398. The Raincoats, "The Raincoats"

 

When I first started listening to this glorious, clattering mess of an album, my first reaction was what the fuck, followed by is this for real?  It is not what you would call an immediately accessible album; it's discordant and messy and abrasive but it's also immediate and urgent in a way you rarely hear.

The Raincoats have become a cult classic, I guess, due to Kurt Cobain championing them and getting Geffen to reissue their albums.  The story is that Kurt was so enamored of them he tracked down Ana da Silva working in an antiques shop in London to get a new copy of this record.  They subsequently did some reunions and played some shows and were going to open for Nirvana on tour but that got kind of sidetracked by Kurt Cobain committing suicide.

You can hear the DNA from this show up in so much later stuff, like the Riot Grrrl bands to postrock acts like Deerhoof.  I think this album is really a shining example of a band that didn't really know the formal strictures, so they weren't bound by them.  There's skittering violin and jumpy drums but also beautiful harmonies.  I think my favorite song on this album is probably "Life On the Line," which could be a garage rock song from the 60's if you squint hard enough.  

The Raincoats were all art students and an integral part of their legend was that they were all squatting in a seedy part of Bayswater in London, usually described as "bombed-out" or the like.  I went to look up the street some of them lived on.  Here's what it looks like now:

Gentrification comes for us all.