Lifetones - 'For A Reason' (Light in the Attic)

As rewarding as This Heat's discography is, the projects that formed in their wake offer fertile paths for discovery as well. Hayward's career is well established, and the Gareth Williams Flaming Tunes record with Mary Currie is a quiet masterpiece. But Charles Bullen's work is not as well known, and Light in the Attic's reissue of 1983's For a Reason was an attempt to do something about that. Lifetones was a collaboration with Julius Samuel, a drummer/percussionist who primarily has worked in the dub/reggae genre, and the result is a heavily Jamaican-influenced mishmash of Heat-style textures and rhythmic interplay. The six songs here are not particularly long, but they are packed with movement, a project of studio layering that doesn't strive for tension in the same way as Bullen's previous band did, and therefore is a little bit more approachable (while also not delivering obvious, immediate satisfaction). The opening title track lays down some explicit reggae-ish basslines and rhythms, but with the familiar singing style of This Heat (a little bit droning, and moving slowly through its cadences). This record is full of sounds, each song packed with clanging strings, keyboard lines, and lots of bells and whistles; parts of it sound like a bunch of buzzing clocks. My favourite cut is probably 'Travelling', which employs a Czukay-like bassline under a swirling buzzsaw of strings, overtones blanketing the midrange, staying instrumental until the end, where a few dour lines are sung almost like a coda. There are echo effects on most tracks, sometimes a melodica swirling over a start-stop drum part, sometimes keyboards swelling and receding. The most fruity, splendid parts are layered in way that actually make me think of the band O.Rang (a post-Talk Talk 90s post-rock project), and maybe the My Life in the Bush of Ghosts search for an unworldly pulse, which is found here and mined voraciously. While there's clearly improvisatory moments here, the whole record is just over a half-hour, and there's a lot of control over these songs, which move into ideas, explore them, and then move on without beating anything into the ground. For A Reason has grown on me with each listen, and the brightness of the tonal palette is really remarkable; for a two-man band, there's a tremendous dynamic range here, of course using overdubs to achieve so many laters, but the space between everything stays audible. 'Patience', the closing cut, is driven like most other songs by the bassline, yet somehow recalls hot summer afternoons, and a feeling of childhood. It eats its own tail, guitar, bass, and melodica turning in on each other until it's hypnotic and a bit maddening. Thinking about England in the early 80s and specifically the production work of Adrian Sherwood, I can hear affinities between his work and Lifetones. There's not any aggressive edge here, and besides echo not as many signs of processing, but I wonder how this might have sounded under the Sherwood treatment, and what influence (if any) they might have had on each other. This colourful, eclectic sort of art music was a really beautiful progression out of the post-punk sound, and the connecting lines between records like this and the aforementioned O.Rang would be interesting to discover.