Sulk

Product Information

a b "ASSOCIATES | full Official Chart History | Official Charts Company". Officialcharts.com . Retrieved 16 June 2021. Hawking, Rom. "10 Bewilderingly Underrated Post-Punk Bands You Need to Hear". Flavorwire . Retrieved 3 March 2017. Waring, Charles (June 2016). "The Associates – The Affectionate Punch, Fourth Drawer Down, Sulk". Record Collector. No.454 . Retrieved 24 June 2017. Reynolds, Simon (2009). Totally Wired: Post-Punk Interviews and Overviews. Faber and Faber. p.265. ISBN 978-0-571-23549-0.

heart of glass | full Official Chart History | Official Charts Company". Officialcharts.com . Retrieved 16 June 2021. lush, anxious, dark, atmospheric, cryptic, manic, surreal, nocturnal, passionate, male vocalist, psychedelic, hedonistic, energetic, playful, quirkyHe later taught at Stow College in Glasgow, where he helped students set up their own record label, Electric Honey, which later launched the careers of bands such as Belle and Sebastian, Snow Patrol and Biffy Clyro. Strange obsession, what a strange obsession for this haunting record. Like two lovers (invariably male I think), "Party Fears Two" and "Club Country" are dancing eternally, holding each other into a damned dance throught labyrinths of sulphur and fetal death. Where did I dare to listened this? On a defiant stand near Hell, for sure. "Bapdelabap" is like a bat flight - any gothic band, shitty or not, is laughable near this: probably wins the price for the scariest moment in Pop music - even Peter Murphy has pissed off his trousers.

Growing up in the 1980s, a much derided decade, I've always been an advocate of pop: it's not a dirty word! & the early 1980s, post-Abba/post-Bowie/post-Chic/post-Moroder/post-Roxy, was an era when pop was at its most inventive. From ABC's The Lexicon of Love to Scritti Politti's The Sweetest Girl, from Cabaret Voltaire's Red Mecca to Simple Minds' New Gold Dream, from The Human League's Dare! to Prince's Controversy etc- this was an era of wild abandon alluded to on the recent compilation 'Death Disco'. Associates' Sulk is probably the masterpiece of the era, an album that on one hand was perfect pop, and on the other wildly experimental. This is the album that just edges out other contenders for greatest album of the era- Sorry for Laughing, The Correct Use of Soap, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, Avalon, Climate of Hunter, New Gold Dream... Then there is Sulk, on which the group’s splendour is fully realised. It is ornate, unsettling, joyous and playful. For years, Dempsey worried it had become unlistenable, thanks to unsympathetic mastering. “You’d take it into the master room, and the guy looks at his meter and goes white; he doesn’t know what to do with it, and usually he would err on the side of caution.”

This deluxe reissue features exclusive sleeve notes from Simon Reynolds with interviews from Alan Rankine, Michael Dempsey, Mike Hedges & Martha Ladly plus previously unseen photography by Derek Reid, Tom Sheehan & Eveline Dröge. Also, a more primeval version of Club Country, anintensely boisterous alternative version of And Then I Read a Book, the several very different versions of Its Better This Way, of course, the full single version of 18 Carat Love Affair and the incredible Love Hangover. If there is a cure for this, I don’t want it… Michael was a very distinctive bass player and the way Bill and I telepathically worked, bouncing off each other, he was very good at just slotting in the middle without interrupting. Murphy was Australian and quite a character. In all the time that we played live together, he never bought a drink and if you went to a party with him, he would start rummaging through the bins looking for something to eat. When we were rehearsing, he would have the NME spread out on his floor tom and he’d be reading it as we were playing. The best Associates songs sound fresh and luminous. Mix Billy's phantasmagoric voice with Rankine's multi-layered instrumentation. OK? Now add tons of amphetamines. Sulk is the result. It seems to me this music will resist the passing of time, for it feels it was made disregarding all critics and musical currents." - Altair82