Bringing Home the Ashes

 

When I was a young kid, I struggled to sleep at night.  I used to lay in bed for hours tossing and turning trying to find some way to relax and get to sleep.  Sometimes I found some relief by imaging that my bed was out in a wild wind storm in the middle of an isolated place far from civilization or away from help.  In order to survive the storm, I would have to hunker down, curl up snugly in my blankets to keep warm and be protected from the imaginary deluge.  Plus I had to stay calm to be ready for any unforeseen dangers and problems.  This narrative was made more intense when our home was actually being battered by the fierce winter wind storms that occasionally ripped through our small town on the Oregon coast.  Hearing 70-110 mph wind gusts physically assault our home made everything more vivid.  The staying calm part of my waking dreams would help me eventually drift off to sleep, or at the very least I would be entertained by my pretend disaster narrative.

 

I was first introduced to Northern England’s The Wild Swans via the Sire Records compilation sampler Just Say Yes in late 1987.  I bought it because it was cheap and had a couple of songs by established favorites like Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen, Erasure, and The Smiths.  It wasn’t until the following spring that The Wild Swans’ fitting song “Young Manhood” became an obsession.  I say fitting, because I was in the midst of becoming a young man, had recently become a licensed driver, and was earning a regular income, and became responsible for managing that money and buying my own stuff (clothes, food, necessities), and to perhaps save for my upcoming college years.  I failed at money management and spent all of it on CDs and records.  What’s interesting to me is that that fruitful sampler introduced me to The Replacements, James, Throwing Muses, The Mighty Lemon Drops, and of course, The Wild Swans.  By the spring of 1988, I would skip those songs that first tempted me to this collection and would only listen to these other bands’ song and even some of their albums, such as The Mighty Lemon Drops’ excellent World Without End album, which I played constantly.  However, I could not find any music by The Wild Swans anywhere.  That summer (1988), a second Sire compilation surfaced in a similar fashion named Just Say Yo, and had another track by the Wild Swans.  This one was named “Bible Dreams,” and the lush and urgent sound of it sent chills up and down my spine.  It instantly transported me to another reality – a new reality that I desperately wanted to visit.

 

There’s a howl that leads up into the persistent drums of the opening track and that first single “Young Manhood.”  The drums feel like it is trudging up too many stairs.  It’s fitting considering the futility of the chorus: “Here it comes: young manhood / One day all of this will be yours.”  It starts out like a congratulations for reaching this milestone and now (wave of the arms) ‘here you go – deal with all of these shitty problems.’  At seventeen, that’s exactly how I felt.  I did not (and still don’t) know what I wanted to do, where I wanted to be, or know how to get to any of these things, but now responsibility was slapping me in the face.  Paul Simpson’s lyrics throughout this album seem to be drawn from a post-war England perspective.  A time of rebuilding and what must have been a time of uncertainty.  How do we do this?  How do we proceed?  This reflection and doubt juxtaposed with loads of Christian references really speaks to me.  There’s a lot of perseverance within these lyrics that feel like passages from a great classic novel, yet almost every moment of triumph is tempered by failure or loss.  The brilliant title track “Bringing Home the Ashes” provides the line: “the heart in the heart of England can never die” just before the chorus begins: “Bringing home the ashes / is more than I can bear.”  The dreamy keyboards that introduce this song combined with the lovely repetitive guitar melody has always been my favorite.

 Jeremy (Jem) Kelly really shines throughout!  His guitar work is exemplary, and I believe that it’s highly underrated.  That howl I mentioned earlier is a key for me.  It kind of sounds like a muted version of a train whirring through a tunnel, or as I envisioned in my youth: a howling wind.  Most of these songs are adorned with this sound in some way or other adding to the gravity of the words and creating an atmosphere that expanded my world view and made me feel like I was privy to knowledge regarding human nature that maybe I wasn’t quite ready for.  I truly think that my fascination and love of his guitar stylings is still influencing the types of music I gravitate toward.  Kelly’s guitar work however is everything I was looking for at that time.  His ability to create those controlled feedback howls, his lithe fills and twinkling plucks of pristine notes.  He’s like a cross between the best of Johnny Marr, Will Sergeant, and the soon to shine at that time David Schelzel from the Ocean Blue. 

