Utopian Ashes is not the most obvious record Primal Scream singer Bobby Gillespie and Savages belter Jehnny Beth could have made together. A cross between Primal Scream’s frothy, beat-driven psychedelia and Beth’s scorched-earth punk would have been their path of least resistance, and it’s easy to imagine how great it might have sounded. But instead the two opted for something higher risk, higher reward, and much higher concept: a fictionalized divorce album modeled after the tear-jerking country, soul, and pop duets of yesteryear. It’s a side project in the truest sense, a departure from anything either has attempted with their primary bands.
Utopian Ashes gambles everything on its contrivance. Gillespie and Beth are not a couple, nor are either of them going through a divorce. But while history romanticizes divorce albums born of real-life decouplings—Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Marvin Gaye’s Here My Dear, Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights—in truth many of the best breakup ballads were written by songwriters for hire who happily went home to their spouses at the end of the day. Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” wasn’t written about a real divorce, either, but that doesn’t diminish its impact any. Gillespie and Beth were so enamored of the form they had to invent a marriage just to kill it.
Indebted particularly to the soured-love duets of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra or Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, Utopian Ashes commits fully to its premise, flaunting the many ways that a sad song can be dressed up. On opener “Chase It Down,” it’s with disco strings and a wah-wah pedal right out of a Tom Jones record. For “Remember We Were Lovers,” it’s with bluesy Memphis horns, and on the Summer of Love-hued “Stones of Silence,” it’s with kaleidoscopic the Mama’s & The Papa’s vocal projections. Each arrangement is staged for maximum melodrama. They flirt with camp without ever succumbing to it.
Only once, on the wallowing “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” does the record get so caught up in its imagined misery that it becomes an actual buzzkill. Otherwise, Gillespie and Beth execute these songs with the tact of seasoned studio pros and the vigor of a couple crushing shared Righteous Brothers favorites at karaoke. Gillespie is fantastic; his pleading, ornately cracked voice tests every millimeter of his range. But Beth is the record’s real revelation. Removed from the brutalist intensity of Savages’ records, her wooly voice is tender but unyielding, all smoldering resolve. “You wonder why I never have sex with you anymore? Well, without trust, how can there be love?” she sings on the harp-swept “Living a Lie,” in a seething whisper that cuts just as deep as any howl on a Savages record.
It helps, of course, that they’ve got such strong songs to back them up. At its best, like on the rangy Sticky Fingers callback “Your Heart Will Always Be Broken,” Utopian Ashes sounds every bit as timeless as the classics it emulates. Of all the album’s feats, the most remarkable may be that it never feels like a gimmick. Gillespie and Beth have taken a concept that’s audacious on paper, even frankly unappealing, and they’ve made it soar.
Buy: Rough Trade
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