Big Country - Steeltown (1984) Expanded Remastered 1996

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Big Country - Steeltown (1984) Expanded Remastered 1996

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Clanging and crackling with energy, this second album from Big Country rings natural evolutionary changes on the band's stirring twin-guitar sound even as it frames still better news: bandleader Stuart Adamson has rapidly matured into a songwriter capable of bringing meticulous craft to his obvious passion.

Adamson is the first to assert that his songs spring from a very personal brooding over Britain's ugly, decades-deep malaise, and especially the hard times people have known in his hometown of Dunfermline, Scotland. Yet on the band's 1983 debut, The Crossing, generations gave way to epochs – experience was heightened, poeticized and forcibly made mythic. On Steeltown, Adamson stays closer to the literal surroundings of home. Thus his wife, Sandra, becomes the "Girl with Grey Eyes," and his father, a one-time merchant mariner, is the man as bright and hard as "a bloody edge of sword" in "Tall Ships Go." The strategy makes for an integrated group of songs infinitely more subtle than the Bolshevikposter art of the album's cover.

The locale of the title track is not Dunfermline but a still more desolate town where the singer and his kin have migrated to work steel. (The actual city, Adamson has said, is Corby, England, where a mill and housing were thrown up and many Scotsmen brought in to work for the six years the social-economic experiment lasted.) Over a characteristically terse single-string riff played on the teamed guitars of Adamson and Bruce Watson, the story unfolds in the songwriter's full-throated vocal. (Here, as throughout, bassist Tony Butler's grainy-voiced harmony lends texture and heart.) The mill is likened to the Grim Reaper as well as to a landscape "with a river of bodies/Flowing with the bell." Bleaker even than this tableau is the barrenness left by the mill's closing. The "call of the steel" is still there, but it represents a dream gone black, and now Dunfermline's sons and fathers have no prospect but life on the dole.

Well, one prospect – the army. "Where the Rose Is Sown" is not simply another antiwar song in a year chockablock with them – it's musically the most hard-charging, and lyrically the center, of an album full of angry and convincing testaments. Adamson strategically stacks up verses: on the left side, three beats of jingoistic command; on the right, four or more answering beats full of youthful worriment. "Leave your work" shears into "I just left school," and "Leave your home" into "I am no fool." Adamson uses the device to great effect before he bays a mournful plea that combines both voices: "If I die in a combat zone/Box me up and ship me home."

Drummer Mark Brzezicki beats slow march time into the next song, "Come Back to Me," a threnody in the voice of a dead soldier's girl. It's squarely in the folk-ballad tradition, with the girl envisaging a life of pining for her lost lover as she raises his child. But her view of a returning war hero passing out cigars "the day they had a party/Right out in the street" fits into the album's bitterly modern outlook. Death will come like a reward: "And one day I will lie down/Where the rose was flung."

At points, such seriousness scrapes its head on portentousness. "East of Eden" was rebuffed for just that reason when released recently as a single in Britain, and "Flame of the West" (said by some to be spurred by President Reagan's visit to the United Kingdom last year) is a portrait of a warrior demagogue that whacks away too bluntly to really hit home. But as the record moves into its second side, freshets of genuine excitement keep showing themselves. Watson and Adamson's E-bow-treated guitars – a magnetic device is held over the string to sustain the note – hopscotch across these tracks like fiddles at a hoedown, and producer Steve Lillywhite's knack for layering instrumental sounds leaves ample room for Brzezicki's joyful larruping of his drum kit. He and rhythm partner Tony Butler own such a range of effects that they show up as the band's not-so-secret weapon in the spacious reaches of "Girl with Grey Eyes"; but amidst the knee-buckling, Rolling Stones-y sway of the intro to "Rain Dance," they're properly content to pummel.

This is a band with anthems aplenty, but their next best asset, especially in concert, is their slam-danceable brand of the Highland reel. Like "Inwards" and "Angle Park" (the latter from their Wonderland EP), "Rain Dance" is a drone, with Adamson huffing and hollering the melody right through the top of his head. Here, as elsewhere, Adamson's karate-kick barks and bellows punctuate the song.

If this is formula, it's a rich one, and the quivering sonic envelope doesn't let up with "The Great Divide," a song some might reckon to be about factory hands and some might read as a young man's extolment of the sexuality, the "sighs and youth," that frightened him in "Rain Dance." Adamson knows what's on the far side, for some couples, of desire: "Just a Shadow" portrays the hearthside hell brought on by wife-beating. And throughout the album, he does a masterful job of linking personal and national frustrations. This is a group of songs that invokes hell three separate times and portrays a life dogged by violence, uselessness, fear and loss. Sometimes, though, "the blood that's running" is inside lovers' veins, and seeds do grow in corners of this Stygian world.

Beyond any analysis, Big Country is a group that has met the test of its second outing with a record that ends up exultant, and healing, by never forgetting to dance. "Where will we find the newborn year,"Adamson asks in ending "Rain Dance" with a characteristic howl, "as the winter crashes down?"

Review by Fred Schruers, Rolling Stone (RS 439)

Big Country came out of one of the less dominant parts of the United Kingdom with an anthemic sound and vaguely revolutionary-sounding lyrics to captivate the British listening public and at least interest Americans. Big Country continued their winning ways at home with this, its second album, which topped the charts and produced three Top 40 hits – "East of Eden," "Where the Rose is Sown," and "Just a Shadow." But in the U.S., the album was perceived as proving that the band's sound, guitars-as-bagpipes, courtesy of the E-bow, was a one-time novelty, while Stuart Adamson's lyrics, full of British socialist working-class fervor, seemed jingoistic and pretentious. Nevertheless, much of the music, as on the first album, made for stirring rock & roll.

Review by William Ruhlmann, Allmusic.com

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Big Country - Steeltown (1984) Expanded Remastered 1996

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Big Country - Steeltown (1984) Expanded Remastered 1996

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Big Country - Steeltown (1984) Expanded Remastered 1996

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