The Eurythmics of Our Lives: Vol. 1 - In the Garden
Written: Dec 15 '05 (Updated Dec 26 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent new packaging and sound, forces a reassessment of the neglected album.
Cons: The album was neglected for a reason.
The Bottom Line: In which the author finally takes it from the top.
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| plorentz's Full Review: In The Garden (Deluxe... [Digipak] [Remaster] - Eu... |
It was around Christmas time in 1987. I'd just gotten my very first CD player, and along with it, the beginnings of what would become a very large collection of CDs: a new album by Mr. Mister called Go On..., Chicago's Greatest Hits, and (found in a record store in Schaumburg while visiting relatives) Chicago III, U2's The Joshua Tree (of course), and three CDs by an a capella group called The Nylons who I'd just recently fallen in love with via their hit remake of "Kiss Him Good-bye".
The second of those Nylons CDs was called Seamless. Released in 1986, it featured several Nylons originals along with a handful of old-fashioned doo-woppy covers of songs like "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" and "Up On the Roof"; but also a song called "Take Me To Your Heart", which bore the familiar (but highly unlikely, I surmised) writing credit Lennox/Stewart. One listen to the Nylons performance confirmed it though. This was definitely a Eurythmics song, the voices creating a swirling synthesizer effect that was all icicles and ghosts, then erupting into a wailing wall that instantly reminded me of Annie Lennox's wordless crying on "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)".
Though I'd known and loved the Eurythmics since I first saw the video for "Sweet Dreams" as an impressionable 10-year-old - at first I'd figured they were Australian because so many of my favorite bands were, and also because Lennox and Men at Work's Colin Hay had the same hairdo - I'd never heard of "Take Me to Your Heart". Not surprising, really. All I knew of the Eurythmics was what I'd heard on the radio or (even better) seen on MTV. I didn't have any of their tapes, and in fact, in 1987, the extent of my Eurythmics collection was a long-suffering 45 of "Here Comes the Rain Again" (b/w "Paint a Rumour").
Also, by then, with the recent release of the album Savage, their career was arcing unpleasantly (I'd thought at the time) away from the sleek, synthesizer pop of their earliest hits to something far nastier - it was definitely a sound that would take years of experience and finally a fresh, unprejudiced listening to before I would really appreciate it. For the time being my interest in the group was on the wane. So it didn't much matter to me that I was just now having my first close encounter with the very beginnings of the Eurythmics - a song of dangerous, serpentine allure - and an album of whose very existence I wasn't even yet aware.
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I've been circling around the Eurythmics discography like an indecisive hawk for the last twenty years, and specifically around In the Garden, the duo's first album, released in Europe in 1981. I've owned various of their records at various times - they've come and gone from my collection depending on whim and my financial situation at any given moment. The first CD I ever owned of theirs was, in fact - gasp - a greatest hits collection; the first studio album I ever bought of theirs when it was new was their (for shame!) ho-hum 1999 reunion disc Peace.
In the meantime I was reveling in Annie's solo work, and, well, shall we say intellectually curious about (but never really interested in) Dave's. While working at a Goodwill store in the mid-90s, I found an LP of Dave and Annie's pre-Eurythmics band The Tourists, an import whose credits were all printed in French. I always regarded it as a neat thing to have, but didn't play it. When I finally did, I realized I wasn't all that interested in hearing whatever Dave and Annie had done between then and "Sweet Dreams".
Until, one day, a couple years ago, when I chanced upon a used copy of In the Garden at one of my favorite stores, and saw "Take Me To Your Heart" on the tracklist, and the wide-eyed curiosity of my Inner Eighth Grader got the best of me. 6.49 and it was mine. A week later, I found an article in Ice Magazine about a massive, forthcoming Eurythmics reissue campaign supervised by Dave Stewart himself, due in stores in a couple of months. I gathered my current collection of Eurythmics CDs and sold 'em all off. Good-bye In the Garden. I hardly knew ye. But it was okay. What I'd heard of it was sorta boring. I'd already lost interest.
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More than two years after that article, the deluxe edition re-masters of the Eurythmics catalogs are finally in stores and not a moment too soon for fans of the band who have been clamouring for an upgrade to those original RCA CDs. All packaged in slick, sturdy cardboard digipaks (longtime Eurythmics associate Laurence Stevens refurbished his own designs), loaded with period photos, production credits, historical liner notes, and several actually interesting bonus tracks apiece, these elegant reissues gave this particular writer an excellent excuse to take the trip across town through nasty wind and freezing rain and drop something like $130 on 8 CDs (yes, unfortunately - but understandably - they all list for the price of a standard new release) - something I'd generally be loath to do, especially for reissues.
