It starts like an accident. It feels like an accident, and perhaps that's all it was. Even though, of course, Mark Hollis is a notorious perfectionist and his then-bandmates Lee Harris and Martin Ditcham, now currently doing some marvelous stuff as Orang, are hardly ones to simply record something and leave it at that. So it's all sculpted, the way "Myrrhman" sounds like it could be just as much tuning up and getting a sense of feel for something else entirely, and maybe it was, Hollis singing like he's been suddenly prompted by a silence, his elegant, sad, melancholic voice saying only just enough and nothing more, the low tones and sudden interruptions all melding in together with the rest of the music.
Talk Talk were always just that "It's My Life" band to me in the early eighties. That was the one song I knew of in my pop radio state and I left it at that, didn't feel the need to investigate more thoroughly. So their twists and turns and evolutions into something else entirely was something that passed me by. But I've mentioned that seemingly magic fall of 1991, when a lot of stuff suddenly came together in many different ways on a lot of different levels, and this album appeared then. I read some articles and reviews in Melody Maker, concluded something had to be happening and investigated.
And I found the above, and more, the sudden surging chime of "Ascension Day" turning back into the jazzy break that started the song, Hollis singing of burning on judgment day with his perfectly restrained exultance into not-quite-understandable states of something, a reverse rapture. The accompaniment screams 'quality, adult' etc., but doesn't feel like it. It feels alive, captivating, uncentered around a dominant personality trying to convey a certain interpretation. You go with the flow you pick.
It ends, "After the Flood" starts with piano, soft tones, woodwinds perhaps, quivering guitar lines, fading in and in and in. Keyboards fill in, there is a barely there sense of propulsion, just enough, until the squalling guitar solo beneath the beauty kicks it further along, a chiaroscuro of snarl and serenity, done just right.
And so on. I could go on, I have gone on about it before in many different ways, the slow guitar/vocal crawl on "Taphead" moving into the horn parts, "New Grass" and its astoundingly lovely blend of, well, everything, piano and sweet guitar and Hollis and persistent drumming and keyboard strains, pure meditative love and hope and future glances. And the way "Runeii" ends softly, surely, just so. But ultimately, everything here is almost beyond words. I really can't find them to tell what impact this album has for me.