East Village – Drop Out
With the announcement of a vinyl reissue of East Village’s compilation Hotrod Hotel, Getintothis’ Matty Loughlin-Day casts an eye back at their classic debut album, Drop Out.
Posthumously applying the term ‘lost classic’ to an album that, for whatever reason, slipped through the cracks of public or critical consciousness on release is a powerful act.
It affords the discoverer, the cultural archaeologist, a sense of wisdom, allowing them to be revered for their find and also offers those who handle the said artifact a feeling of being in an elite, almost clandestine club.
Maybe it’s snobbery, or a strive to achieve holier-than-thou status, but for the seasoned music aficionado, there are surely fewer better rewards than stumbling upon a stone cold gem of an album it appears nobody else is aware of.
Listening to Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ Don’t Stand Me Down or Jim Sullivan’s UFO for the first time for instance is a very different experience than listening to Revolver or Illmatic for the first time.
With the latter albums, there can be no denying the greatness on show and listening to them is an act of confirmation that the received wisdom, relayed through countless lists, articles and recommendations is indeed correct; yep, you told me Tomorrow Never Knows would blow my head and it has.
Listening to the former however is very different; it opens up a new world. The impact of being caught off guard by something as majestic as This is What She’s Like or UFO’s title track and simultaneously wondering how on earth they aren’t held up as high points of musical achievement is a thrilling and exciting experience.
It prompts a dig into the history of the album, reading around as to why-oh-why you haven’t heard of it before and an ultimate desire to preach, as others simply have to, ahem, get into this.
Although sometimes there are simply no obvious reasons why an album or artist should sink without trace – Nick Drake’s lack of success was as baffling to him at the time as it is to us decades later – there are of course often a multitude of explanations as to why this might happen; bad luck (see: Shack), bad timing (see: erm, Shack) or wider situationally specific/social circumstances (see.. oh, you get where I’m going with this).
One lesser spotted reason that – handily – relates to this article is that by the time said album was released, the band in question no longer existed. Lesser spotted still to consider this happening with a debut album.
Enter East Village.
Formed in the mid-80’s, under the moniker Episode Four and consisting of brothers Martin and Paul Kelly and Johnny Wood, the three of whom shared singing/songwriting duties. With drummer Spencer Smith, the band released a handful of singles on Jeff Barrett’s pre-Heavenly label, Sub-Aqua before re-emerging as East Village in 1987.
The EP Cubans in the Bluefields followed, as did 12” single Back Between Places, again, both on Sub-Aqua. 1988 and 1989 saw extensive touring, including support slots with very much bands-of-the-moment House of Love and McCarthy on their tours and by all accounts, blowing the headliners off stage.
Things, it seems, were looking good.
Despite the demise of Sub-Aqua, the band were able to find a home for their music via a patron in the form of Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne and the emergence of Jeff Barrett’s embryonic Heavenly Recordings.
Via Heavenly, they were able to record an album’s worth of songs, release the single Circles and play further tour dates with the likes of Manic Street Preachers and Flowered Up. A sell out date at the New Cross Venue soon followed in 1991, whereby the band, apparently on the cusp of greatness, promptly split up.
On stage.
Quite the way to bow out.
In their infancy, the Manics had of course, infamously, sworn to release their debut album and then split up forever; here was a band daring to do that before they’d even released the album in question. Some statement, for sure.
After the split, Martin Kelly went on to join forces with Barrett at Heavenly, whilst brother Paul and Spencer Smith went on to play with a mixture of acts such as Saint Etienne and Birdie amongst other projects (including Paul’s highly acclaimed film making work) and Johnny Wood relocated to China to study fine art and record solo work.
The album sessions of 1990 were not wasted however, as the tracks in question were posthumously mixed and released in 1993 in the form of Drop Out.
Naturally, given a lack of band to promote it, it barely tickled the soles of the feet of the charts, though it did give rise to the single Silver Train.
The following year, a collection of the band’s early singles and demos was released as Hotrod Hotel, which is scheduled to be reissued on vinyl this year via Slumberland Records, however, to bring this back to the theme of lost classic albums we started with all that time ago, it’s Drop Out that we will be focusing our attention towards.
Seemingly lost down the back of the sofa of time, the album was eventually re-released on Heavenly Recordings in 2013, whereby it received an unprecedented 10/10 from Uncut Magazine, which heralded it as “pop perfection” and claimed it to be “a true lost classic of its era”, yet it has still to attain the wider recognition it so apparently deserves.
So this begs the question; in line with such a proclamation as Uncut’s, what makes Drop Out a lost classic?
Handily, this writer would agree with this sentiment, so feels somewhat able to justify it.
Firstly, and maybe most noticeably, it is timeless. Drop Out is one of those rare guitar albums that would not sound out of place were it to be released in the 60’s, amidst the West Coast splash, the 80’s during the C86 jangle surge or tomorrow, in the wake of the post-Belle and Sebastian et al re-enlightenment that reclaimed forward thinking, clever pop.
East Village
Arguably the one era the album might not have been in step with was the early 90’s, which is of course when it was recorded.
