Martyn Bates
Your Jewled Footsteps (solo and collaboration works 1979-2006)
(Sub Rosa SR 257, September 15 2006, Cd)
Review 1
by Rob Young (?) (The Wire, January 2007)
Eyeless In Gaza
Summer Salt And Subway Sun
AMBIVALENT SCALE CD
Plague of Years : Songs And Instrumentals 1980-2006
SUB ROSA CD
Martyn Bates
Your Jewled Footsteps :Solo And Collaboration Works 1979-2005
SUB ROSA CD
Even before one listens to the music within, the artwork of the two Sub Rosa compilations gives a visual insight into Martyn Bates’s muse. Photographs of nondescript houses in his hometown of Nuneaton, sitting under grey skies, are juxtaposed with rain-spattered windows, flame red sunsets and lush fields, neatly illustrating a sense of an otherness on the edge of the everyday that has run through Bates’ lyrics and music from the very first.
For a time in the early 80’s Eyeless in Gaza, the duo of Bates and Pete Becker, appeared to be raincoat-clad popsters with severe haircuts – a notion that soon evaporated. Their music was melodic, but there was intensity about it. Plague of Years illustrates how Bates remarkable voice has developed in character and poise from these early untrammelled outpourings of yells and yodels where syllables were chewed up or elongated to the point of incomprehensibility.
Eyeless in Gaza soon became more lyrical, with Bates’ lyrics capturing transience, loss, the subtleties of sensation and a pantheistic awe at the natural world. It’s unsurprising, then, that he has enjoyed an overlap with the folk tradition. Although ‘She Moves Thru The Fair’ (from 1985) has so much reverb it sounds like it was recorded in a cave (in a garage, actually –Ed.), it is beautifully sung. Bates’s exploration of folk forms is more in evidence on Your Jewled Footsteps. Although his earliest solo work is almost interchangeable with Eyeless In Gaza’s, ‘90’s collaborations with Max Eastley (‘Cherry Tree Carol’) and Mick Harris (‘Cruel Mother’, from their Murder Ballads album) are more spectral, with his voice soaring through the music’s space.
Although Eyeless in Gaza’s work has a tendency to slip under the radar, its quality has been remarkable consistent. Bates still enjoys a potent musical relationship with Becker and the brand new album Summer Salt And Subway Sun is fresh and vital, as good as anything they’ve done before. A mix of drifting ambiance, churning guitars and layered sonics, it ranges from the sparse piano and voice of ‘Mixed Choir’ to the dark edged instrumental ‘Whitening Rays’. According to Bates, this album represents a conscious sideways move to prevent them being lumped in with any of the new folk fads. But let’s also hope that it doesn’t estrange them further from the attention they so obviously deserve.
Review 2
by Colin Buttimer (Grooves, Late 2006)
Martyn Bates, one of the co-founders of post-punk duo Eyeless in Gaza, has a voice that’s alternately yearning, choral, impassioned, and quavering. Like a banner unfurling on a windswept moor, with rain falling in sheets. There’s also something that initially appears unschooled, pent-up, and rapidly unravelling in the forms Bates traces. The brief, but incredibly to-the-point epilogue at the back of the lyric booklet for Your Jewled Footsteps, a compilation of his solo and collaborative work, locates the singer firmly in the tradition of UK roots music. Although I can’t claim to be an expert on such traditions, the sense of passionate imprecation, of woes borne with stoicism rings familiar and true. It feels touchingly moving, shadowed as it is by pipes and strings and history. Bates’ voice might be considered alongside Joanna Newsom’s, as both evince a rare honesty and challenge the uninitiated with their respective deliveries. Bates’ lyrics are, however, somewhat easier to decipher.
Take the magical suspense of 1997’s ‘Cherry Tree Carol’, a collaboration with improviser and instrument maker Max Eastley: there’s something angelic, even medieval about Bates’ vocal, enough to make wherever you listen to it hallowed with age. Or the passionate ‘Later War Cries’ yelled out and driven, or the pastoral ‘The Garden of Olives’, at once plaintive, lyrical, and seemingly wordless. The 20 tracks on this overview dance backwards and forwards in time, from 1982 to 1994, 2005 to 1979, and so on, but despite the temporal hairpin bends, the music flows cohesively onwards. Even the cover of Your Jewled Footsteps is a wonder, rich in color and form. It’s the first time I can think of a musician’s environment being brought to life in such a way-and suits Bates’ work perfectly.
