I could dig up from the two songs he played on were their live renditions at the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden in 1987. They sound a lot like A Flock of Seagulls.

From Coltsfoot there’s In The Hour Between, which is a perfectly serviceable prog ballad. The tape it’s on is mostly important as the first thing Wilson’s produced for a band of which he was not himself a member, and it sounds exactly like how you’d expect it to sound in 1988. That’s a roundabout way of saying it owes more to Altamont/Karma than anything he did later.

As for No-Man, first up is Forest Almost Burning, off The Girl from Missouri, which has some properly twitchy violin work. It has the distinct air of a band, from its precarious perch in 1989, gesturing toward a sound still under construction…which makes sense, considering No-Man would become influenced by trip hop and Blue Lines wouldn’t be released for another two years. The other one was Bleed, from Swagger, which sounds all right. The percussion is nice, the guitar work is proper heavy, but it’s…very strange listening to Tim Bowness alternate between his usual vaguely Bowie-esque croon and that weird, uncomfortable growl/snarl thing he does at the chorus. Can also understand why we don’t hear much of his climactic bellowing after this, too. If both songs are representative of their output at about this time, then these EPs are clearly the work of a band who are still trying to figure themselves out.

Should probably also mention that I am not a particularly huge fan of No-Man myself, but they nevertheless feature prominently at this stage in Wilson’s musical history, so we’ll see how much I can look past that and be objective.