Rolling Stone

 

• Ocean Rain

• Echo & The Bunnymen

 

By Parke Puterbaugh | July 19, 1984

Suspended somewhere 'twixt heaven and hell, Echo and the Bunnymen take an oddly visceral pleasure in their spiritual limbo, evoking a vast, white, arctic expanse that's silent, unbroken and pure — but also deadly. The band's fourth full-length LP is too often a monochromatic dirge of banal existential imagery cloaked around the mere skeleton of a musical idea. Even the livelier songs — e.g., "Silver," "My Kingdom" — tend to beat a formula into the ground.

The typical Echo and the Bunnymen number calls for a percussively strummed acoustic; a forsaken, tuneless chant of a vocal, steeped in cavernous echo; and a snippet of a theme, played on guitar and counterpointed by a choppy string arrangement. Sometimes the songs kick in on the choruses, but even there, guitarist Will Sergeant tends to wander around in a fog whenever he assays a solo.

The album's low point is "Thorn of Crowns," wherein singer Ian McCulloch — besides inverting a Biblical image and rendering it incoherent — attempts a Jim Morrison imitation that's more blustery than gripping. After four or five long minutes, there's a false ending, then McCulloch bobs up for a kind of verbal jam that's hard to imagine being delivered with a straight face: "I have decided/To wear my thorn of crowns/Inside-out/Upside-down/Back to front/All around." Well, if the crown fits....

Actually, there are some nifty choruses and nice atmospheres scattered about Ocean Rain, and "Crystal Days" and "Seven Seas" are enjoyable, welcome respites from the dark clouds of doom that spew rain and bile elsewhere. But a handful of good tunes doesn't justify an entire album, and, for a fourth record, Ocean Rain evinces too little melodic development and too much tortured soul-gazing from Echo and the Bunnymen. Silly rabbits.

 

 

 

 

Uncut Magazine

 

Echo & The Bunnymen - Ocean Rain – Collecters Edition

 

There can be few greater testaments to Julian Cope’s theory of Liverpool’s spendthrift celtic artistic spirit – the tendency of scouse groups to gloriously “piss it all away” - than Ocean Rain. While their contemporaries knuckled down to break America, in 1983 the Bunnymen toured the Hebrides and resolved to make an album of “kissing music”: psychedelic sex shanties, crooned beneath a Sinatra moon and swathed in the Parisian strings of Piaf and Brel.

The shiver and swoon of singles “Silver” and “The Killing Moon” marked their high tide of UK pop success, but may have scuppered chances of serious stadium rock crossover, and after such languor the group themselves seemed to lose momentum and ran aground. This latest reissue, timed to coincide with Liverpool's City Of Culture shindig, now incorporates the superb, much bootlegged 1983 Albert Hall show.

STEPHEN TROUSSÉ

 

Rating: 4 / 10

(Rhino)

 

 

 

 

BBC Online

 

BBC Review

Echo & The Bunnymen - Ocean Rain – Collecters Edition

 

The last truly great record they made.

Chris Jones 2008

 

Following the commercial breakthrough of 1983's Porcupine, Ocean Rain was both a consolidation and point of disintegration for the Bunnymen: the point where the cracks began to show, but were masked with such beauty as to hardly matter. Here you sense a pull in two directions. McCullogh's theatrics beg for widescreen setting yet Will Sergeant's fierce, jagged guitar pays homage to every proto-psych garage band that appeared on the Pebbles and Nuggets compilations that wormed their way through the record collections of a myriad music geeks in the late 70s. As a result Ocean Rain represents Liverpudlian psych at its absolute peak.

Both the album and the wondrous live bonus disc - recorded at the Royal Albert Hall in 1983 - represent a glorious blend of vaulting ambition and limited ability. The Donny Darko-assisted ubiquity of The Killing Moon may have blunted its impact, but it's still a gorgeous sweeping romantic gesture. Likewise second single, Seven Seas. But Thorn Of Crowns, pushed the shamanic Jim Morrisonisms a little too far. And while the use of a 35-piece orchestra allows the songs like Nocturnal Me (brooding with Eastern European sang froid) and the title track to set sail, in other cases (The Yo Yo Man) songs can flounder under the weight of intrusive arrangements. Also the sheen obscures the thiness of opener, Silver; a song that, if closely examined, shows signs of the band covering old ground.

In retrospect it sounds as though their garage roots were withering in the harsh glare of success. Unlike, say U2, who could reinvent themselves as world citizens, the Bunnymen would always be a very English institution. Only Pete de Freitas, whose performance on the live disc is a testament to his place at the very heart of the band, sounds like an utterly confident world-beater.

Such misplaced self-importance was to prove their undoing. And while Ocean Rain remains one of their finest albums it's also the last truly great record they made.

