In theory, talent and time should be all it takes to break a band, but everyone knows making music is not a simple meritocracy. If it were, a band like the House of Love would have fared better. An early jewel in the Creation Records crown, the House of Love seemed poised for a breakthrough that never happened. They had great songs, they had a great sound, they had buzz, but in the end it all wound up as little more than the foundation for a fervent cult following.
Much belated U.S. issues of the band's self-titled 1988 debut and its originally Germany-only singles compilation companion (also self-titled, confusingly, but since dubbed The German Album) won't do anything to alter the group's fate any more than its excellent 2005 reunion Days Run Away did, but with the essential 1986-88: The Creation Recordings (which contained the entirety of those formative album tracks and singles) out of print, their arrival is still much appreciated.
Like a lot of bands of their vintage, the House of Love looked back to the 1960s while veiling their music in such contemporary trappings as reverb-drenched guitars, trebly production, and the occasional squall of noise. Arriving at the tail end of the Smiths but before the Madchester boom, the London band hearkened back to the moody early-80s atmospherics of Echo and the Bunnymen and the Chameleons. Guy Chadwick was such a strong writer, and guitarist Terry Bickers such a complementary foil, that in a lot of ways their music hangs in the air, rootless and mysterious-- a status only enhanced by all those years "lost." (In the beginning there was also third guitarist/vocalist Andrea Heukamp.)
The four singles and B-sides contained on The German Album find the band on fire; songs such as "Shine On", "Nothing to Me", "The Hedonist", "Blind", "Love", "Destroy the Heart" and the stripped down "Loneliness is the Gun" would make any impressionable youth worth his weight want to start a band. By the debut Heukamp was out, but she stuck around to help record "Christine", one of those classic side one/track one songs that showed the singles were no fluke. Once again, all the tracks are impressively strong, "dodgy lyrics" (Chadwick's words, in the liners) and all, with highlights the very Echo-y "Road", the chugging "Sulphur" and "Happy", the shimmering "Man to Child" and "Love in a Car", and the raging "Salome".
Admittedly, it's easy in retrospect, knowing the UK trends lying in wait just around the corner, to see why the band's days were numbered. The House of Love's fate was further sealed by the departure of Bickers and a premature departure from Creation (never mind that its subsequent Fontana debut-- also self-titled-- was pretty good). Even listened to with the group's early demise in mind, these reissues capture something fleeting but special, the lightning-in-a-bottle sense of so much promise, not exactly promise squandered but all the same perhaps promise never fully unleashed.
