For the past decade or so, modern music has exploded in such a way that it’s become difficult to hear it as coming from a specific point in time. Every style, sound, instrument, and period is being hijacked, sometimes simultaneously, so it isn’t hard to reach back in music history and find precedents for what’s happening now. When I wrote about Martin Newell’s 1985 track “Golden Lane” last month, I said it was very much a product of the 80s projecting itself into modern times, “an early home recording opus steeped in pop songcraft but obscured by hiss and sonic charm. Sound familiar? Listen to the production quality — might as well be a new Ariel Pink single.” Certainty, one of the most interesting aspects of Songs For A Fallow Land is its prescience for the lo-fi self-recording boom. In the tape’s original liner notes, Newell boasts that the album was recorded on a “four track in a bedroom in shameful poverty. It can be done.” Which seems like a quaint sentiment now, but it also highlights that, after being economically forced into the lo-fi sound, Newell reveled in it. Or rather, he found the aesthetic value in a seemingly warped, imperfect sound. That makes sense in the name of rock ‘n’ roll, but also in the bourgeois realm of appropriation. It might be hard to admit that the two often intersect with thrilling results.
Newell urges his listeners: “Now go do it yourselves. What if they started a record company and nobody signed? Ha ha ha.” Well, Martin Newell of 1985, we did go on to do it ourselves, which, I imagine, is why Gary War and Taylor Richardson decided to re-release your record. (We also went on to develop affordable means of recording in high fidelity, putting further emphasis on the choice to go lo-fi.) The “fuck, I don’t need you” attitude is visible in the aesthetic and aura of Fallow Land, if not in all of its harmonic and lyrical content. For example, the fairly lovely and aforementioned “Golden Lane” is pure Brit pop. There is a dash of Syd Barrett psychedelia mixed in, but removed from the hazy recording quality, I also hear The Zombies or Paul McCartney’s breezy, often nonsensical style of wordplay: “Round in Golden Lane/ Truant on a bicycle in the rain (…)/ I’ve got nothing to do but I’ll do it quite happily.” It’s this slight clash and contradiction of values — one pole inferred through lyrical stylings, the other through sound — that lends particular appeal to Fallow Man (it’s also hard to ignore the irony in Newell’s “who needs a record company?” statement when the Fixed Identity logo is placed directly below it on the reissue LP). A song like “Heroin Clones,” while more lyrically foreboding and anchored by a thumping, perfectly lo-fi rhythm section, still traipses around early psychedelia from start to finish.
Modern listeners who are introduced to Newell through Fallow Land (as I was) might be turned off after hearing a later album like The Greatest Living Englishman, his first non-cassette breakthrough, which essentially transposes the same songwriting methods onto a clearer sound palette. Of course, Newell’s later excursions don’t detract from his cassette days; they simply emphasize the oft-overlooked aspects of music-making — money, recording equipment, an engineer, general context — and assign them due importance. That may seem obvious to any active musician, but casual acceptance of timbre and fidelity as compositional tools is still a long way off. Reissuing music like Newell’s will only broaden the long narrative of rock ‘n’ roll, helping us understand the often contradictory musical terms that make listeners tick.