But then, for me, this set of reissues is probably the biggest musical event of the year - something on par with, say, the recent reunion of the Pixies, or Prince's induction in the Rock N' Roll Hall of Fame. Or if Bono had actually won the Nobel Peace Prize. In many ways, these new releases not only affirm (canonize?) one of the most accomplished (and easily overlooked) bodies of work of the 1980s, but also make that work new again.
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The one disc of the bunch, then, that will strike most listeners as the most new will undoubtedly be the band's oldest record, 1981's In the Garden. Listening to this record for, really, the first time - and now, in the context of the rest of the Eurythmics' work is like watching one of those tearful talk-show reunions, where an adopted child, now grown-up, is welcomed into the arms not only of her birth mother, but also all the kids her birth mother had later on - biological brothers and sisters that also happen to be strangers with little, if any, shared history.
At once, In the Garden sounds like a Eurythmics record and also not like the Eurythmics at all. It's got a lot of the same facial features - Annie's icy voice and the equally chilly synthesizers - but it feels largely hollow and foundationless. Where each of their later records would present their growing audiences with a new and distinctive Eurythmics identity, marking out the duo's evolution from an appealingly naive outcropping of the New Romantic movement to the work of jaded creative divorcees on 1989's We Too Are One - perhaps due to the vacuum formed by the Tourists' implosion, or maybe even because Annie and Dave, having just split romantically from each other, were rewriting the boundaries of their personal and creative relationships - In the Garden spends most of its time in limbo, in the grayest, broadest sense of the word.
It's not that the tunes are necessarily bad in and of themselves. Individually, at least when they aren't just self-consciously weird (see "Caveman Head"), many of these tracks are quite nice (in the grayest, broadest of that word). The album's lead single, "Belinda" is a mildy catchy new wave rocker that could have been recorded by any one of a zillion Blondie wannabes, while songs like the opening "English Summer", "She's Invisible Now" and "Take Me To Your Heart" are blandly seductive (in fact, The Nylons version is much more effective), as if to demonstrate the disconnect between Annie's cherry lip-sticked voice and icily ironic lines like "it's good to pretend that you are here with me".
But mostly, these tracks aspire to something both ill-defined and (at this point) out of reach. The only song here that even hints at what the Eurythmics would become is also one of the record's most backward looking songs: "Never Gonna Cry Again" is layered and repetitive, a wholly synthetic mantra of distance and (again) disconnection set to cheap-sounding drum machine beats reminiscent of John Foxx's Ultravox (no doubt thanks to famous Ultravox and Kraftwerk producer Conny Plank). Harmonizing with herself on an endlessly looping hook, Annie Lennox sounds every bit the machine Foxx so wanted to be.
Added here are a couple of neat b-sides - the upbeat charmer "Heartbeat Heartbeat" and the more atmospheric experimental "Le Sinestre" - and rounding out the disc are several live tracks recorded in what sounds like a thinly populated club in 1981, all taken from a 1982 EP (This is the House, whose title track served as a preview to the band's second album). It's here that we also get a bit of a teaser about the kind of theatrically expressive frontwoman Annie Lennox would become, percussively stage-whispering her way through "Take Me To Your Heart", drearily droning on "Never Gonna Cry Again", and breaking out the whips and chains for the playful "4/4 in Leather".
All told, In the Garden remains the least essential album by the Eurythmics (with the possible exception of Peace, but for entirely different reasons). Nevertheless, this handsome repackaging of the disc verily demands reassessment even from those familiar with the original album's obvious shortcomings. This is essentially a five-star reissue of a two-and-a-half star album - recommended not so much for the music, but for its noble intent, and the brilliant execution of that intent.
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RATINGS:
Original Album - 2 1/2 stars
Reissue - 5 stars
Total - 3.75 rounded up
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"In the Garden" [deluxe edition] by The Eurythmics
RCA / Legacy Records
Originally released 1981
Reissued 11/15/2005
Original Album Produced by Conny Plank and the Eurythmics
Remastered by Ian Cooper
57 min.
SONGS: English Summer - Belinda - Take Me To Your Heart - She's Invisible Now - Your Time Will Come - Caveman Head - Never Gonna Cry Again - All the Young (People of Today) - Sing-Sing - Revenge /BONUS: Le Sinestre - Heartbeat Heartbeat - Never Gonna Cry Again (live) - 4/4 in Leather (live) - Take Me To Your Heart (live)
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THE EURYTHMICS OF OUR LIVES:
In The Garden (1981)
Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) (1983)
Touch (1983)
Be Yourself Tonight (1985)
Revenge (1986)
Savage (1987)
We Too Are One (1989)
Peace (1999)
Recommended:
Yes
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plorentz
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Member: Paul Lorentz
Location: The Land of Limburger and Leinenkugel's
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