Among other things, it's because "ONE of the conTROLlers had fifteen RUNNERS!" Working for him, that is.
At the time, what I knew of -- hrm -- Madchester consisted of vague noises and style sheets. Eventually the bands started touring the US some -- I think the Mondays actually filled the Palladium over here, 3000 people, not bad. But the one album I really got to love out of the whole mess was this weirdass little thing out of nowhere, which I never would have heard of thanks to some sort of bizarre licensing reissue deal that ended up putting this record on Mute, and therefore WEA, in the States. Corporate skullduggery, I gotta love it.
So, Pigeonhole. Indeed from Manchester, and as the lyrics quoted above no doubt aptly illustrate, Fall-influenced to an extent. I gather singer Andy Spearpoint actually acts as well, and was on Coronation Street or something else the UK bunch would know much more about than I. Whatever the reason, he doesn't actually sound like Mark E. -- I've heard John Cale as a reference point, but that doesn't quite cut it either. It's declamatory and nicely controlled, good sense of projection, and can take you into very strange worlds if you let it. Nice line in lyrics and song titles as well -- "You Were Lying When You Said You Loved Me," "Penguins" (as in "I've got penguins for company!"), things like that.
And you should, because I did, and I still love what I found there. Theirs was a more free-flowing funk than most, the Daffodils' -- I'm sure I could make comparison points if I sat down and thought through the history of such things (Liquid Liquid, maybe? Better than whatever the Talking Heads were trying to do, I know that much), but the point is they had the beat and damned if they didn't do it well, taking advantage of having both a drummer and a percussionist to go with their other folks. No RHCP splattered metal guitar either -- loud when it needed to be, sure, but mostly working the wah-wah on rhythm or else cutting in at just the right moment, holding back rather than vomiting up over everything. Add to that a sense of weird sound dropins -- not so much disorienting samples, just odd ways of handling things as they came along. Astringent at times, arty sure, but never to the point where you couldn't actually move to the damn thing, which is why "Big" has such a damn sweet groove to it (almost something like "White Lines" but even more anthemic, perhaps), why "Fishes Eyes" hits you and doesn't want to let go, and why "Partial" is my all-time underrated dance classic, a low-key monster of a track that keeps going and going, moving on up, all about the beat.
Which is part of the reason why I do like them and this album so much -- they played an LA date in mid-1991, and it was and remains the only LA club show I've been to where the entire crowd was actually dancing throughout the whole thing. They legitimately burned down the house with slippery rhythms, strange lyrics and Spearpoint's friendly aggro carrying it all along, including a cover of "Purple Haze" that's the best I've heard outside of Robert Smith's. Ah, memories.