Shack - H.M.S. Fable (CD)

Shack HMS Fable

By adam  Apr 3, 2000

HMS fable consolidates and surpasses the brilliance of Shack's previous 'lost classics', 'The Magical World of the Strands' and 'Waterpistol'. It brims with chiming guitars, ecstatic/melancholic three-part harmonies, and familiar-yet-beguiling melod...ies, crystallizing sources as diverse as the purest Sixties pop, Latin textures, shanties, Elizabethan madrigals and the peculiar strains of Northern English narcotic sea-symphonies. By turns the album uplifts, pulses, crunches and sweetly, painfully, laments. The title track is a whispering anthem, aching, like the whole album, with echoes musical - The Beatles, Nick Drake, The La's, The Verve - and personal, Michael Head's cracked-folk, soul-survivor's tones recollecting voices and lives lost during 20 years of neglect and disenfranchisement. 'Reinstated' similarly collapses together the private and political, on a bittersweet bed of strings and Bacharach brass. A highlight, amongst many, is John Head's 'Cornish Town'. Combining the belligerence of 'Pull Together' with the rushing passion of 'I Want You' and the perception of 'Comedy', it seems to invoke a realisation of the necessity of connectedness in the face of disintegrating identities. Whether that disintegration, or the redemptive solution sought, is drug-induced, Biblically inspired, or dynamised by the truest love, remains unresolved: the chorus glides into a coda, all ringing, shimmering, and dissolving, powerfully affirmative and beautiful, though haunted by minor chords. It sings with, and for, life; yet it is mindful of the pressing closeness of desperation and death. In that, the song typifies an album which should not be forgotten. Read more Less