CD: EAR 001 CD
RELEASE DATE: 1997
LABEL: Earth Records

01. Stray Bullets
02. Dangerous Stars
03. Vampiric
04. Baby Moon
05. City Speed
06. Kissing In The Dark
07. I'm Your Freedom
08. The Spinning Room
09. Redemption's Knees
10. Between Buidings
11. Over The Under
12. Before The Day Begins

THE rock album of 1997. From high speed rock tracks like City Speed to wonderful love songs like Baby Moon. The best solo-work Adrian Borland has ever put out so far. Candidate for the pop album of the year. Borland's voice is a glorious amalgam of Mark Burgess, Ian McNabb, Ian McCulloch, Mike Peters, Jim Kerr and Then Jerico's Mark Shaw, the breathy intimacy here filling, elegantly, the roll that hoarse fervor played in his singing with the Sound. The production, similarly, seems to regain its bearings, and here brings out the alternately atmospheric and pulsing synthesizers, the alternately roaring and echoing guitars, the galvanizing backing-vocal wails, the unhurried snap of the drums, and the odd flugelhorn flourish. The album kicks in the pop rapture once more before it ends, with the galloping, affectionate "Over the Under", all ahhing choruses, sunny Waterboys-esque trumpets and wiry keyboard hooks, which sounds like what the Alarm might have evolved into if the atmosphere of Eye of the Hurricane hadn't turned out to be a tangent. Borland opts to end the record, however, with a quiet song, the slow, mostly acoustic "Before the Day Begins". "When you drowned in the sea of life, / Did your own one make no sense?", he asks, and this has the ring of self-awareness, as if he has learned, through painful experience, that reaching the cusp of revelation in a song doesn't always correspond to crossing over into it back in the world of clammy movie-theater floors, belligerent impatience, mass-produced aggression and a decade of music that would rather stew in its own transient, small-world street-toughness than yearn, vulnerably, for bigger things