Artist: Durutti Column
Record: LC
Label: Factory
Year of Release: 1981
Sounds Like: Art Rock, Ambient, Instrumental Rock, Cold Wave, Post Punk, New Wave
Country: England
British act Durutti Column is the alias of guitarist and pianist Vini Reilly, who created the project during the post punk era in Manchester. Circa 1978 Reilly experimented with guitar chords and layers of noise creating a sort of personal style that resulted into a sophisticated pop of guitars and some loops and synths. His major companion is the drummer Bruce Campbell who plays a key role in the band providing a perfect timing for Vini's sizzling sounds.
To this Day Reilly is reluctant to offer many interviews and gigs, the project has released several compilations and singles but LC is considered by many his best work.
The title of the album comes from the Italian Term ''Lotta Continua'' ''The fight continues''
It features the track ''Missing boy'' that was dedicated to the late Ian Curtis who had just committed suicide 2 years earlier.
Regina Says
Look at this precious cover. I wanted this record only because of its cover, long time ago. And when I finally got it...I was happy because it turned out that it also had a lovely album with music inside. About the cover, I can't say many things, I just adore watercolor.
It is so ethereal, so vague, so emotional and so 80's. I love the 80's. These 80's. I love watercolor.
Oh, yeah!, the music...
Now, I wont state here that Viny Reilly is the most underrated guitarist of the 80's. That goes without saying, I am prone to state that he is the MOST underrated musician of the 80's altogether, if not the most underrated ever. His fingers are made of delicate glass that work just to make us happy.
We, Hugo and I, listened again to this record while we were cleaning the house, just like it often happens to review this or that album. We don't speak and we rarely look at each other, we let the record spin around, and for some reason there are records that seem to fill rooms like others can't, they actually make houses tinnier and cozier. There are records that spin away with the world, so you can forget about everything while they're playing, this isn't a virtue, it is more like a'' type of record''. However, once they end, they lack; the atmosphere and the air become heavy again.
LC is a record like that. Seriously. This is such a great ambient record, like I described it, it basically kidnaps the ambient around you and replace it with its sound, with its own environment, with its own oxygen; and what sound/oxygen do we find here?
Durutti column offer us here a very identifiable style that is somehow hard to explain, it can be tagged as new wave-dreampoppish-jazz. Mellow melodies full of sun and snow, dreams and desolation. Dreams of desolation, maybe?
Have I told you about the dream I once had? I was in a bus and I was in a rush, everybody seemed to be in a rush even the busdriver, but suddenly all turned purple, the bus began to levitate, slowly and on the radio music started to play, the music sounded so much like Messidor or Missing Boy.
Now, Messidor is (confirmed by me) music from dreams (my dreams).
That strum so of Reilly and the gentle percussions in the background. The subtle tones of synths that give these guitars more leadership. Reilly's voice, languid and simple as it is, goes very well with this orchestration of pianos and strings that never pretend to be reinvention of instrumental music or something like that, it is new wave, and what a beautiful and witty new wave it is.
Rate: Perfect
Menanth Says:
In 2013, a laconic message appeared on the Facebook of Vini Reilly, founder and guitarist of The Durutti Column since 1978. Written by one of the musician's nephews, he said “My uncle is going through a bad economic streak, right now he is fighting for cover basic needs such as food, electricity and rent. ” In these complicated times, unfortunately he is not the first to have a very bad time. His restlessness would not have to be more striking than that of thousands of others, just because he was a "known" musician. Although the truth, it hurts to see how the love of art, the passion for the different and the thirst for virtuosity do not pay. John Frusciante, whom I adore at all but with whom I could agree this time, once declared: "Vini Reilly is the greatest of all."
The Greatest of what? Everyone gets tired of telling him, but he doesn't believe it, or doesn't care. Nor does he like his voice, which his fans love. He is absent from the rock'n’roll circus, gives few concerts, few interviews. He is an introverted guy, who likes to play and play and play. He has invented its own style, it is part of these absolutely untouchable artists, an ethereal mix of cold wave, new age, lo-fi, chill out and dream pop
LC is an album that you don't precisely ''listen to'', it is an album that you drink, that you breathe, that you consume like some mystical vapor trail made out of weird essences. The entire thing is colorful and cold and distant and haunted. It is an album that by no means fits Factory Records, it belongs to 4AD, all of its aesthetic is nothing but the dark and deep instrospection that the line of artists of that label had. It is an album that remains as nondescript no matter how much we want to make it ours or how much we fight to provide it a certain place into our discography to feel it earthly, it is not from this land, it is a piece of dense crazyness that some fancy guru left out his jar. And we can only worship it.
Rate: Highly Recommendable almost Imprescindible