Back in the day when I was a young lad in
school, one of my classmates stood out through coming from a very religious
family background. He never seemed that involved with it himself and he pretty
much managed to keep a lid on it during the week; the main manifestation of the
dogma he was living under came through never being allowed out on a Sunday. As
we all grew older, rebellion entered into the picture in the form of the New
Wave Of British Heavy Metal, a genre of music that was officially a VERY BIG
THING 'round 'our way' in the early 1980's.
AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest,
Saxon, Rainbow, denim jackets and tight jeans - all were grist to the metal mill
and all were indulged in by myself and my contemporaries, including my religious
mate, but it was with Iron Maiden's 1982 'The Number Of The Beast' album that
his parents decided they knew a final straw when they saw one and to nip all
this nonsense in the bud they sat him down to watch 'The Exorcist' on video. And
not just watch it, they told him it was a documentary and that what happened to
Regan McNeil would happen to him too if he didn't mend his ways and get
back on the right path. Needless to say, it worked, and his next brush with the
world of metal was when he brought his albums to school and gave them away
because (he claimed) he could hear the devil tempting him through the drum
beats. He was thirteen years old.
I have to say that the cover here reminded me
of him for the first time in decades, and it kind of gave me an insight into
what his home life must have been like back then - all starchy discipline in a
strait laced humour vacuum where unhappy looking kids, togged out to the nines
in a style more 1870 than 1970, sit grouped around a
blazing fire while a stern patriarch torments them with readings from a well
thumbed text, only putting his pipe and glasses down to reach for a just out of shot bamboo cane that's flecked with
the dried blood of misremembered Bible passages past. Whatever your own views on this sort of carry on are
(and I have plenty), let me say that whilst by no stretch am I a religious
person (in fact, I'm about as atheistic as they come), I will own up to
liking a lot of gospel. A good call and response revivalist holler can uplift
and inspire even at a secular level and I don't mind straight ahead hymns either
as long as they're belted out with joy and enthusiasm. That's what I
like anyway, so shame then that 'Sunday Evening Fire-side Hymns' delivers an
opposite that's as polar as night is to day.
For a start, there are no vocals here to
impart anything; this is a purely instrumental affair. From the title, I'm
assuming the idea is that you gather the family of Sunday evening, put this
on the stereo then sing along to it.* That's ok in itself I suppose, but there's
no room here for anybody to cut loose with the abandon I favour; McKenzie
tackles every single one of these hymns in the manner of a beaten dog cowering
before his master, eager to please but more scared of causing offence to risk
putting a foot out of place. The pace of his playing is so leaden that the gaps
between the notes mean that, over time, the hymns themselves become meaningless
- almost unrecognisable - as they leak into and over each other in a low key ebb
and flow of continuous, ambient misery until I'm dazed to the point I can't tell
where 'How Great Thou Art'
starts and 'I Am Thine O Lord'
stops.
There's no joy to be
had here whatsoever, no spreading of the good news, no spirited Hosanna's or
shouted 'praise be's, nothing except the weary sound of an organ played at the
sodden pace of a funeral in the rain and with just as much spirit - oh never
mind funereal; if the mother of those children were lying in state in the room
next door then the funeral directors would probably think twice about playing
this on the grounds that it would be inappropriately maudlin. It's morose to the
point of it being positively unhealthy, a suffocating dirge that clings like a
plastic bag pulled tightly over your head, the oxygen slowly depleting until all
you want to do is open a window and let some air in. As if Sunday evenings
needed to be made any more depressing - this, I'm afraid, is dreadful stuff.
Time to put some Maiden on I think.
* Looking at the set up there though, I'm not
sure that a record of this sort would be of any use to them anyway; they look
like the sort of family who'd consider disembodied sounds emanating from a
gramophone as the work of he devil and refuse to let one through the
door.
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