Artist: The Bevis Frond
Title: Inner Marshland
Format: LP
Label: Reckless Records
Catalogue Number: Reck 14
Year of Release: 1987
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Tracklisting
A1 Cries from the Inner Marshland (1:50)
A2 Termination Station Grey (5:11)
A3 Window Eye (5:50)
A4 Once More (7:26)
B1 Defoliation Part One (1:42)
B2 Reflections in a Tall Mirror (4:42)
B3 Hey Mr Undecided (1:33)
B4 I've Got Eyes in the Back of my Head (4:50)
B5 Minsmere Sphagnum (0:58)
B6 Medieval Sienese Acid Blues (5:13)
B7 Defoliation Part Two (5:36)
Much improved sound quality on this release, compared to the début. And it follows a very similar template to Miasma. To wit - short instrumental tracks; long, heavily over-driven guitar workouts; and more of those samples that seem to have been made by holding a tape recorder up to a TV speaker.
It's all good fun though, the B-side being much better than the A though. Both Termination Station Grey and Window Eye suffer from the level of the vocals being a bit weird - and with the latter, one of the vocal lines is from a Sweep (as in Sooty and Sweep) puppet. Once More has good moments, and builds into a suitably noisy slab of acid rock, but Defoliation Part Two does it much better, and includes samples from the original Batman TV series, which is no bad thing.
Hey Mr Undecided is a nice little acoustic number, which breaks up the second side nicely; Minsmere Sphagnum could have done without it's 'comedy' intro; and Mediaeval Sienese Acid Blues is a good example of the blues form, but not outstanding.
The real killer track on this album, and my most highly-rated song so far of the Bevis canon, and therefore the one I would recommend to other people, even people I like, is I've Got Eyes in the Back of my Head. It's a straightforward and timeless British rock classic.
Here's a good interview with Nick Saloman, the man behind The Bevis Frond, from The Boston Phoenix.
