THU., APRIL 02, 2009
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A User's Guide to Sarah Records
by Douglas Wolk
"One day, when the world is set to right/ I'm going to murder all the people I don't like," Harvey Williams enunciates at the beginning of Another Sunny Day's magnificent "You Should All Be Murdered." It's an echo of Furry Lewis's threat in his 1928 record "Furry's Blues" — "I believe I'll buy me a graveyard of my own/ I'm going to kill everybody that have done me wrong" — and even scarier and funnier for having all the machismo drained out of it. But the song builds and builds as Williams' airy little voice enumerates categories of people "who do not deserve to live"; about halfway through, he stops singing, hits a guitar pedal and busts out an obsessive solo that lasts the rest of the song. He means it. It's inconceivable that he's ever going to do anything about it, but he means it.
Another Sunny Day — which was really just Williams, pretty much — was one of the flagship acts of Sarah Records, a Bristol-based label that existed for a little under eight years, from 1987 to 1995. Sarah was one of the most fully aestheticized labels ever, both in the sense of having a specific sensibility in its music and design and concepts, and in the sense of adopting a sensitive high-aesthetic pose that rejected both rock bluster and dance perkiness. The titles of Sarah's singles tell the story: "I'm in Love With a Girl Who Doesn't Know I Exist," "All of a Tremble," "My Secret World," "Last September's Farewell Kiss." Rather than petering out, Sarah ended when its founders Clare Wadd and Matt Haynes elected to close its doors and leave a good-looking catalogue.
Yes, of course, Sarah's bands were wimps. Very, very angry, smart wimps. (They didn't invent that musical persona, either: you can trace the label's favorite kinds of voices and even guitar tones to slightly earlier bands like the Television Personalities and the Marine Girls, who came out of the punk movement but deliberately removed themselves from its received ideas about sounds and subjects.) The archetypal Sarah band was the Field Mice — another featherweight name! — led by Robert Wratten, whose deferential quietness translucently veiled a boiling sexuality and seething fury. Their early singles and EPs were earnest wrist-to-forehead romanticism: "Sad am I, I'm sadder than sad/ I missed you so, I miss you so," begins "Anyone Else Isn't You," which I took at face value when I was a lovelorn undergraduate.
But those lines effectively had quotation marks around them when Wratten sang them. What he's really interested been in for his entire career is articulating the way pain can be romanticized or even eroticized. (His current and longest-lasting band is Trembling Blue Stars, named after a line from Pauline Réage's sadomasochistic novel "The Story of O": "her eyes were like stars, trembling blue stars.") The Field Mice's sole non-compilation album, For Keeps, is one long reaction against their reputation as jangling solipsists, beginning with a song in which Wratten cedes the microphone to Annemari Davies, an 18-year-old fan who'd recently joined the band, and ending with a scalding guitar blowout.
Atta Girl is composed of five sunny-sounding, wildly catchy tunes, two of which are about date rape.
It's worth noting that Sarah's discography was mostly meant to be consumed a few small, sweet nuggets at a time. The label released a couple of dozen albums, but nearly 100 singles. There are a bunch of Sarah bands that do stick to the chime-and-lament "Sarah formula" very closely: Brighter, Aberdeen, the Sweetest Ache. (When Even As We Speak titled a Sarah album Feral Pop Frenzy, they were mostly kidding.) There's also a handful of ace Sarah discs that don't fit the formula and haven't made it to eMusic as of this writing — I'm holding my breath for the two awesomely ragged, feedback-riddled singles by the Golden Dawn.
Occasionally, their bands even acted like they were having fun. That was usually in the service of some kind of bitter irony, which the lesser la-la pop imprints that followed in Sarah's wake tended not to notice. The 85-pound pop band Talulah Gosh's hyper-caffeinated They've Scoffed the Lot (now tracks 14-22 of Backwash) consisted of two BBC sessions on which they played little neo-girl-group tunes at hardcore velocity and sang lyrics like "I don't wanna have to break your face" with their usual Holly Golightly insouciance. Talulah Gosh subsequently evolved into the tighter, tarter pop band Heavenly, in which singer Amelia Fletcher and her associates perfected their lemonade/razorblade strategy. The best introduction to Heavenly is the EP variously known as Atta Girl and P.U.N.K. Girl: five sunny-sounding, wildly catchy tunes, two of which are about date rape and two more of which are duets in which Fletcher and Cathy Rogers enact agonizing breakups.
Sarah was a very British label — their compilations were all named for English landmarks, and Matt Haynes eventually phased out his subsequent label Shinkansen to concentrate on publishing a zine about London. One of the few American bands on Sarah's roster was East River Pipe, the one-man project of F.M. Cornog, whose haunting early singles are collected on Shining Hours in a Can. ERP came off like a specifically New York variation on late-period Big Star — crystalline pop with urban trash and squalor grabbing at its heels, longing for some kind of redemption through abjection, with characters who are crowded into claustrophobia even as they're withering from isolation. ("My Life Is Wrong" isn't actually an answer song to Big Star's "My Life Is Right," but it might as well be.)