It’s difficult for me to highlight songs here, because every song has been a favorite at some point over the past 35+ years.  Listening to it now, I’m finding that even the one song that I never really loved: “Mythical Beast” has blossomed for me now.  Kelly’s guitar solo is so simple, so elegant, and so spine tingling!  Plus I love that whatever the mythical beast in this allegory is, once the angry disillusioned character finds power from this beast, he stubbornly refuses to share it with the world or anyone at all.  It’s a telling example of humankind’s selfishness.  The greatness never fails to inspire and entertain.  

Over all of these years, aside from the already mentioned tracks, favorites include the ‘swallow your medicine’ message of the bright sounding “Bitterness.”  This might be when I first understood the power of pairing heavy lyrics with jaunty pop music.  I cannot forget “Northern England” either.  This melodic masterpiece has always connected with me, not because I identify with northern England (never been), but the lyric refrain “while prayers go unanswered / seeds thrown in the dark” feels appropriate as I’ve always struggled with people’s faith in Christianity and ‘the power of prayer.’  Then there’s the endlessly addictive “Now and Forever” that plays as a coming of age tale and the harsh reality of unmet expectations and dashed hopes. “You want the life you can’t afford / after all that you’ve been through / soon it will be over / boy has this town crippled you.”  Joseph Fearon’s grinding bass here is a highlight.  In fact Fearon’s bass-lines are quietly magnificent throughout.  They humbly anchor these songs with a deep low end, yet they are more than that.  There’s something incredibly memorable and comfortable about the bass-lines that drive these tracks.  Bringing Home the Ashes closes with the straight-forward “The Worst Year of My Life.”  Continuing on with the notion of crushed dreams and inevitability “The Worst Year of My Life” is not as specific as it sounds.  It’s not a list of bad events from the narrator’s past year.  It feels more like a chronicling of how our beginning circumstances can predict or determine our future circumstances.  It’s an unforgiving look at life.  The second verse has always been a depressing favorite: “you were born hungry and you’ll die angry / and if life has failed you leave the cross you’re nailed to / you belong to no one and you owe nothing / there’s no golden future just an open wound there.”  At that time of my life: soon to graduate high school, it felt like a splash of reality versus the ‘future is yours’ and ‘you can achieve anything’ slogans that were being fed ad infinitum.

 

I’ve heard that Simpson disavows this album.  I can understand that he felt like he lost control of his art through the machinery of the music business, and what is up with the drums?  There’s no drummer credited.  Are they real?  Is it a drum machine?  They sound unreal and weirdly dated.  There are some strange choices.  But you know what?  I love these songs, and they introduced me to The Wild Swans’ limited catalog.  I hungrily snapped up their Peel Session EP, which includes the song “No Bleeding,” which is such a brilliant masterpiece that it never fails to overwhelm my senses, and I found their famous debut single “Revolutionary Spirit,” on a Zoo Records compilation.  As an aside, this rare and very limited original vinyl single was added to a list of requests in the Beaverton Tower Records import section every few weeks.  I’m not sure who thought this was reasonable, but they were persistent.

 

The inspiration to profess my longstanding love of this album has come from a variety of resources.  Recently, The H.I. Art on the Edge Surprise Cast has had thoughtful interviews with both Simpson and Kelly individually (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/surprise-cast/id1723695740), the next book on my que to read is Simpson’s memoir Revolutionary Spirit: A Post-punk Exorcism, along with a healthy dose of nostalgia and a need for something familiar and comforting.  Once I re-listened to the album again after several years of dormancy, I was moved to share these thoughts.  I realize that the Wild Swans have been highly regarded by those in the know, yet it seems that they are not known by enough people. 

The Wild Swans "Young Manhood"