Magazine – Secondhand Daylight | 1979 – 3.5

For the longest time, this album didn’t make much of an impression on me. I bought it at the same time as “Real Life” and I chalk it up to the wider impact of the debut album at the time. Subsequently, I tended to write this one off and barely listened to it for the many, many years I have owned a copy. When reviewing Magazine’s output for this Rock GPA® I specifically listened more times to this album and “Magic, Murder, And The Weather;” the two Magazine albums that didn’t move me too much. Last week I thought I had them down and under my skin, so I formulated my ratings and began this series of posts. Mea Culpa! I find that after further, concentrated listening that I am more cognizant of the merits of this album and have upped its rating from 2.5 to 3.5.

I find that the factor that initially kept me from more fully embracing this album was its over reliance on David Bowie’s sonic tropes. The group wanted Tony Visconti to produce, but he was unavailable. Logically, they settled for his engineer, Colin Thurston, who had never produced before. And since the album was recorded in Visconti’s Good Earth studios, the band had access to Visconti’s gear. The same gear that made Bowie’s “Low” sound so unique.

This means that gated, harmonized drums are all over this album. And Bowie’s “Low” would never sound quite so unique again.

The album opens with the devastating “Feed The Enemy.” The longish track opens with an extended synth instrumental intro sounding not a million miles away from a melody associated with doo wop songs of the late 50s; a juxtaposition that couldn’t be more jarring once the song properly begins and the full band start in on this cut. Immediately apparent is Barry Adamson’s move to fretless bass for a greater sense of unease. “Feed The Enemy” uses plane crash and Eastern Bloc imagery quite vividly. At the song’s middle  eight, the same motif of the intro is re-introduced, played this time more smoothly on saxophone by John McGeoch. After that break, the song ratchets up the tension apparent in Devoto’s voice as the track clambers to its abrupt, shocking end as Howard literally has the last word on the cold ending. Hmmm. This is an album all about “cold endings.”

Next up is the only track on this album that has a melody sticky enough to lodge itself in my brain after a hearing of it all day long. “Rhythm Of Cruelty” appears here in a recording different to that on the single version, which was “sweetened up” with backing vocals in addition to the different takes. It’s telling that this was the only single released from the album since “pop music” is not among its concerns and this was the closest brush with something potentially chartworthy on the whole disc. I’d bet the single version was recorded after the album was done and the burden of being the one single fell upon “Cruelty.” While their debut album had art and pop on equal footing, you had to make an effort to keep up on this album, otherwise you would be left behind as I certainly was on the first 20 times I listened to it. It was not until I was prepared to listen to it a dozen times in succession that it’s strengths revealed themselves to me.

If you are as besotted with “Low” as much as the band apparently were, then “Talk To The Body” is your track. Until Devoto chimes in, you would be forgiven for thinking that this was a “Low” outtake and that Bowie would begin singing at any moment. It’s not just the perfectly replicated drum production, the guitar also sounds exactly as Ricky Gardiner did on “Low” as well.  In fact, this sounds so redolent of “Low” that it gets in its own way when I listen to it. I’m marveling so much at how much this sounds like David Bowie from the previous two years that the song’s innate impact is lost on me.

“I Wanted Your Heart” closes out side one and it sets the Bowie Wayback Machine® far earlier than “Low.” The last half of the song adopts deliberately atonal “jazz” stylings that, in all fairness, echo the lyrical content as Devoto sings of everything “falling to pieces in our hands.” Dave Formula pulls out his best Mike Garson playing to echo “Alladin Sane.”

The Bowie hat trick continues with side two’s first cut, an instrumental called “The Thin Air.” McGeoch composed this track and he plays sax as well as guitar on it. And it really feels like one of the instrumental tracks on side B of… wait for it, “Low.” I think that if these three cuts were resequenced in the album some other way, I might like this album better than I do. As it stands, having them all clustered together disrupts the flow and only draws attention to the Bowie influence at play. Fortunately, the last three cuts on side two make huge strides in avoiding the Bowie influence taint.

“Back To Nature” is the centerpiece of the album. The excitement of the track and its arrangement belie its almost seven minute running time. You’ll be forgiven for being shocked as you check the display on your music device after it’s over since it feels half that length. Adamson’s bass positively hurls the song forward at full canter. After this plateau, the album offers “Believe That I Understand” as a suitable dénouement before concluding with “Permafrost;” the bleakest song I’ve ever heard. You too, probably.

If ever a song took place on a desolate, rainy, grey plain of the mind, this is the one. It pulls no punches and minces no words. In case the listener didn’t get the point, the shattering guitar feedback, perfectly controlled to make a serrated riff under which Formula adds the final, descending chords, should clue in anyone listening.

“Secondhand Daylight” does not present Magazine at their most accomplished or tuneful. It just presents them at their most uncompromising while simultaneously painting them at their most derivative; at least in regards to the sound of the album. That paradox is undoubtedly why my feelings towards this album are so complex and quixotic; having only gelled when listening carefully as part of my research phase for this series of blogposts.

Next: Magazine reach for the brass ring…