I first heard “Juno” by Life Without Buildings ten years ago, when I was maybe twenty years old. I was immediately swept away by the effortless creative power of this relatively obscure art-rock band from Scotland. When I started listening to their music, the band had already been lost to the immovable passage of time, but thanks in part to a 2014 vinyl reissue of their one and only album, 2001’s Any Other City, I and many others could be introduced to a band that existed for a single blip in the indie-rock timeline. I felt then like an ornithologist who had just discovered the exotic call of a long extinct bird: bittersweet because I could never hear it in person, yet happy to have heard it at all.
Life Without Buildings began in the summer of 1999, as a bit of fun for three friends from the Glasgow School of Art. Comprising Will Bradley (drums), Chris Evans (bass) and Robert Johnston (guitar), the band started out playing purely instrumental music before recruiting visual and sound artist Sue Tompkins to provide her poetic, spoken-word lyrics to their quick, steady chugging backing. That led to gigs, and eventually their recording Any Other City.
For a while, Any Other City lived in an underground part of the hardcore post-punk world. Burned CDs were passed around in grungy flats and parking lots. Tompkins’ unique vocals became the lightning rod for both praise and criticism. In an early review from 2001, NME wrote that “only mad people and immediate family could warm to Tompkins. Hers is the sound of a performance artist having a self-conscious breakdown.” And my personal favorite slight, from the same review: “Plainly, she thinks she’s Patti Smith reborn with an estuary accent.” Which, I guess, is a pretty British dig.
Of course, now we can all point at NME and laugh. Hindsight is 20/20, and Life Without Buildings were doing something other bands weren’t: They were taking risks. They were taking their time to explore the outer limits of what music and lyrics can be. In that sense, Any Other City explores the deconstruction of language and music. The listener can wonder, forever and ever, what “LGO, LGO, chi sound,” means, and they’d maybe never get closer to the truth, if there even was one. Tompkins’ stuttering vocal work doesn’t follow the rules. She’ll repeat words and phrases, or she’ll meander through a sentence in fragments. It’s sometimes disorienting but always engaging, and it’s a style that has endured nearly twenty-five years later.
They’ve had some resurgence in the last decade, aided by a Rough Trade reissue, but perhaps more significantly by an uncanny viral TikTok trend of teens lip-syncing over the intro to “The Leanover.” One caption read: “These aren’t words but I like them.” Even the band were surprised by this one, with Tompkins’ remarking how special it was to see young women expressing themselves, telling this site, “When I sang the song live in any context really, whether it was in rehearsals with the band or actually recording it in a studio or live on stage, I think deep down I always felt a sense of freedom and energy.”
Today, Life Without Buildings could be considered a predecessor to other post-punk-meets-poetry British bands like Dry Cleaning and Yard Act. Yet there’s a prototypical quality to the music, like a kind of patient zero for the biting irreverence that emerged in post-Brexit Britain. On Any Other City, you’ll find the tense, angsty, Gang of Four-esque drum fills, the thick basslines and the chugging overdrive guitars of The Raincoats—touchpoints for the band, despite Tompkins’ claiming she never really listened to their music before joining Life Without Buildings. But deeper, beneath the surface, is an even more palpable tension, between the unchecked guitar parts and Tompkins’ vocals. It sounds cool, wobbly and delicate, as if it could all dissolve into its distinct parts at any moment. It sounds like how one imagines a dark Glaswegian basement in the year 2000 ought to sound: expressive yet maybe a little bleak, sweet and musty, bright, but dim as well. It’s no wonder they chose the off-kilter song from Japan’s 1981 album Tin Drum as their namesake.
But there’s also a deeper tenderness, a lyrical existentialism that permeates through Tompkins’ talk-singing, shout-singing delivery. It’s an examination of language at every corner that hasn’t really been replicated since. The record begins with Tompkins’ electric vocal delivery on “PS Exclusive.” “No details, but I’m gonna persuade you,” she hisses. And by the end of the record, she has, indeed, persuaded you. She repeats the phrase “the right stuff” nearly forty-four times, like a mantra, each instance taking on a subtly different meaning and not losing any of its shine. On “Envoys”, she repeats the phrase “Flash it” forty times and later highlights the slipperiness of language in pitting the words “salt” and “assault” against one another, sounding like an extraterrestrial learning how humans speak.
On “Juno”, as she stutters through the song’s crescendo, alternating “My lips are sealed” and “Gimme the dropout!”, one might just think she’s discovered a new way to communicate; that when the words themselves falter, one can always get through by repetition and emotional commitment. Then, on my personal favorite, “Sorrow,” with guitar parts that sound like an homage to the Velvet Underground, we see inside her consciousness. She describes the way someone’s eyes can look like lotus leaves, but then she catches herself and corrects: “No, not even like.”
In 2009, Johnston noted that the band broke up shortly after they’d started touring Any Other City because Tompkins wanted to pursue visual art, which she’d studied in art school. “For Sue, I think it turned from a laugh into being a commitment she’d never signed up for,” he said, and added that they felt pressure from their label (the now-defunct Tugboat, an imprint of Rough Trade) to tour more and support bigger artists. “We were generally treating it more like a job than like fun.” Any Other City passed us by long ago, lost to time. And while we may wonder what would happen if Life Without Buildings went on indefinitely, we must ask: Would another album even hit the same way? Lucky for us, depending on who you ask, we’ll never have to find out. And in the end, that’s pretty persuasive.
