LP reviewed in Sounds, 6th November, 1982
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES ‘A Kiss In The Dreamhouse’ (Polydor POLD 5064) *** | THERE IS little doubt about it, Siouxsie And The Banshees have been saved from extinction by the rise of the ‘new pop’. Their last few singles have been excellent, not least because they bring a note of darkness (whether it be satirical or subversive or just damned clever) to the essential ‘levity’ of your ABCs, Associates et al.
In this sense, the Banshees are unexpectedly more valuable than they have ever been. Their black tar of a commercial music amid the clever candy floss has a genuine foreboding about it, it is subversive-within-subversion. In short, the Banshees shall now last a great deal longer than their ‘new pop’ cohorts while still reaping the same short-term profits. They are the heavy end of the new commercial boom and good luck to them.
The trouble is that, simply put, ‘A Kiss In The Dreamhouse’ is an album. Perhaps ironically, though now we see why, this isn’t the Banshees territory at all. Since the first, they have all been unmitigated disasters.
The problem, I’m afraid, is Siouxsie herself. Without wishing to insult (I have in a year come to be a Banshees supporter), the Banshees would be better off without her.
Siouxsie And The Banshees | A Kiss In The Dreamhouse | (Polydor) 1982
That’s too extreme perhaps: Better put, Siouxsie is the least important part of the Banshees’ real sound.
The star of ‘Dreamhouse’ —the reason why its unevenness, so typical of Banshees’ albums, is so irritating — is John McGeoch. McGeoch is a guitar player and overall arranger in a million. And surely the new-found pithiness and imaginative scope that the Banshees achieved on, say, ‘Fireworks’ (admirably not included here) owes much to him.
On ‘Dreamhouse, he does everything but make the kitchen sink sound good; that the album still fails says firmly that something large is missing in the Banshees’ make-up.
In Banshees songs, the last thing that should strike your mind are the lyrics — in other words, Siouxsie. With McGeoch, the Banshees are now capable of that kind of architecture they always groped after but missed, often embarrassingly (hence the critical slaggings?).
There is now a real Yeatsian poetry about the Banshees; on this album, ‘Melt!’, ‘Cascade’ and, above all, ‘Painted Bird’ are quite stunning and as good as anything on ‘The Correct Use Of Soap’.
But the lyrics are Printed On The Sleeve. Siouxsie’s wail is dominant again and, unlike on a single, over an album there is no avoiding the misgivings of Siouxsie’s (and Severin’s!) lyricism. At worst, they are those of rampant ego; at best, they allow her to press her nose against the area of emotion and passion.
Siouxsie And The Banshees | A Kiss In The Dreamhouse | (Polydor) 1982
But, even with McGeoch playing a Gary Mabbutt and adding a psychedelic recorder to the proceedings, writing a song called ‘Green Fingers’ with “She’s got green fingers” as the main hook-line makes you unavoidably think of Percy Thrower.
Similarly, ‘She’s A Carnival’ — written this time by Severin — and ‘Obsession’ smack too much in every sense of Pamela Stephenson doing an impersonation of stock Siouxsie.
No. There’s something wrong at the root of the Banshees. I admire the earthiness (again, Yeatsian) of Siouxsie; she tries to be wildly romantic in a candid and honest manner in her words and singing. But there is something deadly inhibited at the back of it.
Maybe that inhibition is half the attraction of Siouxsie’s Men but they smack above all of the Art School set who’ve never successfully beaten the art rap.
They are at the same time too reverential and too frightened of the creativity they (long to) perform. In Siouxsie, it comes over practically as a sexual problem; She won’t let go.
‘A Kiss In The Dreamhouse’ shows the Banshees still being incomplete as an album band, but has nothing to do with the single successes they will surely continue to have. Forget the dreamhouse, and keep those kisses . . . (Dave McCullough)
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES ‘A Kiss In The Dreamhouse’ (Polydor) | A SIOUXSIE and the Banshees album holds its attraction in the struggle to keep ideas and trim imagination into a concise pop format. For make no mistake, no matter how much Sioux would like you to think otherwise, her vision is strictly confined by a pragmatic pop sensibility.
Sure, ‘Kiss In The Dreamhouse’ is veiled in all sorts of dark imagery, Hitchcockian melodrama, straggly suburbanite pictures of hell and beyond. But at root, when stripped of its pretence and pomposity, it reveals itself as a safe and popularised cheap novelette.
Not that this is a criticism, mind you, for this is never less than compulsive listening. The point is, not to take it all too seriously. Now we’ve pushed the ‘Hammer horror’ cobwebs away, let’s go take a look and see what’s on offer.
