Here's another set of lovingly packaged reissues from Renascent -- Britain’s foremost archivists of out-of-print and often painfully overlooked guitar rock -- of The House of Love’s self-titled 1988 debut and their super rare 1987 singles collection The German Album (so named due to its original release in, you guessed it, Germany). Two albums that, since their release, deserve to be recognized as touchstones for many popular trends in British pop and rock: from shoegaze to Britpop to whoever the hell NME and Q have plastered all over their covers this month.
The House of Love fit somewhere in between the tail end of The Smiths and the rise of The Stone Roses on the British rock timeline; in fact, the sounds of those two bands present a good basis from which to approach these albums. Less emotive and literate (read: less pretentious) than Morrissey, but more focused and articulate (read: smarter) than Ian Brown, Guy Chadwick’s voice seems to melt between the guitars, his oblique lyrics never less than insightful, with hints of political awareness and a philosophical muse poking through the nonchalant façade. It’s a side Chadwick shows on “Welt,” when he proclaims, “I would like to criticize.” However, the band certainly makes it difficult to critique when the results are so pristine, some 20 years on.
While The German Album was never conceived as a whole, it arguably contains a stronger set of songs, largely due to the urgent delivery of the earliest 12-inch singles. The first four tracks — “Destroy the Heart,” “Shine On,” “Real Animal,” and “Nothing To Me” — stand up to any like-minded tracks from the era, recalling the moody anthems of predecessors The Chameleons and Echo and the Bunnymen, especially the latter’s work on Crocodiles and Heaven Up Here.
The House of Love, on the other hand, is moodier and slower, just missing classic status by a few cuts. Leadoff track “Christine” is the best song that The Jesus and Mary Chain never wrote, and if you’re familiar with that band's first two albums — Psychocandy and Darklands — you probably have an idea of how fucking good it might sound. “Salome” reminds me of The Psychedelic Furs, if Richard Butler’s voice had been sanded down to a croon.
In spite of its occasional brilliance, the relative restraint when compared to The German Album forces me to wonder if The House of Love ever should have conceptualized an entire LP. This isn’t to say it’s bad — far from it, in fact. But at times the band’s ambition in the studio is so grandiose it occasionally suffocates the music. The single format, however, gave the band an opportunity to reign in their sound, providing some of the rawness that suited them so well in their early days.
Regardless of its propensity for overproduction, The House of Love still comes out as a beautiful collection of distinctly British pop, a counterpoint to the spare reverb and echo of The German Album. And both — I repeat, BOTH — of these albums belong in any ‘80s rock collection that runs the gamut from post-punk to shoegaze. Yeah, they’re expensive as all hell, and you will probably have to order them online (unless you live in the U.K.), but where’s the fun in finding them easily? These are the kind of albums destined to be tracked down and located by obsessives only. They are truly diamonds in the rough, and they probably wouldn’t shine as bright if they weren’t so hard to come across.
