3. Talk TalkLaughing Stock
This is one of the few ‘gentle’ records that I keep coming back to. Most of what I listen to is fairly pointy, perhaps that’s because I don’t put music on in the background? I don’t put the radio on if I’m in a room, for me I’m either listening or I’m not listening. I don’t have music just wafting around when I’m cooking dinner. Laughing Stock is soft enough in feel that I guess it could work as mood music but I never hear it that way. It’s tense, you can hear the fact that everyone in the room is listening out for what’s going to happen, because they didn’t know what was going to happen. There was, I’ve read, no planned songs because the aim was to capture the wonderful moment as it came into existence. The theory was that when you re-play something part of the original charm is gone and they wanted to record the original take. It’s difficult enough to do this as one person but they were trying to do this as a band. It feels like they are trying out syllables in the hope that they will stumble on sense and, given that it took a year to record, what we have must be the result of many, many discarded takes of nonsense. I’ve listened to it so many times but still, where there’s a lull, I sometimes find myself willing them to find the thread again and make it, whatever it is, exist.
