There are times when something in me sickens every time I flick through a music magazine or browse some online publication. Seems like there is a never-ending array of earnest singer-songwriters, vacuous factory-sealed pop products, former Idol contestants torturing some over-baked fluff with needless melisma, pro-tooled and pitch-shifted RnB cyphers, and skinny-jeaned alt.-culture wannabes. Endlessly I hear the same influences invoked over and over in reviews, in interviews. Music can grow to seem like a mishmash of corporation-approved sounds and styles, everything tried and tested and ready to deliver via hi-speed internet connections. A stagnating junk-heap of blandness.
An endless parade of beige on beige on beige.
For every genuine innovator there's a stinking tidal wave of mediocrity; for every Bjork there is a plague of Ke$has (that is the correct collective noun, I assure you).
Which is why the world needs artists such as cult British trio The Tiger Lillies.
They formed in the late eighties; the brainchild of deviant genius Martyn Jacques who, if he is to be believed; has a fascinating and tarnished past (once supporting himself financially by dealing drugs and pimping out his girlfriend). Their longest-standing line-up sees Jacques on vocals, accordion, guitar and piano (latterly ukulele as well). Adrian Stout on double bass, theremin, and musical saw. And lastly, but very far from leastly: Adrian Huge (actually Hughes but he changed it as it was amusing to do so) on percussion. They have never been signed to a label, launching their own instead: Misery Guts Music. They have released and recorded in excess of thirty albums, sometimes as any as three in one year.
They are unmarketable. Unclassifiable. Irreverent. Mad. Extraordinary.
They have been nominated for a Grammy ('Best Classical Album' for 'The Gorey End' a musical collaboration with The Kronos Quartet, inspired by the unpublished works of the late Edward Gorey: an award they really ought to have won). They tour internationally almost constantly. They have been vilified and worshipped; reviled and revered. A Christian lobby group even tried to prevent them from entering New Zealand back when they were touring Shockheaded Peter (the work for which they are perhaps best known).
As you may have guessed from the instrument list (a line-up occasionally seasoned with violin, trumpet, trombone, harpsichord, church organ, celeste and 'some of the finest Turkish musicians living in Berlin') The Tiger Lillies aren't exactly dubstep. In fact keyboard only features on one disc ('Circus Songs'; played by Steven Severin who in the absence of evidence to the contrary I'm going to assume is the former member of Siouxsie and the Banshees). Beyond that, the closest thing to an electronic instrument to adorn any of their discs is the theremin.
Their music is heavily influenced by the works of Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill: scabrous, beggar's opera. It combines elements of Weimar cabaret, jazz, blues, Eastern European folk, circus music, classical, French chanson, opera, klezmer, and torch songs. They play vicious tangoes, spiteful waltzes, venomous polkas and heart-breaking laments. Unlike other bands that swim the same waters (Portland's superb 'Vagabond Opera' spring to mind) the songs of the Tiger Lillies are not overwhelmingly complex or exhausting. On initial listening they often seem simple, direct and immediate.
Their lyrics are a Dickensian nightmare. A cavalcade of grotesques and degenerates: of perverted monsters and their ruined victims. They spin tales of women butchered by Satan-worshipping serial killers ('Maria' - perhaps one of the most exquisitely beautiful and sublime songs ever recorded). Of transvestites killed in hate crimes, their charred bodies abandoned ('Maxwell', also heart-rending). Of pimps and prostitutes, carnies and freaks, pedophiles, bank-robbers, junkies and pyromaniacs. They perform the sweetest, saddest sea-shanties you will ever hear, telling of sailors drowning thousands of miles from land. They sing of poverty and disease, of creeping senility and the endless looming spectre of death. They have dedicated entire albums to documenting sexual perversions ('Farmyard Filth' - bestiality, obviously). They even find time to throw in a spot of Christian-baiting heresy.
They are very, very funny, but in a truly alarming and uncomfortable way. They are also often deeply poignant.
Jacques takes the stage glowering from beneath a bowler hat; leering and gurning at the audience through a face full of clown/kabuki makeup. But it is his voice that is the true surprise. More on that later.
