The 1981 Listening Post - The Makers of the Dead Travel Fast - The Vessels

 Reviewed by Paul J Zickler / LISTENING POST DISCOVERY

Released: March 1981 The Makers Of The Dead Travel Fast The Vessels Genre: Experimental Australian Post-Punk Rating: 4.25 out of 5 Highlights: No Threat Copper Hats Lovers Of Observatory Time The Barbers, The Barbers Zebra Crossing And now for something completely different. The Makers of the Dead Travel Fast named their band after a quote from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They formed in Sydney in 1980 and recorded a single titled Tael of the Saeghors, an eerie, ethereal waltz that became a local cult hit and led to this album, The Vessels. That’s all the background you need, really. Experimental music tends to fall into three categories: 1) Someone gets ahold of recording equipment & instruments and decides to mess around with it, usually leading to less-than-listenable results; 2) Gifted and/or established musicians decide to play weird on purpose, usually leading to slightly-more-listenable, although occasionally baffling, results; or 3) Creative people with interesting ideas use whatever they have on hand to turn their weird ideas into music. The third category has the highest potential to be listenable, but it depends both on how you feel about the weird ideas and how successful the musicians are at making them into actual music. The Makers of the Dead Travel Fast fall into that magical third category, and for the most part, they’re pretty good at converting their weird ideas into something listenable. They mostly avoid obvious pitfalls like pounding one riff into the dust or over-relying on sound effects or eschewing melody altogether. Every song has multiple musical themes going, shifting between tempos, structures, melodies, bass lines, noises, and textures just often enough, yet holding onto an overriding sonic feel that keeps each song intact. There are very few vocals on the album, and some of them are more decorative than narrative, but the titles - The Shadows Of Mde. Velo's Story; Illuminated Bay, Illuminated Buoy; Dance of the Trout; Copper Hats - let you know there’s a story happening, even if it’s known only to the band itself. The main instruments are piano, synthesizer, and bass, with some drums, guitar and saxophone here and there, but this represents only a tiny fraction of the sounds heard. I could try to guess what they used to make the tinkling, clanking, knocking, scraping and clicking on The Barbers, The Barbers, but it would feel intrusive and pointless. The sum total of whatever they did creates such a perfect emotional soundscape, it’s better to just take it all in and not ask questions. Only two tracks have actual lyrics. The opener, No Threat, reminds me of Joy Division, but with cheap Casiotone drums and tinkly piano. The closer, Zebra Crossing, feels like what Remain in Light would have sounded like if it was the Talking Heads first album and they’d produced it themselves instead of with Eno. Everything in between sounds like the soundtrack to a movie James Whale dreamed one night but forgot the next morning. I dig this quite a lot.