Review 3
by Ned Raggett (allmusic, Late 2006)
Conceived and released as a complement to Eyeless in Gaza’s Plague of Years compilation, Your Jewled Footsteps focuses on Martyn Bates’ solo and other collaborative work over the years, providing a handy one-disc overview of an extensive discography. Like his more well-known duo work, Bates has released material on a slew of different labels over time, making this collection a good if inevitably limited take on a vast, underrated musical archive. Bates’ tender but tense singing has the same gentle impact here as with Eyeless in Gaza, but the settings range from the comparatively familiar – much of the straight-up solo work is not far removed from Eyeless in general – to the contextually adventurous and surprising. Songs like the brief ‘The God on the Tree’ and the chaotic 1979-era snippet from ‘Dissonance’ help to emphasize his instrumental gifts, while various duets, most especially the mesmerizing dark ambience of ‘The Cruel Mother’, done with Scorn/Lull main man Mick Harris, ghostly vocals floating over huge depths of sound, showcase other areas of work. The sequencing is part of the joy of the compilation – sticking to no chronological setting, it flows readily across years and styles, showing how well Bates’ voice has held up over time. Hearing the shifts from the (generally) more electronic earlier years to the acoustic-based, hushed folk turns of more recent times in this fashion establishes not only surprising continuities but creates a lush atmosphere that demonstrates his creative impulses to good effect. No otherwise unavailable or unreleased songs are featured on Your Jewled Footsteps, so hardcore fans can make their own equivalents as they wish, but for others this is a welcome look into a defiantly creative cycle of work.
Review 4
by John Kealy (Brainwashed, January 6 2007)
This is a fantastic compilation that shows the range and talent that Bates is in possession of. Cold, post punk songs sit comfortably beside real English folk songs that are full of warmth. Impressively, despite covering over 25 years of his career, the different styles and periods of Bates’ works still sound like they were recorded all in one go.
With folk now being a term used loosely by many, including myself, it is important to get things straight: Bates writes songs in a proper folk style; he does not just throw an acoustic guitar into the mix and try to pass it off as some hippie jam piece of crap. Instead his songs have an ancient quality about them, sounding like they have been crafted by a few generations of singers. Songs like ‘Shorepoem’ and ‘Cherry Tree Carol’ are two examples of Bates’ quality songwriting. There is a timelessness to these songs that is hard to capture and surprisingly the small hints of electronics used in the songs do not take away from this timelessness.
It is not just serious folky sounds that this compilation covers but the poppier end of the spectrum too. Songs like ‘First and Last February’ and ‘Later War Cries’ remind me of Matt Johnson’s brand of pop but Bates is far from a The The clone. His more experimental efforts are also represented by an excerpt from a noisy piece called ‘Dissonance’ from before he formed Eyeless in Gaza. This piece would sound at home on Industrial Records, which is not something that can be said of the rest of Your Jewled Footsteps.
One problem with some of the songs, mainly those from the early ’80s, is that there is sometimes a severe hint of goth off them. At times Bates puts too much effort into sounding emotional on these tracks, coming off a little hysterical. However, the keyboards on all these early songs are excellent, very like those found on Joy Division’s Closer which is no small complement in my book. The music and the singing improve as Bates’ career progresses with the mid-’90s material definitely being the best in overall quality. Although some of the better lyrics belong to James Joyce and not to Bates, his musical arrangements of Joyce’s poetry are a damn sight better than many I have heard on many a Bloomsday walking through Dublin.
Your Jewled Footsteps is a wonderful collection of songs. To the detriment of other albums that need reviewing I have been spinning this quite a lot over the last couple of weeks. It does not sound like a compilation at all; Bates’ work all fits together nicely so instead of sounding disjointed like most career retrospectives it sounds more like a normal album. I cannot recommend this enough for those who are new to Bates. As for those who are familiar with his work, there are enough rare and unreleased songs here to justify the release of Your Jewled Footsteps.
Review 5
by DO (Hi-Fi, Late 2006)
Music: Martyn Bates spent much of the 1980s as half of the indie experimentalists Eyeless In Gaza. What wasn’t always obvious, was his interest in English and other folk musics, which he explored in greater depth as a solo artist. This is collected on this beautifully packaged retrospective. There are some lovely moments, even though the subjects of his songs largely seem to concern futility and loss. Standouts include the haunting synth patterns of Cut Like Sunset and his doom-laden arrangement of the traditional murder ballad The Cruel Mother.
Sound: These are intimate, quiet songs, many of them recorded at Bates’ home studio in the Midlands, but though the circumstances may have been lo-fi, the results never sound cheap.
Review 6
by Céline Rémy (Les inrockuptibles, 22 janvier 2007)
Plus romantique encore que l’anthologie Plague of Years de Eyeless in Gaza qui sort ces jours-ci, la compilation Your Jewled Footsteps consigne quelques-unes des nombreuses pistes osées en solo par leur chanteur Martyn Bates: entre traditions celtiques, divagations médiévales et folk lunaire, il dessinait là les contours flous d’une pop illuminée, qui allait faire la fortune de This Mortal Coil ou de grossistes new age qui débarrasseront sa musique de ses épines et poisons – mandragore ou dansemort.
Review 7
by Paolo Bertoni (Blow Up # 104) (Italian)
