1980 Housekeeping Listening Post Discovery
by Jim Coursey
Missing Presumed Dead
How's Your Bum For Cracking Walnuts?
Genre: Post Punk / New Wave / Avant Jazz
Rating: 4 out of 5
Highlights:
Say It With Flowers
Suburbia
Nothing to Lose
Time On My Hands
Family Tree
***WORTHY OF ATTENTION***
Maybe in retrospect their name was a bit too on the nose, but Ealing’s Missing Presumed Dead deserve more. Featuring a couple members from marginally better remembered post-punk outfit The Transmitters, Missing Presumed Dead carried the previous bands’ mild eclecticism further with surprising success. Maybe the album name didn’t help – “How’s Your Bum For Cracking Walnuts” is funny but might undersell the quality of the material therein.
“Say It With Flowers” kicks things off with a taut, danceable new wave groove over which the singer tries to figure out how romance works. It’s a catchy number that could scratch the cool kids’ pop itch. A sign of things to come, they bring in some horns at the end, here reminiscent of Romeo Void if a year ahead of their time [1]. But the band is anything but predictable, and the teasingly brief “Walkie Talkie Eyes” kicks things into high gear, serving up yelled vocals, heaps of dissonance, and lashings of jazz skronk horns. Almost like a totally different band, but it works.
While there are slow points, there’s a lot more to love here. "Nothing to Lose” reminds me a bit of Firehose, with its busy walking bass over jittery punk guitars. On that note, “Time On My Hands” really shows off drummer Jim Chase’s George Hurley-like chops and hi-hat finesse. “Family Tree” is for me the most charged and arguably most effective song on the album, railing against the sins and habits of the past.
Their new wave moments are great, but when they mix brittle, tense post punk with skronky jazz horns that would play equally well alongside The Lounge Lizards or Fred Frith as they would with Kleenex/Liliput, Minutemen or The Fall. If the whiff of free jazz scares you off, the songs where they really let their freak jazz flag fly are almost always the silliest. Case in point “Toothbrush”, with lyrics like: “Got a toothbrush in my pocket, got a toothpick in my hand… now I’m ready for war!” On the other hand, adding some wah-wah horn and jazzy guest vocals, “Delicate” is a bit of a funky miss for me. Nevertheless by the time they get to closer “Catholics”, they’ve earned the long jazz odyssey build-up that turns back to their solid post-punk roots before it closes.
Why they failed to make a dent is beyond me. For whatever reason Tim Whelan (vocalist, occasional flutist, and future Furniture/Transglobal Underground Member) would depart after this album, and their second and to my ear, their last album suffers for it. Prior to this though they did notch at least one Peel session. The album is well worthy of re-release, at least on the streamers, and after a half dozen spins I’m inclined to seek a copy out.
On the other hand this one is maybe as derivative as it is inventive – I can’t help but think of a song by a certain Manchester band when I hear “Say It With Flowers”, especially the chord progression and the chorus’ refrain “dance to the beat, dance to the beat.” But maybe I’m just hearing things, and at worst it’s a welcome and groovier take on “Transmission”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMTOkviUXV8
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