Ultrasound: ‘Stay Young’
But – suitably for a song that starts with a struck match and fizzing fuse, and ends with the celebratory skybound bangs of fireworks – Stay Young is secret dynamite. Yes, it’s still closer to Suede than is comfortable; but if so it’s Suede doing Kashmir, leaning out into that giant sky-filling stretch with a Floyd-flood of organs, huge minor-key mellotron orchestrations, layers of ringing diva voices (from the throat of bassist Vanessa Best) and squiggly gold synth-spangles. It’s pomp rock with a huge, fascinating crack in it, right down to the great wind-down of the Guy Fawkes coda, held together by Tiny’s stridently awkward charisma. It’s both a parody and a culmination of Britpop’s clunky nostalgia: a massively overblown anthem (Marillion on raw vodka and pineal glands?) thriving on an unspoken understanding of the friction between hopes, drive and disaster. As aware of the fragility of idols (“Gary Glitter’s gone to seed / So who will lead us now?”) as it is of the power and desperation of naked adolescent yearnings (“I want to have fun, I want to go out / And never come back home…”).
However clumsy those feelings are, there’s no way they can’t move you: but it’s on the Vanessa-sung Underwater Love Story that Ultrasound really display their unearthly ability to regenerate rock. Wrapped in liquid nets of ringing, breathing psychedelic guitars, Vanessa’s voice begins kitten-small and ends up as an immense haze of terrified transcendence. It’s a song of faith, of fear, of literally drowning in love (“we’ll sleep together in this watery grave, / and if you let me I’ll drown, we’ll be found and be saved: / let’s be brave”); and, as the huge sound builds, of transfiguration (“she shines so brightly as she’s climbing the stairs / It takes her body, her thoughts and her cares / and she’s drowned…”). Finally, as a wall of guitars howl in a gale of derangement, it’s a song of immortality: “Stay hard and fast, and I’ll be proud of you. / As I sleep, be sure I’ll dream of you.”
On one side, the proudly flawed monument of Stay Young; on the other, the emotional bewitchment of Underwater Love Song. Sloshing around somewhere between them – a raw hunk of potential – is the essence of Ultrasound, waiting to earth itself. The jury’s out: this is the sort of rock band that could go gloriously supernova, but constantly risks a belly-flop. If they did go off boom, it’d be a colossal letdown to find that, instead of starstuff, they’d sprayed us with mere glitter.
Fiel Garvie: ‘Colour You’
Fiel Garvie are still latched onto their obsession with the process of truth, its evasion, and the growing crisis that results. Even Swing’s straighter arrangement (almost chamber music, with spartan cello, piano and shakers picking out a plaintive melody and, for once, letting up on the claustrophobia) frames more deception. “All I ask you for is silence, all I want from you is loving… / You see, I know; see you laugh. / You say you try: here, you can’t. / You say I like it; I laugh; / you know I have to say I’m happy.” Behind the words, a kettle drum slowly fills up the spaces like a rising earth tremor. To the sound of Little Lie’s swatting heartbeat and bandsaw guitars – a lounge tune for a schizophrenic, wrenched at by swills of warbling My Bloody Valentine noise – Anne vacillates between contradictory hometown feelings (“This town holds it for miles; never could I have come from this little lie… / You don’t know anything; this town, what this life is. / You’re full today: did you laugh when I liked it?”). Marching behind her arguments, a whisper – “she can’t get out, she can’t get out…” The last squall of bilious guitar chokes out. I’m still stuck on a mudbank, wondering where the solid ground’s gone…
Greenship: ‘Perfect Smile/Place to Hide’
Two songs – Perfect Smile and Place to Hide – which stre-e-etch slow and unstoppable as lions in your bedroom, and then turn and eye you with a mad sensuality that blows everything else away. And they’ve managed to brush against rock touchstones – Led Zeppelin, Stooges, to name but two – without tripping over them. Greenship have tapped into the roots, yes, but have grown up out of them in an exciting new shape – still organic, but muscled in unusual places, eerily graceful, sporting strange flashes of glittering scales, fur, occasional surfaces of cyborg metal and science fiction atmospherics. And flowering at the top into Bnann’s voice, as incredible as his name: lucid, urgent, horny as hell, and swooping from bullish frenzy to a state of transfigured passion that has to be heard to be believed. Monsanto? Akira? Eat your fucking hearts out.
Let the vibraphone tickle your spine on Perfect Smile as Bnann straddles the defining stay-or-go moment in the whole precarious love affair. A thrum of potentials, all violence and tenderness. “I could pick you up, or I could push you down, down. / …I could pierce your skin, or I could crawl from deep within, child, / I could make you cry “It’s not real!”, or I could turn and run away.”. It’s power. It’s also peril – the surrender to a feeling that flies in the face of wisdom, the glitter of the odds that has the gambler limbering up for one last throw, the plunge into something you know will have you skidding on the lip of hell even as you seize the prize. Here, it’s that dangerous lurch of hope that halts the break for escape. “You turn me round again, you smile at me so perfectly. / You turn me round again – maybe I’ll stay here, maybe I’ll turn it round.”. It’s so poised that as the song gathers into a revolving mass of awestruck ranting and Herb’s screeching, twisted guitar babble (‘OK Computer’ with a new rush of neat testosterone), you can’t tell whether Bnann’s voice is a call of pain or a shout of jubilation.
It’s probably both – the last moment of free-fall before you discover what you’re about to hit. Place to Hide is what happens when you’ve hit something hard. Bnann sounds fatally bruised; shocked and angry, shuddering in the voice as the drums flail at him and the guitar seethes in the background. And now, too late, is the time to turn and run. “Heard what he said, and now I’ve heard enough to leave… / Fall to disgrace and stumble onto nothing real… /Take me away from everything I’ve said and done. / Can’t say, won’t say. / I’m sailing on ’til all my troubles come and gone./ Don’t wait for me.” Responsibility folds; the band sounds wracked – scraped and scalded, on the ropes for the pleading chorus, fighting back upright. “Wait until I cannot feel…” Two naked swipes at the numbed nerve of rock, sending life jolting back along it. Life hasn’t loomed so large in a song for a long time now.
Ultrasound: ‘Stay Young’
Nude Records, NUD35CD (5023687035122)
CD/cassette single
Released: 1st June 1998
Get it from: (2020 update) original single best obtained second-hand; ‘Stay Young’ appears on Ultrasound’s ‘Everything Picture’ album.
Ultrasound online:
Fiel Garvie: ‘Colour You’
Foundling, CDS FOU 002 (5 021449 650224)
CD only single
Released: 15th June 1998
Get it from: (2020 update) original single best obtained second-hand; song appears on Fiel Garvie’s ‘¡Vuka Vuka!’ album and can be streamed via streaming services below.
Fiel Garvie online:
Greenship: ‘Perfect Smile/Place to Hide’’
Camp Fabulous Ltd., CFAB 008CD (5 027731 5080)
CD-only single
Released: 22nd June 1998
Get it from: (2020 update) original CD limited to 500 copies only, and best obtained second-hand. This was Greenship’s only release.
Greenship online:
(2020 update) No websites – although there’s a Reverb Nation page and one for former Greenship frontman Bnann Watts.
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