Twelve years after Sarah concluded its active existence with the compilation There and Back Again Lane (named after an actual Bristol road), its early releases fetch stratospheric prices on eBay; its most prominent disciples are probably Belle and Sebastian, whose song "Another Sunny Day" appears to be named after Harvey Williams' band. But the label's legacy hasn't quite come back into fashion. That's perversely appropriate. Sarah's best records didn't pretend the world was going to sing along: they were secret messages, notes scribbled in margins from one shy outcast to another.
Another Sunny Day — which was really just Williams, pretty much — was one of the flagship acts of Sarah Records, a Bristol-based label that existed for a little under eight years, from 1987 to 1995. Sarah was one of the most fully aestheticized labels ever, both in the sense of having a specific sensibility in its music and design and concepts, and in the sense of adopting a sensitive high-aesthetic pose that rejected both rock bluster and dance perkiness. The titles of Sarah's singles tell the story: "I'm in Love With a Girl Who Doesn't Know I Exist," "All of a Tremble," "My Secret World," "Last September's Farewell Kiss." Rather than petering out, Sarah ended when its founders Clare Wadd and Matt Haynes elected to close its doors and leave a good-looking catalogue.
Yes, of course, Sarah's bands were wimps. Very, very angry, smart wimps. (They didn't invent that musical persona, either: you can trace the label's favorite kinds of voices and even guitar tones to slightly earlier bands like the Television Personalities and the Marine Girls, who came out of the punk movement but deliberately removed themselves from its received ideas about sounds and subjects.) The archetypal Sarah band was the Field Mice — another featherweight name! — led by Robert Wratten, whose deferential quietness translucently veiled a boiling sexuality and seething fury. Their early singles and EPs were earnest wrist-to-forehead romanticism: "Sad am I, I'm sadder than sad/ I missed you so, I miss you so," begins "Anyone Else Isn't You," which I took at face value when I was a lovelorn undergraduate.
But those lines effectively had quotation marks around them when Wratten sang them. What he's really interested been in for his entire career is articulating the way pain can be romanticized or even eroticized. (His current and longest-lasting band is Trembling Blue Stars, named after a line from Pauline Réage's sadomasochistic novel "The Story of O": "her eyes were like stars, trembling blue stars.") The Field Mice's sole non-compilation album, For Keeps, is one long reaction against their reputation as jangling solipsists, beginning with a song in which Wratten cedes the microphone to Annemari Davies, an 18-year-old fan who'd recently joined the band, and ending with a scalding guitar blowout.
It's worth noting that Sarah's discography was mostly meant to be consumed a few small, sweet nuggets at a time. The label released a couple of dozen albums, but nearly 100 singles. There are a bunch of Sarah bands that do stick to the chime-and-lament "Sarah formula" very closely: Brighter, Aberdeen, the Sweetest Ache. (When Even As We Speak titled a Sarah album Feral Pop Frenzy, they were mostly kidding.) There's also a handful of ace Sarah discs that don't fit the formula and haven't made it to eMusic as of this writing — I'm holding my breath for the two awesomely ragged, feedback-riddled singles by the Golden Dawn.
Occasionally, their bands even acted like they were having fun. That was usually in the service of some kind of bitter irony, which the lesser la-la pop imprints that followed in Sarah's wake tended not to notice. The 85-pound pop band Talulah Gosh's hyper-caffeinated They've Scoffed the Lot (now tracks 14-22 of Backwash) consisted of two BBC sessions on which they played little neo-girl-group tunes at hardcore velocity and sang lyrics like "I don't wanna have to break your face" with their usual Holly Golightly insouciance. Talulah Gosh subsequently evolved into the tighter, tarter pop band Heavenly, in which singer Amelia Fletcher and her associates perfected their lemonade/razorblade strategy. The best introduction to Heavenly is the EP variously known as Atta Girl and P.U.N.K. Girl: five sunny-sounding, wildly catchy tunes, two of which are about date rape and two more of which are duets in which Fletcher and Cathy Rogers enact agonizing breakups.
Sarah was a very British label — their compilations were all named for English landmarks, and Matt Haynes eventually phased out his subsequent label Shinkansen to concentrate on publishing a zine about London. One of the few American bands on Sarah's roster was East River Pipe, the one-man project of F.M. Cornog, whose haunting early singles are collected on Shining Hours in a Can. ERP came off like a specifically New York variation on late-period Big Star — crystalline pop with urban trash and squalor grabbing at its heels, longing for some kind of redemption through abjection, with characters who are crowded into claustrophobia even as they're withering from isolation. ("My Life Is Wrong" isn't actually an answer song to Big Star's "My Life Is Right," but it might as well be.)
Twelve years after Sarah concluded its active existence with the compilation There and Back Again Lane (named after an actual Bristol road), its early releases fetch stratospheric prices on eBay; its most prominent disciples are probably Belle and Sebastian, whose song "Another Sunny Day" appears to be named after Harvey Williams' band. But the label's legacy hasn't quite come back into fashion. That's perversely appropriate. Sarah's best records didn't pretend the world was going to sing along: they were secret messages, notes scribbled in margins from one shy outcast to another.
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