Ahead of the release on the 4th December of the Pete Shelley tribute album “Yesterday’s Not Here,” Not Murdered Records have released a limited edition double A side 7” black vinyl single featuring two tracks from the upcoming album: ‘I Don’t Know What It Is’ by Klammer and ‘You Say You Don’t Love Me’ by The White Ribbons (both songs are also available digitally via the artistes pages on Bandcamp.com).
Shelley was the main driving force behind the Manchester punk bank The Buzzcocks and sadly passed away in 2018. The forthcoming album seeks to pay tribute to Shelley’s songwriting skill – which cannily married pop hooks to the stripped back aesthetic of punk rock and was perhaps best demonstrated in the Buzzcocks’ 1978 hit single ‘Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)’ – and the two songs on this single release certainly gives a taste of what is to come.
Leeds based post-punk band Klammer tackle ‘I Don’t Know What It Is’ (also known as ‘I Don’t Know What Love Is’), a song from Shelley’s 1981 post-Buzzcocks album ‘Homosapien’. The original version by Shelley is driven by a heavy synthesiser beat with a vocal delivery which makes Shelley sound like a robot (thus lending the song an ironic edge – can a robot truly know what love is?). Klammer’s arrangement, however, ditches the synthesiser and robotic monotone for a wall of thundering guitar lines, suffocating drum-beat syncopations, and ominous, Ian Curtis-esque vocals. The analogue futurism of Shelley’s original is instead filtered through the post-punk stylings of Joy Division and The Cure and the ironic flavour of Shelley’s version is replaced with something far more sinister. The song reaches towards the climax on the back of an astonishing guitar solo which stabs and howls with the same rage felt by someone experiencing the cruel taste of unrequited love and being frustrated at their inability to express or understand their feelings. Klammer’s contribution manages to do what the best ‘tribute’ songs do and sheds new light and a new way of experiencing the song they are covering. Well worth checking out.
The White Ribbons offering, however, is the flip side of Klammer’s (literally and metaphorically). Their take on the Buzzcocks song “You Say You Don’t Love Me” (taken from their third album, ‘A Different Kind of Tension’), is virtually identical to the original release. The key difference is that The White Ribbons version reflects the production style of 2020 as opposed to that of the 1979 original; the version by the Buzzcocks featured a vocal filter on Shelley’s vocal track which The White Ribbons dispense with. The upshot of this is that the vocals sound warm and clear. But the arrangement and overall sound is so close to the original that this sounds like a straight-up copy rather than a radical reinvention. It’s not that it is a bad version, in fact it is a very good recording – the musicianship is tight throughout and the song is a great deal of fun to listen to – but it sums up what many ‘tribute’ songs fall prey to: namely, a slavish desire to just stick to the template of the original. Perhaps this will work better in the context of the full album – if it is surrounded by radical reworkings along the lines of the Klammer song then its ‘traditional’ punk sound will come as a welcome relief and reminder of what Pete Shelley did best.
This single release, then, presents the tension which is inherent in all ‘tribute’ albums – the desire to reinvent on the one hand and the desire to remain faithful to the artist being paid tribute to on the other. In that respect, it is a fitting taster of what is to come on the album. On the evidence of these two songs, the album will be a fitting tribute to a much-missed musician – irrespective of whether you prefer songs to be reimagined or reverentially recreated.
Shelley was the main driving force behind the Manchester punk bank The Buzzcocks and sadly passed away in 2018. The forthcoming album seeks to pay tribute to Shelley’s songwriting skill – which cannily married pop hooks to the stripped back aesthetic of punk rock and was perhaps best demonstrated in the Buzzcocks’ 1978 hit single ‘Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)’ – and the two songs on this single release certainly gives a taste of what is to come.
Leeds based post-punk band Klammer tackle ‘I Don’t Know What It Is’ (also known as ‘I Don’t Know What Love Is’), a song from Shelley’s 1981 post-Buzzcocks album ‘Homosapien’. The original version by Shelley is driven by a heavy synthesiser beat with a vocal delivery which makes Shelley sound like a robot (thus lending the song an ironic edge – can a robot truly know what love is?). Klammer’s arrangement, however, ditches the synthesiser and robotic monotone for a wall of thundering guitar lines, suffocating drum-beat syncopations, and ominous, Ian Curtis-esque vocals. The analogue futurism of Shelley’s original is instead filtered through the post-punk stylings of Joy Division and The Cure and the ironic flavour of Shelley’s version is replaced with something far more sinister. The song reaches towards the climax on the back of an astonishing guitar solo which stabs and howls with the same rage felt by someone experiencing the cruel taste of unrequited love and being frustrated at their inability to express or understand their feelings. Klammer’s contribution manages to do what the best ‘tribute’ songs do and sheds new light and a new way of experiencing the song they are covering. Well worth checking out.
The White Ribbons offering, however, is the flip side of Klammer’s (literally and metaphorically). Their take on the Buzzcocks song “You Say You Don’t Love Me” (taken from their third album, ‘A Different Kind of Tension’), is virtually identical to the original release. The key difference is that The White Ribbons version reflects the production style of 2020 as opposed to that of the 1979 original; the version by the Buzzcocks featured a vocal filter on Shelley’s vocal track which The White Ribbons dispense with. The upshot of this is that the vocals sound warm and clear. But the arrangement and overall sound is so close to the original that this sounds like a straight-up copy rather than a radical reinvention. It’s not that it is a bad version, in fact it is a very good recording – the musicianship is tight throughout and the song is a great deal of fun to listen to – but it sums up what many ‘tribute’ songs fall prey to: namely, a slavish desire to just stick to the template of the original. Perhaps this will work better in the context of the full album – if it is surrounded by radical reworkings along the lines of the Klammer song then its ‘traditional’ punk sound will come as a welcome relief and reminder of what Pete Shelley did best.
This single release, then, presents the tension which is inherent in all ‘tribute’ albums – the desire to reinvent on the one hand and the desire to remain faithful to the artist being paid tribute to on the other. In that respect, it is a fitting taster of what is to come on the album. On the evidence of these two songs, the album will be a fitting tribute to a much-missed musician – irrespective of whether you prefer songs to be reimagined or reverentially recreated.
Reviewer - Andrew Marsden
on - 23/10/20
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