THE MEMBRANES
WHAT NATURE GIVES... NATURE TAKES AWAY
Forged amid the snotty fires of punk, The Membranes emerged from the mean streets of Blackpool in the late 70s. Part of a freewheeling post-punk movement that had precisely zero interest in the virtuoso excesses of progressive rock, they became one of the most celebrated underground bands of the 1980s. Adored by John Peel, they wrote songs with titles like Spike Milligan’s Tape Recorder and Postdetergent Vacuum Cleaner Man and sounded as scrappily DIY as can be. They were, one could argue, the very antithesis of everything that prog had become by that point. In 1985 The Membranes even released an EP entitled Death To Trad Rock. So definitely not prog, then.
But time changes everything, of course. The Membranes originally split in 1990, but they reformed in 2009 at the request of My Bloody Valentine, who were curating that year’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival. What was meant to be a one-off swiftly evolved into much more, and the band fronted by journalist and dapper polymath John Robb have subsequently released two widely acclaimed studio albums: 2015’s Dark Matter/Dark Energy and 2019’s What Nature Gives… Nature
Takes Away. Both are fascinating, but What Nature Gives… – a double album peppered with numerous special guest cameos – is a particularly extraordinary and self-evidently progressive piece of work.
A concept piece, concerned with the changing of the seasons and humanity’s place within nature, the record still shares a certain subversive streak with The Membranes’ early works, but here their music blooms into something much more colourful and rich.
Songs like The City Is An Animal (Nature Is Its Slave) and Deep In The Forest Where The Memories Linger are still rooted in the thumping post-punk riffs of the early 80s, but now they come embellished with a thousand smart ideas, from dizzying detours into psychedelic rock to quasi-ambient poetry readings from late, great punk queen Jordan and, most gloriously, TV naturalist Chris Packham. The latter’s contribution to Winter (The Beauty And Violence Of Nature) is profoundly moving in a way that you may not expecting from the ex-Really Wild Show presenter.
Meanwhile, A Murmuration Of Starlings On Blackpool Pier is simply stunning: a noirish crawl, propelled by jabbing strings, it features another poem, this time written and read by folk legend Shirley Collins. Elsewhere, Mother Ocean/Father Time and
Demon Seed/Demon Flower embrace the squelching Moogs and stuttering beats of krautrock; The Ghost Of Winter Stalks This Land wrings cosmic dread from deep, dark dub; and the closing Pandora’s Box is a veritable feast of new wave synths and wild choral flurries.
Admittedly, John Robb still sounds like someone likely to physically assault anyone accusing his band of being a prog band, but you can’t have everything...