Laughtrack: ‘Amusements’
It’s a lyric which almost sounds as if it ought to be bobbling along on top of a corporate anthem: but which, in this context, sounds as if it’s shadowing the giant corporate hands which can pat you on the head in one pass and scoop away your world with the next. “Why have you sold the future, why have you sold the past?” questions the chorus. “Is it for our amusements, ‘cos nothing is meant to last?” Someone’s standing on the edge of the kerb, swaying on their heels, counting the change they’ve been returned and failing to come up with comforting answers.
If the original Amusements resembles a rocked-up ‘Mezzanine’, the Severance mix (done with “avant-hardist” MEME) flings the drums into echoing relief and carves the groove into a zombie stomp, Garbage-style. Grating peaks of sub-bass and further sandstorms of psychedelic guitar crackle somewhere between Chapterhouse, Suicide and Levitation – sleekness savaged into life by noise and interference. No words, but an implacable, forceful indifference. The deal’s done – it’s time to bring out the heavy lorries.
Slide round the corner, and things are different. The torch song atmosphere of Left Standing implies Goth-cum-trip-hop, but also a take on Billy Mackenzie at his most open. It’s the brittle piano chording, that cavernous sway of arrangement around the lamp-post glow of a solitary microphone; the hints of theatrics and sincerity interlocking fingers and squeezing for luck… or in desperation. That said, it doesn’t follow the Mackenzie trail entirely. There’s an absence of helium operatics and peacock posturing. Instead, the almost-buried voice of Joe (Laughtrack’s mastermind) catches at the same blend of clenched unfunky indignation as Roland Orzabal at his most vulnerable; and even breaks at the same preacherly point.
This time Joe’s not mourning a way of life, but a person: and although the burden of grief is shared, the empty space that’s been punched into his life is obvious. Joe sounds exhausted and angry as he confesses “I really don’t care for very much these days, / but the living is easy in a pointless way. / You left us standing, and now everything is hard to say…” Thankfully there are compensations, new reconcilations, new solidarities to be found in the face of it: “I tell my friends ‘don’t be so scared’… / You left us standing, and that’s something we’ll always share.”
It’s Laughtrack’s unease – their sense of huge forces and emotions moving behind the immediate business of life – that draws you back to them. This is dark, luxuriant pop to tease apart with the fingertips and pry into; something that suggests stories in the same way as the more oblique moments of no-man or Smog. And Laughtrack’s simple but oddly unsettling name (raising questions every time you consider it) suggests a writer intelligent enough to be aware of the frame surrounding whatever he does.
As Laughtrack roll away off into the night, they’re being quietly trailed by gumshoes who are after some more answers.
Laughtrack: “Amusements”
Contrary Public, CONTPUB001 (no barcode)
CD-only single
Released: 2001
Buy it from:
Best looked for second-hand.
Laughtrack online:
Misfit City 
Another old review from 2001, retrieved from the original ‘Misfit City’ – and this one has surprised me both with the prescience of the subject material (which has hardly aged at all) and with the quality of the prose which it brought out of me. I’m trying to avoid blowing my own trumpet too much, but I’m really pretty pleased with this review.
So what happened to Joe and Laughtrack? Well, quite frankly, Joe’s main problem was that he was ten years ahead of his time. Not necessarily with the music – while that still sounds good, it was also a product of its times and the musical flavours which swirled around in 2001.
No… Joe’s problem was that he could produce excellent material (if not necessarily very fast) but then had to exhaust his patience and his resources attempting to get a CD into the shops and catalogues of the time. Not blessed with a review from a source which counted (ones provided by me and dedicated sources such as ‘Robots And Electronic Brains’ didn’t cut it, apparently), and unwilling to bribe his way up to a level of promotion which would still remain borderline-indifferent, Joe retreated. He wrote a rueful, pithy article about his frustrations (almost a miniature version of Steve Albini’s notorious and trenchant ‘The Problem With Music’) but after that I heard no more of him.
Of course, in these days of Bandcamp and resource-friendly download economies, Joe could have just the kind of career he needed.
I’m hoping that he’s still out there somewhere and that he’s still got songs in him – certainly it would be nice to know that he’d survived many of the chains and catalogues who rebuffed him and then went to the wall in the past decade. I’ve just dug up an old e-mail address which I have for Joe and, just in case, I’ll drop him a line to find out… Meanwhile, if what I wrote interests you, go over and listen to the ‘Amusements’ tracks on MySpace.