Who needs chemicals when you have Julian Swales in your band? If you want to infuse your music with “emotional or cosmic uplift and depth” — the stated aim of Kitchens of Distinction’s existence, according to the liner notes in the Capsule compilation — it helps to enlist a guy who can sculpt a sound that does not solely dazzle with gloss and ornamentation.
Swales not only knows how to connect his effect pedals, he manipulates them compellingly — the listener won’t just have mental impressions of, say, riding on a sparkling pinwheel as it sinks into the Challenger Deep, but might actually feel like he or she were doing so. (The aforementioned sensation struck me while listening to “Blue Pedal.” And yes, I’m aware that it could seem cheesy to you, so feel free to listen to it on your own time and see if you can conjure up something better.) Or, like on “Hammer,” the listener might feel flogged, lacerated, vivisected, or outright flayed alive by Swales’ closing two-minute-plus feedback squall, before two last screeches slam the remains of the listener into a wall, a great metallic wall as long as the Large Hadron Collider, where it reverberates from the collision for a full 30 seconds. (Torture and particle accelerators? That’s practically the basis for a Howard Brenton play. Suck on that!)
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As for the track above, “On Tooting Broadway Station,” we have bassist and frontman Patrick Fitzgerald kneeling down and weeping like Elizabeth Smart (the author/journalist revered by Morrissey, not the Utah abductee) in the titular South London tube stop over a gentle melody from Swales and a steady mid-tempo beat from Dan Goodwin. Fitzgerald punches “the concrete floor/ until my fingers bled” and later on takes time to note that his fingers have been bandaged up. He swears to cut his estranged lover out of his heart and admits a few lines later that he has done so, but soon makes it obvious that he’s not over the man in question at all. Fitzgerald suggests that the man’s clothes be burnt along with “everything he owned and the empty chamber left” and pouts that he’ll carry on without the man “as this hollowness that drags in my voice.” He then vows to “burn it all” in a “benedictory fire” and demands, “Give me his charred heart/ And give me his fillings/ And God, give me God to forgive me!” before ultimately dismissing (or rather, celebrating) his lover as his “John of Arc.”
Julian Swales compounds these declarations with a succession of notes, chords, and assorted atmospherics that swoop skyward, careen back down, and then swoop even higher than before. The resultant wave of sound evokes a towering wall of fire. The gentle opening melody and first chorus amount to mere kindling compared to the conflagration underway; when Fitzgerald sings about wanting his lover’s charred heart, it feels almost like Swales has single-handedly restarted the 1991 Kuwaiti oil fires. Once Fitzgerald stops singing, the volume increases and the song itself morphs into a firestorm. And what does that mad fool Swales do? He casts the listener deeper into the firestorm that Fitzgerald started. Upon being engulfed, a crescendo ensues, and it’s obvious that he aims to incinerate the skies. There’s little point in razing the world to the ground when that happens. (Bakuninites, take note.) No mortal should have that sort of power, but Mr. Swales tries his damnedest to remake the world into something akin to Canberra in 2003 with his guitar. And as the song starts to fade out — on the studio version, not the live take above — you can hear Swales begin to scorch the stratosphere.
I’m hard-pressed to think of anything that could have a greater cathartic impact on the mind than such an impression. If it was emotional uplift they wanted, Kitchens of Distinction succeeded in ways that hardly anyone has matched before or since, and they not only achieved it here, but also in the dozens of other songs scattered throughout their discography.