Rolling Stones riffs
Simply, ‘A Kiss In The Dreamhouse’ covers well worn territory, but in doing so lightens the journey with the oblique stroke and sharp craft of a very talented group. From the clear acoustic treble of ‘Cascade’ to the ham walking jazz bass line of ‘Cocoon’, the Banshees evoke a plethora of half earnest sixth form angst and, dare I say it, pilfered Rolling Stones riffs on the rocky ‘She’s A Carnival’.
Delight in the tackiness of it all. Banshees would have you think they plumb the depths of darkness, ride the scabrous, dirty side of modern nightmare. They don’t, but then, there’s something touching in such playful suburban decadence. Forget what the Banshees think they are, for this is a very fine pop record. + + + + (Record Mirror, 06/11/82)
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES | A Kiss In The Dreamhouse (Polydor) | IT’S RARE for a group to make their fourth LP and still be provocative, still be interested in themselves, let alone break any substantially new ground. For them to progress as far as Siouxsie and The Banshees have done on ‘A Kiss In The Dreamhouse’ is a feat of imagination scarcely ever recorded. It’s breathtaking.
It seemed to me when they took first brash, punky steps that this might be the model for the perfect group. They avoided record contracts for longer than most would have dared and built up a following based solely on live performance and reputation.
Their manifesto was to challenge the natural order, incarnate both as the soft revolt of the new wave and the consumptive greed of the business: they wanted to restore the mystery dispersed by years of rock misuse.
Siouxsie And The Banshees | A Kiss In The Dreamhouse | (Polydor) 1982
Of course, as soon as their records began to appear the whole strategy capsized disastrously. As I suggested in discussion of their singles collection last year, the clumsy noise-making of the ‘Scream’ period did nothing more than throw a shabby cloak of ersatz strangeness around a grey little repertoire of songs, redeemed only by the occasional glimmer of sensuality from a singer bound up in mannerism.
I had forgotten about that ‘perfect group’ until some of the glistening resonance in this record brought it back. The Banshees’ discipline of their progress is what has allowed them to move on: as with Smith and The Fall, the only other group of their era to have retained their dignity, reigning in their ambitions has permitted them to reach this now incandescent state.
From ‘Cascades’, an opening flourish that falls down like a rainstorm of needles, to the bottomless shaft of ‘Slowdive’, their old gothic garb is traded for robes of transfiguration. Everything here is flooded radiance and flame.
Siouxsie And The Banshees | A Kiss In The Dreamhouse | (Polydor) 1982
Somehow, a bold assurance of intention has met with a hunger for experimenting with sound to expand an already formidable group of songs into pure, open-ended ambiguity. The flesh of a song will balloon out or contort into unimaginable patterns; indecipherable echoes volley between the walls of the recording; glassy, splintered tones pierce the luxuriant sheen of the mix.
Repeated listens trick the sense of balance; tremendous risks are taken. They have refused to settle for simple light and dark. There’s even some humour.
In John McGeogh‘s guitars a shattered beauty settles on the tattooed skin of the songs, and in Budgie‘s now tumultuous rhythmic shifts they are given the spirit of the movement. The most improbable sounds crowd the corners of an esentially electric music: bells, the rustic trill of a recorder, the taut skein of parched brushes. ‘Green Fingers’, ‘Obsession’ and ‘Cocoon’ are the most ambitious and consummately realised works they have conceived, daunting songs that actively confront passive listening — sensually threatening in a way they have only fleetingly touched on before.
As the seal on this breakthrough, the singer sheds her last doubts at being as one with the music. She doesn’t trouble to strain through a great babble of accents — it is the same voice throughout, one which arcs between moods with a suddenly struck grace, taunting and cajoling and whispering its spellbound state.
Having dispensed with affectation she actually sounds younger, betrothed to the wisdom of a calm, all-knowing child. It is a marvellous performance by Sioux.
Siouxsie And The Banshees | A Kiss In The Dreamhouse | (Polydor) 1982
And yet, the record is flawed — which is as it should be. Their frameworks don’t always set a prodigious enough challenge for imaginations which are now in full flow, which leaves, say, ‘She’s A Carnival’ as a too familiar Banshees spiral and too many of the lyrics as obscure reversions to vulgarly clotted imagery (“So many blazing orchids/Burning in your throat” and a recurrent horror of the marital altar). But it means they can progress still further: for now, there is enough here to call for a complete revaluation of the Banshees.
Especially in the closing ‘Slowdive’, the most complex and demanding of all their singles (significantly, a commercial failure). In its acid collage of strings and voices it triggers the emotional avalance which they were trying to secure on ‘Helter Skelter’. I promise, this music will take your breath away. (NME, 06/11/82)
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