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The Raincoats
Odyshape
We ThRee Records
Article written by
Ged M - Oct 2, 2011
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The Raincoats: Odyshape
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As Kim Gordon has it, these are “ordinary people playing extraordinary music”. 1981’s Odyshape was the Raincoats’ second album, and though it was, technically, emerging from the post-punk period, it was just as much informed by the avant-garde and feminist theory. Guest musicians on Odyshape included Robert Wyatt, Charles Hayward of This Head and Richard Dudanski, all drummers who encouraged the Raincoats to experiment with rhythm. Post-Palmolive, and before Ingrid Weiss was recruited, many of Odyshape’s songs were written without a drummer, with gives this album its memorably strange rhythms and percussive elements. Drums don’t so much as underpin the beat but float around, sometimes like skittery jazz butterflies, sometimes like heavy dub thunderbolts, and create all sorts of odd-time signatures.
This is a one of those Marmite albums; Gina Birch, on the sleeve, writes of friends melting the original release into ashtrays, but others (like Kim Gordon and Kurt Cobain) loved it and took on board its lessons. While it’s still not an easy listen, the distance of 30 years highlights how single-minded and forward-focused the Raincoats were when you consider the rest of independent music in 1981. It borrows from other cultures and steals ideas from other genres; ‘And Then It’s OK’ could have been assembled from several different songs, mixing playful guitar and weird sounds, bits of melody and spoken word, going first faster, then slower. ‘Dancing In My Head’ has sawing violins, booming drums and some dub reggae too. ‘The vocals change too, song by song, hushed and whispery on ‘Baby Song’ and dark and almost folky on the excellent ‘Only Loved At Night’, singing about consumerism to motherhood to the tyranny of appearance. It’s really a repudiation of, or a divorce from, “traditional” rock, and as such has maintained its sense of daring and imagination while its contemporaries are showing their age.
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