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Band:
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Modern Eon | |
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Title:
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Fiction Tales | |
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Format:
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LP / Cassette | |
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Year:
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1981 | |
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Label:
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DinDisc | |
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Catalog
Number:
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DID11 | |
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Song Titles: |
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Reviews:
Modern Eon: Fiction Tales
WELL LOOK - hey, don't turn away...I cant stand it when you get hurt...no, I wanted to like it (Christ, I wanted it to be marvelous, rush round to play my friends, say "listen, isn't this great?") But there's just something missing.
Yeah, well of course I'm taking it personally- there's no way I can be detached, it's disappointment OK? Perhaps it might still grow on me, thought I've been playing both sides for a week and it still doesn't make me feel involved. My emotions are merely caressed not stirred.
Isn't it funny how my favourite tracks are the ones on that sampler you gave me a while ago? Hell, I thought then that the album itself would be devastating, I used to play those four tracks all the time, wrapping myself to 'Choreography' and singing off key with 'Waiting For the Cavalry'.
Actually, 'The Real Hymn' is my fave, it seems to have a deeper sense of reality, even a hint of desperation, which is great! I was thinking about it in the bath the other day and a line from the song came to me - "take off your clothes / I want to see how much of you I know" - and that seemed to fit perfectly with how I feel about the album. I dunno, it's like you've been a bit too clever and devious, it's almost too perfect and sterile. I'd prefer to see you all stand naked - but proud and with embarrassment - for a change.
That track on side two - yeah, 'In A Strange Way' - is what I'm on about, that song captures an experience, it's like a mirror for a previous moment of fear or unease - too many of the other tracks tend towards the sublime and floaty atmospherics, which can be powerful at times but too often a bit empty.
Mind you, 'Child's Play' is definitely the best song song, if you know what I mean. - I've been whistling the damn thing for the last three days! Not soo sure about the Enrico Carminono (can't ever remember his name) thing, cos it seems a bit too pleasant, where as I recall all those westerns having Clint Eastwood massacring people all the time!
Oh Yeah - Nearly forgot - my mate said that vocals sound like Jon Anderson of Yes (bloody cheek!) but I told him to fuck off! See, I still really like you, but this LP is just a bit too smooth for me.
Can you put me on the guest list for the next gig? -Johnny Waller, Sounds June 13, 1981Modern Eon: Fiction Tales
Neo-Liverpudlians of the Echo and the Bunnymen school, Modern Eon play a cold rock music that pushes anxiety as much as rhythm. Not an easy album to like, Fiction Tales Does show originality and stylishness as well as a glimmer of accessibility. Occasional use of odd instrumentation and a good drummer make this more than just another genre exercise. -Ira A. Robbins, Trouser Press 1983Modern Eon: Fiction Tales
If Modern Eon are a product of the Liverpool scene, then they're an anomalous one. On the one hand, they're doomy, but never lapse into greyness like Section 25; on the other, they fumble after some elusive stylish quality but don't dress up hollow material in retarded r'n'r finery like The Bunnymen and Corrie Explodes.
The band's very name, conjuring up as it does both the contemporary and atavistic, is anomalous: it's difficulty to fit Modern Eon in anywhere. True to form their debut album is by turns adventurous and old-fashioned, lyrical and dull, reflecting an uneasy alliance between pomp, art rock and intellectual synth-etic muzak.
In a way their current single 'Child's Play', taken from the album, say' it all. Vocalist Alix - as Max Bell has already pointed out - does come over like Jon Anderson! But the voice doesn't pall, just as ME's arrangements, like very early Yes, are well edited.
Numbers like 'High Noon' and 'Waiting For The Cavalry' move from scene to scene rather than grossing out on one redundant tableau. The band also go sparingly on the dynamics and dramatics: they don't, for instance, flog dead (cart) horses with their double beats.
Mind, ME aren't particularly delicate either: their melodic touch remains under-developed, especially on 'In A Strange Way', Jarre's 'Oxygene' in a dodgy aqualung. This track typifies the rest: neither success, nor failure. The only thing over-the-top about the band are some of the words - eg. the clumsy poetry of 'Choreography'.
Ultimately, the album performs a kind of balancing act between conventional playing of sax, drums, bass, guitar and synth, and unorthodox shaping of songs which eschew easy beginning-middle-end formats. Also distinctive are uncluttered flurries of sound driven along by tom toms, a low key equivalent of The Banshees vortex.
Modern Eon are more memorable than people have given them credit for, and they've just presented us with something of a pleasant surprise. Is that enough, though? -Paul Tickell, NMEModern Eon: Fiction Tales
Modern Eon's Music is like a prismatic oilslick in a puddle, a captivating trick effect that isn't really there when compared to solid reality. Their songs are 80% air, bubbling up like methane globules from some forgotten well that's seen its share of witchy rites, but the group admit to no gods but Ennio Morricone and his fistful of soundtracks and are obviously reaching for that parched, arid, brutal tenderness that makes one grab for ze cooool Heineken in stead of the plastic Mac necessary to go exploring the work of the Bunnies or The Cure. Funnily enough, Mod Eon manage to produce highly mannered music that actually seems to surpass its intent. Undoubtedly The Man With No Stereo would enjoy a blast of "High Noon" or "the Grass Still Grows" after a hard night plastering corpses all over the cantina walls, but this band's brand of languid, elemental hypno-rock is happily much more universal; it hints and murmurs seductively, implies and evades with a coiling, smoky vagueness. It kisses but won't tell. Indeed, the work is 'cerebral'. That's dangerous ground, hombre.
But frontal banzai just isn't Modern Eon's style and, apart from its dry abstraction, "Fiction Tales" is, like Interview's "Snakes and Lovers" and the new Bunny goodie, what might be termed a 'wet' record, full of rain rhythms and squally gusts of aquamarine culminating in the submarine shorthand of "In A Strange Way"and the byzantine "Mechanic", in which Bob Wakelin's synths masquerade as tidal flow effects. Tracks ebb and smear into each other like moisture-heavy North Sea cumulus while Cliff Hewitt beats a showery tattoo on his hollow skins and asthmatic Alix (that's not description, that's fact) sighs and wails like the ghost in the machine and, with the welcome return of the rejuvenated "Second Still" and "Choreography" as well as sterling quicksilver like "Watching The Dancers" and the shimmering, aching "Child's Play" included, "Fiction Tales" checks in as a sublime hallucination in light and shade. It doesn't even matter that this album is essentially about nothing but itself since the mood is the message and its square root is the beat of the heart. And "Fiction Tales" will either insinuate itself into your spirit on the biochemical level or else, like a drifting downpour, pass you by.
My view is that Modern Eon refresh the parts other bands can't reach. Holy wine rather than a pint of cooking lager. Zeese hombres, they are killers, I theenk. -Steve Burgess, Dark StarModern Eon: Fiction Tales
A good one this. A musicianly but modern set of carefully planned dark sketches and moody set pieces, attractively melodic if not overly tuneful, and propelled by a calculated attack that's well complemented by wispy, wistful vocals. There's good use of effects and electronics too to produce interesting musical textures and though you occasionally wish they'd break loose a bit more, this is a fine album that seduces you by mood and emotion rather than all the fun of the fair. A haunting grower, in fact, and if perhaps a bit too ethereal to produce hits then definitely the stuff of which favourite albums are made. Both recent singles, "Choreography" and "Euthenics", are included. (8 out of 10) -Ian Cranna, Smash Hits June 25 1981
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