It's well documented that plenty of oddities were snapped up and issued by major labels during the grunge era, but the fact that DGC released four albums by post-punk artists the Raincoats (including re-releases of their first three records and the then-new Looking in the Shadows) remains a confounding footnote of that time. David Geffen clearly didn't swell his already sizable bank balance by reissuing the band's second album Odyshape, as it quickly became as hard to find as the original 1981 Rough Trade version. It must be frustrating for the group to have their music fading in and out of time like this-- the preceding The Raincoats and the following Moving have been treated in the same manner-- but it helped cultivate a mystique around Odyshape. That feeling is partially shaped by the distinctly un-rock approach, with the core trio of the band (Ana Da Silva, Gina Birch, and Vicky Aspinall) occasionally utilizing African instruments including a balophone and a kalimba to get the job done.
A big part of Odyshape's charm is derived from its backwards construction, with the band leaning away from the spikiness that made The Raincoats such an inviting listen, and writing many of the songs without percussion. The tribal drumming of original member Palmolive was forcibly removed from the mix-- she quit the band by the time of this record, causing percussion to be added after the fact by a variety of guest players including Robert Wyatt and This Heat's Charles Hayward. Coloring in the songs in that manner might sound like the band were shoving a square peg in a round hole, but it undoubtedly contributed to the uniquely disorienting air that Odyshape thrives on. It's from a place where the Raincoats' best ideas stem-- throwing orthodoxy out of the window, playing on instruments with which they weren't familiar, assembling all the parts back to front because the standard way of doing things held little or no interest.
As such, it fits into that basic post-punk tenet of rejecting everything that came before to test out new ways of doing things. This album has little in common with anything else around at the time, other than the feeling that you're hurtling relentlessly forward into a previously unmapped musical space. There may be a little Scritti-esque hue to the guitar scratch on the pushy "Only Loves at Night", but much of Odyshape is positioned in a peculiar place somewhere between the earth and the sky. Sometimes a discordant violin howl is pitted against dreamy vocal pining ("Dancing in My Head"), at others the relationship is reversed and the singing takes on an earthy tone while the instrumentation is positively otherworldly ("Shouting Out Loud"). Occasionally those two impulses are conjoined, such as on the title track, where Birch delves into body dysmorphia over stop-start rhythms that feel like two different songs colliding.
That schizoid shift can partly be explained by all the instrument swapping going on in the band, but it's also an escape and an embrace of the circumstances in which the band found themselves. Holed up in a squat in London, which Birch admitted (in Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again) had mushrooms growing out of the toilet wall, they found a release in Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis albums, and the transformative tones of the unconventional instruments that ended up being scattered all over this record. England wasn't a peaceful place during 1981; riots prevailed, the economy was in dire shape, and the rise of Thatcherism gained a stranglehold on the country. Fast-forward 30 years later and Odyshape is being released again, in much the same climate, acting like an acute reflection of all that hurt and the contrasting desire to block it out for a while.
That divide between the oblique and the real is what separates Odyshape from the ideas the Raincoats' post-punk peers were pushing toward, many of whom went one way or the other but rarely met in the middle. It's a very intimate recording, full of sounds they wisely never tried to recreate again, and vocal takes that are often inflected with a heart-crushing vulnerability. There's no easy category for this record to slip into; sure, you can sometimes hear hints of reggae, and at times there's a folky tinge to a few of the songs. The latter is particularly unusual in the post-punk scene, but makes sense here when you consider how these tracks were initially conceived, and the fact that Robert Wyatt (also a keen jazz fan and with a distinctly English folk-iness all of his own) was drafted in as a collaborator. It's telling that Kim Gordon was brought in to provide sleeve notes but doesn't say a single word about the album, and no demos, outtakes, or other ephemera are included. Despite living in an era where almost all music is available on tap, Odyshape still feels like a self-contained secret floating out there waiting to be uncovered.
