44. Felt: Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty

 

Released: February 1982

Chosen By: Stu

Comments - 

Dean: Well I have done my best and I have given it endless listens in the hope that I would gain an insight into that indefinable pleasure you take from listening to CtAB. I am still without clue or concurrence.

I'm left with a feeling of melancholy every time, a feeling of impoverishment. It helps when I hear his vocals and then the metallic guitar kicks in and despite all attempts to dispel the unpleasantness it pulls me down as if I were a dying mackerel. It almost feels as though I was set up to disappoint you Stu and I did give it every possible chance but alas, without joy. It is also without joy that I deliver this condemnation.

Paul: In my review of Mozart Estate (number 40 if you're keeping count) I wrote how I'd failed to follow up on a fabulous Felt track I knew. If I had followed it up this would have been the album I'd have got involved with. So, 40 years on, here's my chance.

Starting with an instrumental is a bold choice. As our good friend Kevin said to me at a gig once when listening to an instrumental, "would it kill you to write some words?" But words or no words the album doesn't really engage me. 

It's a bit background. A bit too pretty. A nicey, nicey Felicity Kendal version of the Velvet Underground in places. I don't dislike it. But neither do I really like it. I think late-teens me would have thought the same.

The exception is I Worship the Sun. There are future echoes of the Jesus and Mary Chain (minus the feedback) here but it's twice as long as it needs to be. It's possible that a late-teens me in a parallel universe 40 years ago stuck that track on a mixtape for a girl he liked. But she wouldn't have been interested. In him or Felt.

Ben: I don’t like it either, for the same reasons that Paul and Dean don’t particularly like it. It sounds to me like two kids picked up a couple of guitars a couple of months back and this is what they’ve managed to come up with from scratch in that time. Alexa played Sparta FC automatically after this album finished and it blew that Felt stuff completely away. Stu, do you really like it or are you more taken with the singer and his story?

Stu: I totally relate with one guys passion, playing in his bedroom, a curious blend of ideas and a virtuoser guitar player. A guess I liken it to my current plight, just sitting about writing stories. Let’s not be carried away, lest they are not listened or read in their 1000’s it doesn’t take away from their own glory!!! I’ve sold 750 copies of NUTS and I guess the numbers were not that much higher for FELT but they both have a solid heart and soul, made and forged from the heart!! As with books, music is very much in the ears of the listener and I find beauty and conviction in all these LPS! I’m not embarrassed and I’m not just buying the story BUT, like many of my favourite bands, they do have a story!!!