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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
(Translated from my old Italian text by Nicholas Green)
In the late 1970s, Alison Statton was a simple and unassuming singer, totally uninvolved in the punk-rock frenzies, psychedelic delusions, and provocative posturing of those years. She revealed herself to the public as part of the Young Marble Giants, formed as a trio of bass, vocals and Farfisa organ on the initiative of guitarist Stuart Moxham. The group was singular in the revival scene because it favored soft, spare muted music, with Statton's little voice in the foreground crooning an anemic singsong against a backdrop of naive rhythms and harmonics.
Their first and only album,
Colossal Youth (Rough Trade, 1980 - Les Disques du Crépuscule, 2003), contains sparse tracks in which one hears echoes of fatalistic Parisian café songs (Searching For Mr. Right);
surf timbres, folk ballads and Morricone (the instrumental Taxi);
samba and Joni Mitchell (Eating Noddemix);
tango and street pianos (The Man Amplifier);
The Shadows and rumba (Choci Loni);
garage rock and exotic lullabies (Colossal Youth);
or, on the more aggressive tracks, echoes of rhythm and blues and country (Include Me Out);
rockabilly and Duane Eddy (Constantly Changing);
hard rock, samba and Gregorian mass (N.I.T.A.);
hard rock and funk (Music For Evenings);
and boogie and pop (Brand New Life);
remixed in every possible combination.
Young Marble Giants evokes (perhaps unintentionally) the ambience of 1950s beatniks, linking them to the experiments of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp.
After that album and two EPs (Final Day and the instrumental
Testcard), Alison Statton became the frontwoman of many different musical projects, while the remaining members formed Gist.
The same fragile pop is pervasive on Gist's album,
Embrace The Herd (Rough Trade, 1983), particularly on Love At First Sight,
and on Stuart Moxham's solo albums, all in the spirit of Burt Bacharach :
Signal Path (Feel Good All Over, 1992, credited to Stuart Moxham & the Original Artists) featuring
Knives (Always Fall),
Random Rules (Peak, 1993), and
Cars In The Grass (Feel Good All Over, 1994).
If anything, Random Rules (Peak, 1993) was the album that brought him back to the heights of his earlier career.
On Fine Tuning (Feel Good All Over, 1995) he recorded new versions of his old classics.
Colossal Youth & Collected Works (Domino, 2007) is a triple-disc
compilation of the classic album plus
Ode To Booker T from a 1979 compilation,
a "Peel Session" from 1980,
the EP Testcard (1981), the single Final Day (1981),
and Salad Days (2000).
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