Category: Bathers

AS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN BY CRAIG McALLISTER for PLAIN OR PAN? on 6 NOVEMBER 2023

JC writes……

The eleventh and final (bonus) instalment of this occasional feature, in which I’ve tried to draw your attention to some albums that have been purchased in 2023 and which I reckon are worth highlighting.  This one landed very late – it was only released at the beginning of November – and there is no way I could better Craig’s review from his place over at Plain or Pan?.   My huge thanks to him for allowing me to copy it.

——-

The Bathers, Chris Thomson’s vehicle of unravelling melodies and swooning arrangements, moves at such a stately, tectonic pace that those other west coast hummers and hawers the Blue Nile and the Trashcan Sinatras might consider themselves in Allan Wells territory by comparison. Like a Michelin star chef marinating his secret ingredients overnight for extra devastating effect, Chris has waited 20 years and more between new studio releases before letting Sirenesque out and into the ears of anyone still tuned to his particular station. Entire bands, entire musical careers, at least 72 UK Prime Ministers at the last count, have come and gone since then. And now Thomson, with his ancient, withered, weathered, leathery vocal has crept out of the shadows bringing with him a heavy dose of pathos and regret to remind us what we’d almost forgotten about. Let it be said: Sirenesque is the finest, most autumnal – and most adult – listen you’ll have this year

From concept to realisation, it’s a grand album in every sense of the word; magnificent…awe-inspiring…important…all of this. Concert pianos, delicate and gossamer and bassy and rich, their notes captured suspended in solid air, form the basis of the record. From here, all manner of instrumentation pours forth. Clean twanging electric slide guitar, gently plucked nylon-stringed acoustics and fantasy land harps, subtle muted brass that might well be the ghostly breath of Chet Baker himself, chirping birdsong, the sweeping weep of the Scottish Session Orchestra’s strings, the Prague Philharmonic’s chamber arrangements, filmic and fragile and Tindersticks-tender, a coming-and-going, eerie and vampish female vocalist pitched halfway between wonky Disney and Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs… it’s an album packed with ideas and invention and, crucially, control and discipline. There’s not a wasted couplet or jarring note across the record’s dozen tracks. It might’ve taken 20 years to get here, but every nuance of the record’s structure has been expertly thought out.

At its core is Chris Thomson, his close-miked ethereal whisper vocalising a very particular Glasgow; the Glasgow of high corniced ceilings and Kelvingrove and University Avenue and understated Harris Tweed and Mother India and Royal Exchange Square and croissants and coffee and 20-year old malts in the Old Toll Bar. And the words are sung in a voice of the greats, of Scott Walker, of Tom Waits, of David Bowie…very Bowie, as I’ve come to consider it. That thought struck me midway through side 2’s Welcome To Bellevue and the opening phrasing on the track that follows (She Rose Through The Isles) and has stayed with me through every subsequent spin ever since then.

I now can’t not listen to the record without filtering it through Bowie ears. It’s all there in the considered arrangements and unexpected phrasings and the time-stopping production of it all. Sirenesque is almost a companion piece to Blackstar. Seriously. And while that record’s underlying theme of death couldn’t be further from Sirenesque‘s observations on life, this new record hits almost as hard, unravelling more of its secrets and majesty with each subsequent play. In this live fast, move on, next! next! next! world that we live in, you could do worse than downpace to the thrum of Sirenesque. It’s great – Bowie great. The best kind of great.

CRAIG

Some of you may be wondering how it is possible for a band as little known as The Bathers to have experienced the release of a ‘Best Of ‘ compilation.  The answer partly lies in music label politics…

The Bathers are really a front for the singing/songwriter talents of Chris Thompson, a man whose work I have admired and adored since the early 80s and the emergence of Friends Again.  His indie-pop band had lots of fans in the industry and it was no real surprise that when they split in 1985 that he’d get a number of offers and in 1987 his new band released Unusual Places To Die, a tremendous debut album, on Go Discs only to find that those who had most backed his talents had left the label and the record floundered.

Three years later, the band were on Island Records and history repeated itself as Sweet Deceit flopped despite all sorts of press acclaim.

There then followed a period on which Chris Thompson joined forces with Neil Clark and Stephen Irvine (ex-Commotions) and Mark Bedford of Madness to write and release material under the band name Bloomsday and it was 1994 before The Bathers third album – Lagoon Blues – came out via German based Marina Records with further releases in 1995 and 1977 in the shape of Sunpowder and Kelvingrove Baby.

By now, the music was heavily reliant on lush arrangements and the use of strings, brass and keyboards rather than the guitar focussed work of the earlier material with a range of guest vocalists including most notably Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins.

By 1999, Thompson was regarded by many as one of Scotland’s greatest unknown talents His quality and diversity of work was winning small numbers of new admirers with every release including the sixth Bathers album, Pandemonia, which came out that year on Wrasse Records.

There was a demand for some sort of career perspective but the problem however, due in part to his continuous shifting around labels, and also that most of his records were only ever released in small quantities and went quickly out-of-print, that doing something along those lines wasn’t an easy task.  The solution lay in the release of Desire Regained in which twenty tracks spanning the career of The Bathers were re-recorded and brought together on one release back in late 2001.

It remains, to the best of my knowledge, the last release by the band although they have never formally broken up.

I thought I’d offer up a song that was recorded three times in the band’s career, in 1987, 1990 and 2001:-

mp3 : The Bathers – Perpetual Adoration (1987)
mp3 : The Bathers – Perpetual Adoration (1990)
mp3 : The Bathers – Perpetual Adoration (2001)

Enjoy