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The Gist - Embrace the Herd (1999)

Album details

Label: Rykodisc    Ref#: misc-1480
Date: 1999   Category: misc
Length: 50:35    
Format: CD    
Audio: Stereo    
Genre: Alternative; Alt.Rock    

Notes/Reviews

Stuart Moxham was a driving force in the critically worshipped lo-fi, low-volume pioneering Welsh cult band Young Marble Giants. When they fell apart in 1980, his next project, The Gist, was widely perceived as a disaster. Indeed, even Moxham himself professes an abiding dislike of Embrace the Herd. “It’s a symbol of my misery and lack of direction at that time. There’s very few lyrics on it, for example, because I had nothing to say.”

Even so, tucked away among a sequence of Eno-esque instrumentals resembling spaced-out indicental music for The Magic Roundabout, are a fistful of treasures that could hardly be more ripe for rediscovery.

While mainstream pop taste had descended as far as Renee & Rentao, Kajagoogoo and Duran Duran, The Gist took YMG as a foundation on which to build a new house, offering oblique snapshots of an altogether more intriguing and infinitely more British alternative pop universe, where the mannered folk whimsy of Jake Thackray collided with the intellect of Brian Eno in George Clinton’s back garden.

“It was a time of huge changes for me,” points out Moxham now. “In YMG we’d functioned on cups of tea and fags, but after the split I moved into a really grim Stoke Newington squat where I spent my time permanently stoned, never seeing daylight, and listening to reggae dub really loud. I didn’t know it, but I was heading for four years of clinical depression.”

En route to his girlfriend’s house in Nottingham, he crashed his motorbike and suffered multiple injuries which left him in plaster and on crutches for a year. “I now went into a heavy acid-taking period. Walkmans had just come on the market, and I spent a lot of time hobbling around the streets of Nottingham, wearing headphones, with the microphone from an Aiwa recording Walkman clipped to my lapel and the gain turned up so high that I could only hear what came in through the mic.

Inspired by dub, LSD, the new soundscape revealed by the Aiwa mic, and a love of Brian Eno, Moxham laid down some demos at home “using a four-track recorded as a substitute for the band,” then went into Cold Storage in Brixton with producer Phil Legg and large quantities of grass. “It was the classic mistake of thinking I could do better than the demos but, in fact, you lose the spontaneity when you do it again.”

Whatever Moxham’s misgivings, his outrageously eclectic finished album sounded unlike anything available at the time and pointed to a number of routes to the future. With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, it’s clear that whatever it lacks in coherence, it more than compensates for in unabashed eclecticism and quirky tunefulness.

“Love at First Sight” is the kind of yearning love song that Everything But the Girl would later build an entire career around. “Clean Bridges,” with its single line of lyric and uncluttered linear development, is a more distinctively English take on Kraftwerk than any Human League chart-topper. The loping “Long Run” sounds like a Jamaican Depeche Mode serving time as an easy-listening lounge band.

By the time it was finished, although unhappy with what he’d achieved, Moxham had recovered sufficient composure to realize that the arrogance which had fueled his split from YMG could no longer be allowed to dominate his thinking. “When I called it Embrace the Herd, I was talking to myself, telling myself what I had to do to start putting things right.”

Producer Phil Legg, whose contributions Moxham valued highly, subsequently went on to work with Terence Trent D’Arby, The Pasadenas and others, while the discouraged Moxham returned to a life of relative obscurity from which he is only now re-emerging. “I’ve been writing a lot of strong material just lately,” he says, “and I’m thinking it’s maybe time to get involved with a major label. I don’t think I’d make the same mistakes again.”

Then again, when you could an album as lovable as Embrace the Herd among your mistakes, maybe it’s best to take note of Robert Fripp’s observation that truly creative artists should honor their mistakes as hidden intentions.

--Johnny Black

Songs/Tracks

1.   Far concern  2:51
2.   Love at first sight  3:44
3.   Fretting away  2:19
4.   Public girls  3:28
5.   Clean bridges  3:09
6.   Simian  2:55
7.   Embrace the herd  2:41
8.   Iambic pentameter  2:53
9.   Carnival headache  3:52
10.   Concrete slopes  2:22
11.   The long run  3:08
12.   Dark shots  3:05
13.   Four minute warning (Previously unreleased)  3:20
14.   Problem attics (Previously unreleased)  3:05
15.   Light aircraft (B side 7' single "Love at first sight")  3:40
16.   Love at first sight (Demo version)  3:56

Recording/Credits

Links/Resources

Gist Biography - AOL Music

Lyrics

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