It's My Life

Nine tracks, and the test finds required parts and spare ones. Such a Shame and It’s My Life carry the record’s public argument and could not go. Renée is required for another reason: it is the first long, quiet piece, where the band lets space into the song, and without it side one would be a run of singles. Tomorrow Started does the same office at the head of side two. The test bites in the middle of the second side: The Last Time and Call in the Night Boy restate the brisk mode without turning it, and the record would lose little without one of them; Dum Dum Girl, a fine single, opens in the manner of the band’s first album rather than of this one. The cap is missed by a tenth.

Score: 7.4 / 10

What can be stated is thin but real: a self that wants to own its life finds it given over to chance, habit and other people, and answers with a defiance that sounds like doubt. Such a Shame sets the first half, a man who lets the dice decide; It’s My Life the second, a claim of possession sung with an ache that undercuts it. Renée and Does Caroline Know? turn the same unease toward a couple, a love watched from a distance. Sound carries as much as the words and is credited fully: Hollis’s voice, strained and half swallowed, discloses more doubt than the lines state, and the slow pieces disclose a reticence the songs elsewhere cover. Held far below the gate because the words are oblique to the point of withholding, and what comes through is more a mood of unease than an articulated condition.

Score: 7.1 / 10

Elevation comes several times, warm and melancholy. Such a Shame lifts at its chorus, the voice climbing over the drive of the synthesisers and drums. Renée is the quiet summit: a long, nearly still piece over fretless bass and soft keyboards, where Hollis’s voice is exposed and the record finds a tenderness the singles cannot hold. Tomorrow Started reaches a similar suspended height on side two, and It’s My Life has a bright, bittersweet lift. Against this, Dum Dum Girl, The Last Time and Call in the Night Boy have energy more than height, and It’s You, the closer, is earnest more than transporting. Four or five of nine tracks rise; the highest is real, short of what the medium reaches and of the long ascents this band made later.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Myth is evoked and built nowhere, though the evocation is sharper than it first sounds. The strongest figure is in Such a Shame: a man who gives his life to the throw of a die, an old figure of fate and the surrendered will, which the song gives a real moment’s weight. It’s My Life carries the oldest claim of the self against what owns it, in a title that has become a slogan. Renée and Does Caroline Know? sketch the beloved watched and the secret kept. What holds the axis low is the particular: no place, no year, no person with a face, and words too oblique to make a figure stand. What summons pattern here is mood and phrase, not structure; the record organises itself around no archetype.

Score: 6.8 / 10

The inheritance is the band’s own first album, The Party’s Over (1982), synthesiser pop in the manner of its year, and the New Romantic chart music around it. The turn is real. The keyboard player is gone, Tim Friese-Greene enters as producer and co-writer, and the songs open up: fretless bass and space in Renée, a jazz-touched restraint in Tomorrow Started, a voice that strains against the polish. That direction is credited, and the partnership begun here would take it much further. The stake was a contract with EMI that wanted hits, and the record met that demand with Such a Shame and It’s My Life rather than refusing it. So the turn is placed inside a proven path, synth pop with a darker and more spacious interior rather than a departure from it, and this record only begins it.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Would changing the form change what the record knows? In part, and in its best places much. The knowledge here, a defiance shadowed by doubt, lives in an arrangement of surface and depth: bright, driven singles set beside slow pieces where the polish thins and the voice is left alone. Renée’s length and stillness are its meaning; It’s My Life’s brightness over a pained voice is its meaning. The sequence is counted here, once. Side one runs from the first album’s manner through the hit to the still centre and on to the title track; side two opens on the quiet Tomorrow Started and returns to brisk songs. That order serves more than it enacts, and most of the songs could stand in another order, or alone: a collection with a shape, not a form that is the knowledge.

Score: 7.2 / 10

Evidence over forty-two years, and much of it borrowed. The record is returned to chiefly as the step before The Colour of Spring and the records that followed, heard for what in it anticipates them: the space in Renée, the treatment of the voice, the first work of the partnership between Mark Hollis and Tim Friese-Greene. That is return to the band’s path more than to this record. The singles return in their own right, in broadcast, and the title song carries a second reading, defiance or plea, that renews with each hearing. Against that, the words yield little more than they give at first, because they give little; the faster songs of side two do not reopen; and the formal depth lies in a few tracks rather than across the album. A modest well, partly fed from downstream.

Score: 7.1 / 10

The field is the album of the 1980s. The intrinsic force is modest but real: the record takes the synthesiser pop of its moment and gives it a melancholy interior and room to breathe, a refinement of the form rather than a reorganisation of what the album could do. Its devices, synthesisers, programmed and played drums and studio polish, were the common language of 1984; its distinction is a voice and a temper. Reach as an album, as a model others followed, is small, and the influence that runs from this band runs through Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, which is not credited here. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the singles have lived on in broadcast and are reported to have been large hits in continental Europe, and the title song reached a new audience through a cover by No Doubt, reported as a hit in 2003.

Score: 7.0 / 10

Survival is weighed over forty-two years on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has been reissued. Presence is real for the songs: the title song and Such a Shame have stayed in broadcast for four decades. The album as a whole has been present more narrowly, kept in print and heard by those who come to it backward from the band’s later records, and that narrowness is charged. The fabric is charged too: the synthesiser timbres, the drum sounds and the gloss are of 1984 to the ear, a surface fixed to its production era. Two charges, presence and fabric, hold it well below the records of its age that are heard whole and widely, and a tenth below War, of the same years, which carries the same two charges but whose album is heard whole more often.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, read to the same anchors as every other art. The making is skilled and in places load-bearing. Tim Friese-Greene’s production is clean and spacious for its year: on Renée and Tomorrow Started he leaves the music room, a thing the genre seldom allowed. Paul Webb’s fretless bass gives the record its warmth and much of its line; Lee Harris’s drumming is precise and, on the slow pieces, light. Mark Hollis’s voice is the most distinctive instrument, unusual in grain and phrasing, though at speed it can sound strained more than commanded. The singles are well built: Such a Shame’s drive, It’s My Life’s hook. The faults weigh on a share of the record: generic synthesiser and drum timbres of the period, faster side-two arrangements competent without distinction, and a polish that sometimes flattens what the voice is doing.

Score: 7.8 / 10

One law governs the record, roughly: a bright surface over a doubting voice, the self’s claim heard as half a plea. The two most distant elements are Dum Dum Girl, a fast single in the first album’s manner, and Renée, a long, near-still piece of fretless bass and exposed voice. They obey the same law at the level of the voice, which carries one unease through both and binds the record more firmly than its two manners suggest; at the level of the music they belong to two bands, the one Talk Talk had been and the one it was becoming. The range is wider than a synth-pop album’s, which is credit. But the two manners are held side by side rather than under one physics, and the faster songs of side two obey the law by habit. No break; a seam that shows.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held: the self that wants its life and doubts it can have it, in Such a Shame and the title song. The couple is held at a distance, in Renée and in Does Caroline Know? Chance and the surrendered will are held in Such a Shame’s premise, and one voice joins the three. Beyond them the orders are absent or only glimpsed: no labour, no family beyond the couple, no state or history, no sacred, and no natural order in the record as heard. What holds the figure this low is that what there is lies close together, three orders in one voice. The figure describes the reach of this record, not a limit of the form.

Score: 6.2 / 10