Siouxie and the Banshees - Kaleidoscope
#307
by Thom Bowers
Siouxsie And The Banshees
Kaleidoscope
Genre: Goth
Allen’s Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Thom’s Rating: 2 out of 5
Highlights:
Desert Kisses
Paradise Place
Christine
Confession: I chose to review Kaleidoscope, out of the handful of choices I had been offered, specifically because despite having heard about Siouxsie And The Banshees for decades now, I had somehow never managed to listen to a single one of their songs. So have no context in which to place this record, other than it being an early-ish entry in the catalog.
From my understanding, the primary focus/appeal of the band was Siouxsie Sioux herself, her lyrics and her persona. Listening to this record seemed to bear that out, as the music itself left almost no impression on me at all...except for one element. A few tracks in, it hit me: "Wow, this drummer doesn't play like Stewart Copeland, but sounds EXACTLY like him." Lo and behold, turns out that Kaleidoscope was produced by Nigel Gray, who also produced the first three Police albums. So there's that.
Other than that, it's pretty blah on the musical side. No other instrments stand out. The song-songs are craftless, and the anti-songs aren't especially adventurous. A lot of tracks come off as half-baked demos, with no sense of building something in between their arbitrary beginnings and endings. There are islands of promise poking up through the morass ("Desert Kisses" is evocatively moody, "Christine" and "Paradise Place" kinda almost have hooky choruses) but I found it mostly flat and colorless overall.
But then we come to Sioux herself, and...yeah. I hear it. There are definitely the makings of a compelling performer here, with a strong (if inconsistently employed) voice and sharp lyrical point of view. And that's just on record; I'll bet her vibe translated to the stage like gangbusters, making her the gothy misfit role model that I've been hearing so much praise for through the years. (And likely inspiring the multitide of alt-rock garage bands plodding through their shitty off-brand version of "Hybrid" at every other party I attended in college in the early 90s, but I won't hold that against her.)
She seems cool. She just needed a better team around her, at least at this stage of her career.
So, help me out, Postheads: which SatB records should I sample to get the real stuff? This can't be as good as it got, right?
https://open.spotify.com/album/5jynqY8ZyDoeqrIfYSwF8P?si=izNxHb_wQnaquNIyaez0Ww
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