'Freakshow' (2010) is something like their 26th recorded work. It is the thematic successor to 2000's superb 'Circus Songs' but, as the title suggests, instead of lingering among the carnies this album takes the listener deep into the twisted, tragic heart of the freakshow. It is a handsomely packaged two disc digipak. It is also something of a deviation from the Tiger Lillies' core sound and as such is not the best introduction to the trio (if you've never heard them before and are curious; start with 'The Brothel to the Cemetery' (1996) - the only one of their titles to ever see distribution in the States).
The accordion, typically the driving force behind their past compositions, takes a back seat in the arrangements on display here. In it's place guitar and piano leads are far more prominent. Martyn Jacques' remarkable voice too, is changed (an alteration that began with the lovely, baroque album 'Love and War' (2007).
Across all previous recordings (and still in evidence on this one): Martyn Jacques is a self-taught countertenor - the highest of the male voices. It is a style that is similar in timbre and tone to a mezzo-soprano, but often reaching higher register notes that you might expect from a soprano.
He trained himself to sing in this key because he wanted to sound like a castrato. That, in itself, is reason enough to admire the man.
Jacques twists his voice into alarming contortions, never afraid to let it be ugly or startling: often he evokes a pantomime dame or that infamous puppet bastard Mr Punch, occasionally his delivery recalls Billie Holliday's bright coin of a voice. Sometimes he spills over into falsetto.
However on Freakshow he unleashes a catalogue of other voices as well - it is perhaps the widest recorded showcase of his vocal abilities. Here he reveals a booming, ragged voice that recalls Tom Waits at his most theatrical - and is fully an octave lower than the range exploited over most of their other discs. Sometimes he sounds comical, other times he rages or presents hoarse but tender laments. He whispers menacingly on 'Three-legged Jake'. He bellows his way through 'Flipper Boy'. He berates the audience with increasing urgency on 'Miracle Cure'. He solemnly sings in a wounded tenor on 'The Wind and the Rain', 'High-Heeled Shoes' and 'Matchstick Man'. His delivery always suits the song and the character evoked.
Hell, given the subject matter this is practically 'Geek Love: The Opera'.
The album opens with Jacques in deranged carnival barker mode: inviting one and all to come and witness the horrors of the freakshow over whistling, horror-show theremin. There could be no more appropriate introduction.
The afore-mentioned 'Flipper Boy' sees Jacques growling and slavering over the kind of propulsive countrified guitar rhythm that recalls Nick Cave at his most swaggering and bilious. 'The News' rides a looming, neo-classical piano run as Jacques, in gravel-grimed baritone, depicts the plight of the freaks driven into mental homes once the freakshow closes forever. 'Rosa with Three Hearts' tells of the titular character who loves so much and so deeply that she wears out all three of her hearts. Jacques' voice is exquisite here - rich, with precisely-employed vibrato. It simply captivates.
'Together Forever' is utterly rapturous. Twelve entrancing minutes of elegant, storm-laden piano chords and whispering, brushed drums, over which Jacques' achingly beautiful countertenor voice soars and sweeps, relating the tale of a Siamese twin's growing loathing for their conjoined sibling. In the final instrumental minutes the piano takes on a more delicate filigree and is joined by the low weeping of Stout's bowed bass. Huge's drums and percussion are mesmerizing throughout; far from merely keeping the rhythm he adds a surprising amount of texture and emotion with his often surprisingly subtle and complex playing. This song threatens to supplant 'Maria' as the most beautiful they've ever recorded.
By the time the two-disc set closes out with the wounded, hopeful and lovely 'Normo' (in which Jacques' delivery recalls Tom Waits in one of his more operatic moments) there is a noticeable shift. This song tells of a freak finally finding a 'normo' who can love them in spite of their deformities. It tells of acceptance. Instead of being portrayed as subhuman abominations and deviants the freaks are now revealed as the victims: of nature, of exploitation, avarice and prejudice. It is the audience, the voyeur, who is the true freak.
