Not going to be The Wire's album of the year by the sounds of it...
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Died In The Wool prompts an unkind thought: the songs on Manafon barely deserved to be released once, never mind twice. But here they are: new versions of most of Manafon's songs, rerecorded with composer Dai Fujikura and a group of improvisors including John Butcher, Evan Parker and Keith Rowe. Manafon already felt like an unconvincing successor to Blemish, Sylvian's most accomplished solo record. But, on the first few listens, Died In The Wool had the effect of not only making me withdraw the benefit of the doubt that I'd extended to Manafon, it also threatened to retrospectively undermine Blemish. Was it really as good as it seemed back then? So I go back and listen, and I'm relieved to say that, no: Blemish remains the moment when Sylvian found a post-Japan setting that suited his voice, a voice that has always been about evasion, hesitation and inhibition.
Blemish worked because it played upon this; the songs were about what the voice could not (bring itself) to sing, traumatic wreckage it could only allude to. Manafon sought to be as cryptically suggestive, but, instead, the words too often seemed obfuscatory, and Sylvian's delivery of them laboured. The voice frequently seemed like an intrusion on Manafon. Still, there was something sombrely seductive about the blend of turntablism, piano and electronics that his collaborators came up with: and, though he didn't quite rise to the challenge, the very fact that Manafon raised the possibility of reconciling some of the leading edges of 21st century experimentalism with song meant that even its failures intrigued.
Giving new backing tracks to the Manafon songs compounds the problem that dogged the source album: the impression that there was no real connection between Sylvian's vocal and the music. Here, as on Manafon, "Small Metal Gods" feels like its straining towards a significance it can't reach (there would have to be a very good reason for using a word as clunkily prosaic as "umpteenth" in a song, and Sylvian doesn't come up with it). But, if anything, Fujikura's strings seem even more disconnected from Sylvian's voice than the original backing was. This goes for most of the alternative variations of the Manafon material.
You're forced to the conclusion that the problem lies in the songs themselves. To work in so exposed a setting, they needed to have a prose-poem starkness; instead, they seem almost clumsy, certainly unwieldy, unformed: not quite songs at all, and not quite anything else either. There's so little differentiation between Sylvian's delivery on each track that you feel you could practically take a line from any song and insert it into any of the others and it would have no effect.
Died In The Wool's non-Manafon songs work best. "Died In The Wool" itself has an eerie stillness; while "A Certain Slant Of Light" (one of two tracks with words by Emily Dickinson) and "Anomaly At Taw Head" constitute a kind of ruined pastoral. The suspicion with some of Sylvian's recent work is that it demands more from the listener than it offers in return, but these tracks do repay the effort of repeated listening.
Mark Fisher