How many albums take you back to a feeling you can almost smell? How many of them do you (still) own? And then: How many of those are still classifiable as awesome!?
Siouxsie And The Banshees’ ‘The Scream’ is one that does it for me. One thing that has kept the group fresh has been a flow with the times. No – that doesn’t mean they’d sold out, but like with everything in life – you have to move with (or against) the throng of the masses to some extent. Everything is relative.
An architect (unless they’re designing branded generic corporate environments) would be seen as redundant if they kept designing the same building. (Generic housing complexes form part of generic corporate environments and could be dealt with separately – let’s stick to a non-greed driven, vaguely creative world for now, shall we?)
Musicians – like architects – that can adapt their art to maintain an essence of relevance within a continuously changing environment and retain their integrity are few and far between.
‘The Scream’ is almost surprisingly well put together considering the raw punk sentiment of 1978. The follow-up (and second) Siouxsie and the Banshees album ‘Join Hands’ seems to embody the discord and messiness much more accurately and is pretty close to disastrous. Fortunately ‘The Scream’ managed to transcend all that and captured the raw energy in a way that is still compatible with anything you’ll find today. Not that there’s much to compare it with. Breaking boundaries in music can make you unique and memorable or call you out as rubbish. If ‘Join Hands’ was our first introduction to the Banshees… Who?
