Citrus and Paradise

College kids--college radio kids, in particular--go on vacation in December and January, and don't listen to much new music (myself, of course, excepted). Probably as a result, very few new full-length "alternative" records get released between Thanksgiving and my birthday (January 6). This causes endless problems for me, since it means I don't get new records for my birthday; for this column, however, it's a virtue disguised as necessity. This week, I'll talk about some older records that have been hard to get until recently; next week--probably--the word of the week will be "zine."

ORANGE JUICE The Heather's On Fire(Postcard (UK)) and Ostrich Churchyard (Postcard (UK))

People who don't like Orange Juice--or The Orange Juice, as Edwyn Collins called his band during its declining years--generally compare these fey Glaswegians to the Smiths. (Glaswegians, by the way, were and are unpredictable people from Glasgow, Scotland. The Smiths, similarly, were distraught people from Manchester, England.) These stolid naysayers aren't entirely wrong: Johnny Marr may have picked up the soulful, chiming guitar sound of the first Smiths records in part from the soulful, chiming sound perfected by James Kirk, the Orange Juice guitarist whose (real) name may or may not have inspired the Wedding Present and the Bodines to write songs called, respectively, "Shatner" and "William Shatner." (And no, those Bodines aren't the mediocre BoDeans WFNX plays--but that's another story.) Another Smiths similarity: Edwyn's sinuous vocals, which mixed a shy whiteboy coyness with the tricks and glides he'd learned from American Motown records, were hardly the most "masculine" singing to be heard north of Hadrian's Wall.

Collins once described his band's ambition as "tickling people to death," which pretty much explains why The Orange Juice beat The Morrisey all hollow: tickling beats mourning, and subtlety beats overkill, and gentle youngadult introversion--in general--beats teen self-flagellation. At least in this kind of pop music, "this kind" being the kind with subtle interlocking guitars, witty lyrics and multiple melodies, the kind that descends from Beatles and Byrds and Cole Porter and learned from, but never imitated, punk.

This kind of quietly self-punishing, ultimately uplifting pop came out of Glasgow on a regular schedule between about '79 and '81, most of it on the Postcard record label. Postcard featured four bands: Josef K, the Go-Betweens, Aztec Camera--pre-Dire-Straits-on-downers Aztec Camera--and our rangy heroes, whose Postcard releases have been harder to find than true love for the last, oh, ten years. Postcard's head honcho revived his label last year, and two of the results so far are The Heather's on Fire--which collects all of Orange Juice's early 45s--and Ostrich Churchyard, the unreleased-till now first album they recorded.

The Heather's On Fire is the place to start: The first three non-instrumental songs, "Falling and Laughing," "Lovesick" and "Blueboy," exhibit a kind of boyish coyness no one has ever redone, or re-sung, or re-scripted, half as well. "Lovesick" is a love song, but "Blueboy" is--I think--a song about someone listening to a love song, except that "he wasn't listening to the words being sung," just to the tune, and the mental images it conjured up. (I've been told that "Blueboy" is a British gay porn mag. I don't care.) These songs don't "rock" or "roll," they bounce--up and down and around and around like the social jitters and wobbly boyish hearts they generally describe. Collins is continually advising himself to perk up, or to take action, or (occasionally) to give up, then qualifying and qualifying that advice until the qualification itself, the delicate attempts to fine-tune one's own emotions, become the real subject of the music: he starts by telling himself to wake up and smell the coffee, and ends by becoming a coffee connoisseur. (One Orange Juice song is even called "Breakfast Time." Self-mocking? You bet.)

This amateur connoisseur's attitude extended beyond the lyrics to Kirk's guitar lines and David McClymont's bass playing, which draw attention to the start of each melody, then deliberately hide it amid equally alluring countermelodies. (I always remember how each early Orange Juice song begins, and almost never how any of them end.) The amateur connoisseurs in their Postcard days also knew how to handle production: nothing is muddy or inarticulate, but nothing is overbright or "too produced" or metallic or synth-damaged either. Nor is there a horn section. When Orange Juice signed to a major label, the evil corporate geniuses who did the signing persuaded them to add trumpets, backing vocals, and other extraneous gauzy trappings: if some songs on You Can't Hide Your Love Forever (the first released Orange Juice LP) could properly revel in the resulting luxury, others sank into bombast.

Which is why it's nice to have Ostrich Churchyard, the pre-major label, pre-gauzy scrim versions of all the early Orange Juice songs that aren't collected on The Heather's On Fire (and of a couple that are) along with a few live recordings. This material--to the extent it doesn't duplicate Heather-- is less immediate, slightly muddy-sounding, and requires some patience as Edwyn Struggles With His Emotions; it's quite worth your money if you don't already own the songs, though. Presuming, that is, that what you already own includes some taste for subtlety, for articulate, shabbily suave white boys who've learned from old soul ("Poor Old Soul Parts 1 and 2"--I could have just reviewed the record by listing the song titles), and who, for a few years, managed to sound both more honest and funnier than any of their less craftsmanlike compatriots.

HEAVENLY "P.U.N.K. Girl" (K/Sarah (UK))

The 10" vinyl record and the CD collect the five songs from the last two Heavenly singles, which have been out for the better part of the year on the English Sarah label (about which you can read in the forthcoming Harvard Advocate, should you care to). Heavenly is an extremely talented and extremely happy pop group from Oxford whose ideology, until now, has consisted in the systematic replacement of the most depressing features of adult life'n `love with their more pleasurable childhood equivalents; the band's iconography includes butterflies and flowers and paper cutouts, and bandleader Amelia Fletcher's voice would be called girlish were it not for the complexity of the hooks she sings. Early songs like "I Fell in Love with You Last Night" or "Shallow" stripped the love thing of all its political, and explicitly physical, components, allowing listeners of either sex to luxuriate in real or imagined virginal crushes while enjoying the layers and layers of tunes.

The new record, or records (if you want the two singles), keeps the layers and layers of superb, crisp hooks while ditching the Lewis Carroll ideology: perhaps in reaction to the Riot Grrrl thing, Heavenly has written songs about female self-reliance, gender-based intimidation and, yes, date rape. "P.U.N.K. Girl" is about a supercool but rather repressed "girl" (no age given) who, Amelia Fletcher wishes, would act as "punk" as she makes Fletcher feel: "P is for the painful way/You make me feel some days/U is for you turn me on..." "Atta Girl" gives a disco-flavored backbeat to congratulations for a girl who has just told off an unwanted male admirer: "I'm not yours," she says," and never will be now/You've shown me how you act/When I'm out with another..." And "Hearts and Crosses" begins, true to its title, as a love story, then becomes a date rape fable, with a sinister '60s-flavored organ becoming the musical counterpart for the sinister male organ.

Compared to Heavenly's previous records, the striking thing here is the set of themes, and the departures (organ, backbeat, backing vocals) from normal Heavenly music that accompany the new themes; compared to records by anyone else, the striking thing about these tunes will still be, precisely, the tunes. While Amelia Fletcher is saying she doesn't need another guy, many a listener will be imagining she, or he, doesn't need any other record, so magnificent are the melodies on this one. K Records' domestic re-release of these two singles makes a perfect complement, or compliment, to the Katherine Hepburn film series now at the Brattle every Sunday (plug): heading out of the theater's darkness into any good independent record store, you can exchange one high-spirited, British-inflected leading lady for another, and listen to either or both of them call the tunes.