THE RAINCOATS - ODYSHAPE @ 40

 

Released on June 1st, 1981, The Raincoats sophomore album, Odyshape, is celebrating 40 years since its release. Though the Raincoats had already set themselves in a league of their own with their debut album, they somehow managed to step outside their own self-delineated sphere with this followup.

Just about every aspect of the record sets it outside the colouring lines of punk, post-punk, alternative or folk music, though it touches on all of these genres and more. The instrumentation, performances, compositions and arrangements all defy classification and refuse to adhere to any kind of established norms. Like The Shaggs before them, The Raincoats managed to reinvent music for their own purposes, though in this case they actually had some formal skills to build upon, albeit they pushed each and every technique to the brink of being unrecognizable.

The band were flying somewhat “without a net” when conceiving this album as original drummer, Palmolive, had departed and her replacement, Ingrid Weiss, bailed just as they began working on the album. As such, they began the compositional process mostly without a drummer and it seems that what might have been a constraint actually turned into a source of liberation as the resulting songs all manage to find their way in the most fluid manner, unhindered by concerns for strict tempos and consistent beats. Once they had their landscape somewhat laid out, they brought in a number of drummers and percussionists to ride along their roads and find their way through the organic musical countryside they’d cultivated. These included Richard Dudanski, who had played with Joe Strummer’s 101ers and contributed to PiL’s Metal Box on a few tracks, Charles Hayward (This Heat) and Robert Wyatt (Soft Machine).

The results of these unfettered efforts also opened the floodgates for the girls to express themselves vocally in a manner that exposed their fragility and intimacy in ways rarely heard on record. The honesty and vulnerability that was laid bare in these songs made them feel like listening to them was an invasion of privacy. There’s simply no holding back the emotions here and they took full advantage of their position to explore subjects and attitudes that were distinctly female, yet universally comprehensible.

The fact that the girls all swapped roles and instruments also helped to bring out the unexpected and the intangibly spontaneous in each piece. You never know where a song is going to go from one moment to another. There’s no sense of “verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus” structure here. No “beginning” or “end”. Songs and sounds manifest like a wild garden, growing up from the soil and then receding into the distance as the listener moves along in their journey.

I remember being drawn to The Raincoats after reading somewhere that they were the only band John Lydon would admit to liking. After hearing their first album with it’s raw primitiveness, I was intrigued, but when this second came along, I remember being completely blown away by it. It was an album that stood its own ground, separate from every other genre and trend happening then or since. It remains self-contained and inviolable in its uniqueness and singularity. It still has the power to fascinate and inspire on the deepest emotional levels. It refuses to be subsumed by any categorization and that is why it will remain timeless for the foreseeable future.