During the acid house/Madchester boom, would there have been much demand for chiming guitars, swirling organ and tight harmonies? We’ll never know of course, but outside of that window, Drop Out would, in any just world, be regarded as a staple of that era.
High praise indeed, hyperbole maybe, but let’s examine that claim.
Sounding as fresh and as energetic as other classic debut albums as Rattlesnakes or High Land, Hard Rain, full of the vim of youth, there is no fat on Drop Out. The production has not dated, so it would be hard to pin-point to any exact movement or time and crucially, there’s not a minute wasted.
The music and lyrics are immediate and economic so as not to be bloated, though that is not to say things are straightforward or linear; take Freeze Out for instance – built around three chords and four lines, on paper it should be motionless or repetitive, yet in East Village’s hands, it surges along with a euphoric melancholia and fades away with longing worldless vocals, long before it outstays its welcome.
Sounding as if House of Love had tried to be The Byrds, it is thrilling and symptomatic of much of the album.
Symptomatic in that it is mournful and lustful without ever wading into maudlin or downbeat territories. The mood is distinctly autumnal; equally windswept and crisp, equally colourful and on the cusp of darkness – the crimson will soon give way to grey, but that’s OK, at least we had the deep, sticky green of summer.
To illustrate this, listen to lead single Circles. At its heart is a shuffling drumbeat and it has a loping guitar theme running throughout, while the lyrics observe that “it’s cold outside… it’s always cold”, going on to describe the scene further, including the November leaves that are falling and the desire to be “alone with you”.
Likewise, the wistful Way Back Home finds narrator lamenting a summer gone and contrasting that “now it’s cold and it’s raining” and he is “thinking of the way we were” back in the balmy days of the last season. To really labour the point, one of the tracks is titled Black Autumn ferchrysake.
Again, that is implying that this is a bleak album; it very much isn’t. Opening track, Silver Train rolls along on a bongo-slash-organ led groove whilst Shipwrecked’s refrain of “she knows that I won’t steal her money” could be straight from the Michael Head songbook, just as When I Wake Tomorrow could be the greatest song the Bunnymen never wrote, all urgent drums, earthy acoustics and shining electric guitars.
The only possible downbeat moment comes with the album’s closing track, Everybody Knows, during which guest vocalist Deborah Wykes of The Dolly Mixtures urges someone to let the “single flower on your grave” die away, before pleading “let me live one more moment again”, yet even this is more haunting and woozy than mournful or full of despair.
The album is also, in this writer’s humble opinion, a classic as it bears repeated listens – in fact, it practically demands it. Not in the way that a classic ‘difficult’ album such as Bitches’ Brew might, whereby dozens of listens are required before you can get to grips with it, or an album like Person Pitch where every listen reveals something new; in fact, quite the opposite.
On first listen, Drop Out might sound like a fine album of well-crafted songs and little more – you might even wonder what the fuss is about – but there is something else that pulls the listener back in.
These songs are familiar, even if you’ve never heard them before. Not in a derivative manner, but more in a sense that they get under the skin gradually, they inhabit the psyche without invading it and eventually feel as welcome and as natural as songs you’ve known for years.
On that point – of the album being far from derivative – this is also evident if we scratch beneath the surface and go into full-blown music nerd mode. It would be easy to write this album off as jangle-pop, with guitars set to treble and a liberal use of the whammy bar, yet pay closer attention and it becomes apparent that Drop Out isn’t the case of four lads getting together with a few chords, a bundle of smokes and hoping for the best – there is a deep knowledge of music here; they’ve clearly done their homework.
Bearing in mind that at the time of release the internet was but a sci-fi notion and Bob Dylan’s first installment of the Bootleg Series was yet to be released, there are clues littered all throughout the album that East Village had studied Dylan deeply.
The liner notes refer to ‘Phantom Engineers’, a working title for what turned out to be It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, whilst song titles such as What Kind of Friend is This? And Freeze Out (this writer presumes) allude to mid-60’s Dylan offcuts, that are scarcely available in 2020, let alone 1990. To be that ingrained in 60’s music suggests more than mere passing interest.
The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the rest: should we see these icons while we still can?
The reason this is pointed out is that these small references indicate a deeper understanding – a deeper love – of a certain style of music, which is reflected by the songs and the band’s playing, which is deceptively simple – pay more attention and the intricacies of the instrumentation become more apparent, the whole body of work becomes fuller and richer; evidence of a craft well-honed.
Given that the band were long abandoned by the time of its release, it would undeniably be a stretch to say that Drop Out influenced much – if anything – of what came next. Come 1994, clever, nuanced pop went out of the door along with its jangle and existentialism, to be replaced by laddish, straightforward brashness – a scourge that would haunt the musical wastelands for years to follow.
In 2020 however, in a post-Britpop world, echoes of the universe Drop Out inhabited can be heard in acts such as Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever and Courtney Barnett, with their balance of melody, naive charm and noise.
Maybe such acts have discovered Drop Out, or maybe they just drink from the same well. Either way, by this point, its immaterial. Instead, this writer urges you to turn on, tune in and, yes, Drop Out.
You might just discover a lost classic album you never knew about.
And how good does that feel?
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