 

 

 

 

The Quiteus

 

Echo and the Bunnymen
Ocean Rain reissue

John Tatlock , October 30th, 2008

 

Back in 1984, the year of Ocean Rain’s original release, there were two UK bands, poised to take their bombastic, chorus-laden, almost certainly soul-selling updates of the sparse post-punk aesthetic to the world’s arenas. One was U2 and the other was… er, Simple Minds.

Echo and the Bunnymen were, unbelievable as it may seem now, widely tipped to comfortably eclipse both of those groups. Drawing on many of the same core influences – Bowie via Joy Division with a dash of Television – the Bunnymen also had a clutch of Really Catchy Singles and that most essential (but deeply un-post punk) US-cracking trait, Being Able To Cut It Live. And in singer Ian McCulloch, simultaneously channelling Iggy Pop and Scott Walker from beneath the best haircut of the 80s, they had a genuine pin-up pop idol pseudo-poet up front.

Released at a moment when the world seemed theirs for the taking, Ocean Rain was famously touted in magazine adverts (and regularly onstage by McCulloch) as “The greatest album ever made”.

Almost inevitably, it isn’t even the greatest album the Bunnymen ever made. But it remains the clearest glimpse into every other parallel universe but this one, where Bono is the has-been, phoning in the hits from the mid-afternoon slots of the festival circuit, while McCulloch plays golf with Barack Obama.

While McCulloch remains the only Bunny-face anyone but die hard fans can picture clearly, guitarist Will Sergeant was the band’s real creative force, and Ocean Rain is very much his record. Scattering an intricate lattice-work of chimes and shimmers over the windswept orchestral arrangements that underpin most of the album, he musters a curiously non-macho form of guitar heroics. From the flamenco stylings of 'Nocturnal Me' to the cod-eastern melodies and atonal scrapes and clanks of the lamentably titled 'Thorn of Crowns', he revels in exploring defiantly un-rockist ways of playing the guitar.

Even when playing it relatively straight on the jangle-pop 'Crystal Days', Sergeant casually up-ends the table and pulls out a bracingly experimental instrumental break, with squalls of feedback screeching over bassist Les Pattinson and drummer Pete de Freitas’s suddenly liberated rhythm clatter and overdubbed pipe-banging percussion. It’s these kinds of “what the hell just happened?” moments that still make Ocean Rain a startling listen twenty-four years later.

Time has been rather less kind to the young McCulloch’s brand of metaphysical lyrical cobblers, unfortunately, and for every dazzling leap of imagination the band make sonically, McCulloch takes an equivalent lurch backwards into the kind of risible nonsense that would have embarrassed even rock’s greatest charlatan (and McCulloch inspiration) Jim Morrison. “Blind sailors, imprisoned jailers,” he wails on opening track Silver. “God tame us, no-one to blame us” he goes on. What can it mean? “Food for survival thought”, he solemnly informs us.

Plainly, the more recherché lyrical concerns of the record had much to do with the band’s then-unfashionable immersion in LSD (as documented in Julian Cope’s excellent book Head On), with nosedives from the absurd to the utterly unfathomable being a regular feature. The line “C-c-c-cucumber, c-c-c-cabbage, c-c-c-cauliflower, men on Mars” is delivered with the conviction of a revivalist preacher, and vacuous images of “starry skies” and “blue horizons” and – amusingly – “bigger themes” abound. Presumably, you had to be there.

To take a more generous view, however, the Bunnymen were always far more about evocative form than substantial specifics, and McCulloch brings one of pop’s most idiosyncratically beautiful white male voices to the table. Able to pull off a gravelled croon like his hero Leonard Cohen, but also turn on a penny to a melodramatic Bowie-like yelp, young McCulloch positively soars throughout this record.

And where it all comes together, well… it’s still bollocks, but good lord, it is brilliant bollocks. 'The Killing Moon', both the centrepiece of the album and the band’s greatest single, still sends a shiver down the spine, with its distraught-yet-ecstatic surrender to “fate up against your will”. It’s still McCulloch the Shaman, but this time brooding over infidelity rather than a bunch of Philosophy access course set texts, and is all the better for it.

Closing track 'Angels and Devils' is a gentler take on the same worship of doomed romance which is the cornerstone of the lone young male psyche, and the real core of the Bunnymen’s appeal. McCulloch was always better in this kind of territory, the natural aesthetics of his voice and narcissistic inclinations of his ego enabling him to drag something genuinely affecting out of a fairly hackneyed wounded romantic schtick.

The penultimate title track is probably the only real fumble of the album. A self-conscious attempt at writing A Proper Grown Up Song, it most anticipates the tedious mid-tempo dirges of their current incarnation. And if you ever wanted a single song to blame for Richard Ashcroft’s most turgidly navel-gazing moments, it’s surely this. Tellingly, Sergeant is hardly present on it all, until he appears in the closing moments with a spiralling melody that doesn’t quite rescue the whole enterprise.

