Review:

on 2011-02-24 CharlesMartel Said:

Cal"en*ture\, n. [F. calenture, fr. Sp. calenture heat, fever, fr. calentar to heat, fr. p. pr. of L. calere to be warm.] (Med.) A name formerly given to various fevers occurring in tropics; esp. to a form of furious delirium accompanied by fever, among sailors, which sometimes led the affected person to imagine the sea to be a green field, and to throw himself into it.

The dictionary definition of "Calenture" is, once you have listened to the album a few times, a fairly good description of the major themes running through it. Like all Triffids' albums, "Calenture" is not an easy album to appreciate, though it is more accessible than its immediate predecessor, "Born Sandy Devotional". That may be because the production is more polished, for the depth and intricacy of the late David McComb's lyrics have hardly changed at all. Indeed, if calenture the delirium is all about the effect of heat on the senses, then "Calenture" the album is all about the effect of passion on reason.

Throughout the whole album runs this double theme of the pleasures of love (or being in love) and the more sinister side effects of there being no love (or being out of love). So, the album opens pleasantly enough with a plea for love to come to the rescue - "Bury Me Deep in Love" has its understated synthesisers and smooth acoustic and string instrumentation creating a pleasant feel. Yet despite that feel, it is a plea not a request, and one gets the impression from the lyrics that the plea is becoming increasingly desperate.

This mixing of the dark and the light side of love and relationships features elsewhere and is a hallmark of the lyrical depth and subtlety of this album - as well as being at the heart of what makes the Triffids such a difficult band to appreciate after only a few listens. Take these lines from "Open for You" -

"Well they've dug up the patch
And found the remains
They've taken them all away
The beads end the bones
Hidden beneath that old stone
Where we carved our names on the underside"

The listener could take this either way, but the mixture of kinder and darker images constantly throws the listener off balance. It is a deliberate tactic which works well. The tactic reaches its apogee with "Jerdacuttup Man". This track sounds as if the theme to a horror movie has merged with an Irish jig. Plunging chords are evocative of the ritually sacrificed victim being hurled into a freezing peat bog, eventually to meet his fate as a leathery exhibit in a glass case in the British Museum. And for what was he sacrificed? Well it would appear he was out of luck because of both his business and his love lives, and that sudden change of image again brings us back to the modern world, in spite of our contemplating the shrivelled corpse of a ten thousand year old man.

Sadly for the overall effect of the album, the instrumentation doesn't always rise to match the standard set by the vocals. With the exception of the aforementioned "Jerdacuttup Man" and the excellent "Kelly's Blues", there is little of the latent violence of the imagery transferred to the musical structure of the songs. As a result a fault line opens up - between the imagery of the words and the sentiments of the music. And it is this which drags the overall rating down.

I have the extended and remastered album which contains additional tracks on the first disk - mostly b-sides and outtakes - while the second disk is comprised largely of demos. This second disk is informative for it shows what the album could have been if the original intention of the demos had been followed more closely. Both "Bury Me Deep in Love" and "Jerdacuttup Man" have a much rougher feel to them, and to be honest benefit from it. Listening to the demos it seems as if the producers smoothed out all the edges in the final album to make this a more polished and professional recording, and in the process took away some of the grittiness of the music. That is a pity because the album would have benefited from some of the original rawness being left in. As it is, the Triffids demo'ed a better album than the one which eventually saw the light of day.
Rating: 6/10