And then, blinking in the cold light of day, it’s over. What happened next was that U2 performed at Live Aid, playing a shamelessly conservative covers set featuring 'Walk on the Wild Side', 'Sympathy For The Devil' and 'Ruby Tuesday' and ran off with the 1980s Rock God prizes. And as McCulloch has since admitted, the Bunnymen ditched the acid and sonic adventurousness in favour of c-c-c-cocaine and hummable but inconsequential indie disco fodder like 'Lips Like Sugar'. And by this time, The Smiths were on the rise, with a young guitarist called Johnny Marr who could comfortably out-Sergeant the Bunnymen guitarist, and a singer with a pen so sharp that peddlers of mystic guff like McCulloch suffered a collective Emperor’s New Clothes moment, from which MCulloch at least never really recovered.

Even more disastrously, at the exact moment they should have been globally gigging the living daylights out of Ocean Rain, they fell out with their record label, and decided to spite them by disappearing on an obscure Scandinavian tour playing a covers set of their own, cranking out Doors songs to bemused and shrinking crowds. And that was that, bar an eponymous final album nobody cares about before an 11 year hiatus (I’m disregarding the McCulloch-less album from 1990 here, for which anyone who’s heard it will no doubt be grateful).

Since reforming in the late 1990s, the band have released a stream of forgettable “mature” albums that will leave people hearing them for the first time utterly perplexed as to what the fuss was about. And comparing the Ocean Rain-era Bunnymen – McCulloch memorably clawing his own clothes off in front of a startled Top Of The Pops audience while the band tore up a majestic storm behind him – to the current incarnation – McCulloch standing indifferently at the mic, fag in hand while Seargent rakes out pleasant mid-tempo rock – is holding them to a tough standard. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that at the crucial moment, the Bunnymen simply gave up. However, for a short while, they blazed brightly, and this was the most thrilling moment of the Bunnymen adventure.

 

 

 

 

Truman Media Network

 

Classic Album Review: Echo and the Bunnymen, “Ocean Rain”

 

Most people know post-punk bands like The Cure or The Smiths because of the mainstream fame these bands achieved. Echo and the Bunnymen are an equally talented and influential post-punk band, but they have received far less recognition than their contemporaries. Echo and the Bunnymen were part of the revival of neo-psychedelic music within the post-punk scene in Britain during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. This movement has influenced the sound of several alternative and indie bands. Tame Impala, Pond and Crystal Antlers have all been influenced by this movement. Most recently, the Bunnymen’s lead singer, Ian McCulloch, performed with Arcade Fire at London’s Earls Court during June 2014.

During the ‘80s, Echo and the Bunnymen were consistently ranked on United Kingdom music charts. However, their most commercially successful album was their fourth studio release, “Ocean Rain.” Released on May 4, 1984, this album reached No. 4 on the U.K. Albums Chart and No. 87 on the United States Billboard Top 200. Since its release, this album has been certified gold.

The most notable tracks on the album are its three singles: “Silver” and “The Killing Moon.” “The Killing Moon” is arguably their most popular song, as its chorus easily can get stuck in your head. McCulloch reportedly woke up one day with the phrase “fate up against your will” in his mind, which then became part of the chorus to the song. “Silver” features orchestral instruments that complement McCulloch’s voice and the drums in the background. This song is dominated by string instruments, giving it a swaying, upbeat tempo.

Echo and the Bunnymen were heavily influenced by The Doors, and this can be heard on several other tracks. “Nocturnal Me” and “The Yo Yo Man” both have dark, poetic — although sometimes nonsensical — lyrics, similar to the The Doors’ style. McCulloch channels Jim Morrison on the track “Thorn of Crowns” when he randomly screams throughout the song. This emulation of a psychedelic rock group from the ‘60s shows the Bunnymen’s role in the revival of such music.

Overall, this album has a distinct sound utilizing stringed instruments rather than synth like their previous albums. The album is broken up by the track “The Yo Yo Man,” with stark and bold vocals right at the beginning of the song, in contrast to the other tracks. The last song, “Ocean Rain,” has a much slower tempo compared to the rest of the album. It makes for a nice closer, but anywhere else it likely would be overlooked. Echo and the Bunnymen deserve a second — or maybe first — listen by a modern audience because of their role in influencing a genre and recent collaboration with such a large post-punk revival band like Arcade Fire.

Album Rating: 8/10

 

 

 

 

AllMusic

 

Echo & the Bunnymen

Ocean Rain

 

AllMusic Rating *****

 

Review by Jason Ankeny

 

Channeling the lessons of the experimental Porcupine into more conventional and simple structural parameters, Ocean Rain emerges as Echo & the Bunnymen's most beautiful and memorable effort. Ornamenting Ian McCulloch's most consistently strong collection of songs to date with subdued guitar textures, sweeping string arrangements, and hauntingly evocative production, the album is dramatic and majestic; "The Killing Moon," Ocean Rain's emotional centerpiece, remains the group's unrivalled pinnacle.