"No weak men in the books at home," Gang of Four famously sang of popular history's subliminal, suppressing biases, and the same adage appears to hold true for the steady stream of reissues and compilations that have documented and repackaged the 1978-84 post-punk era for a new generation of indie-rock and dance-music enthusiasts. Maybe it was the sheer volume of DIY-minded acts springing up at the time that relegated London outfit the Lines to the margins of an already marginalized movement. Despite nominally sound credentials-- Miles Copeland's mentorship, a 1980 Peel Session, personnel links to Alternative TV, shared bills with the Cure and Birthday Party-- the Lines have thus far been shut out of comprehensive compilations issued by the likes of Soul Jazz Records and Rough Trade Shops, and earned nary a mention in Simon Reynolds' exhaustive post-punk tome, Rip It Up and Start Again. But there's enough evidence on Memory Span-- an 18-track overview of the band's output between 1978 and 1982-- to suggest the Lines were undeserving victims of attrition. Perhaps their first obstacle to hipster acceptance was that, unlike their contemporaries in Wire and Gang of Four, the Lines had yet to completely sever their trad-rock roots before releasing their first single. The Lines' earliest recordings serve as a reminder that, for all its no-future provocation, punk's amateur aesthetic provided refuge for artists looking to recapture a not-so-distant past-- specifically, a bygone 1967 when bands like the Kinks, the Who and Pink Floyd would let their whimsy run wild before fossilizing into arena rock. While the breathy melody of 1978 debut single "White Night" makes frontman Rico Conning's debt to Ray Davies' plain, the lo-fi production, rickety drum beat and askew blues riff mark the Lines as a definite product of their era, and perhaps a more contemporary one, too: in ampheta-mod rave-ups like "Uneasy Affair", you can hear precursors to the Arctic Monkeys' scrappy pub-punk. But short of providing Alex Turner with potential cover-song material, Memory Span really justifies its existence once the focus shifts to 1980's Cool Snap! EP, where the Lines began to absorb post-punk's angular, polyrhythmic and dub-wise qualities without corrupting their melodic fortitude-- most effectively on the brilliantly twitchy "Background", a psychedelicized companion piece to the Cure's "10:15 Saturday Night". And yet even this progression provides scant set-up for the revelation that is "Nerve Pylon", on which the Lines shed themselves of their lo-fi limitations and go for the Big Music, with a snowglobe-scenic atmosphere and ascendant chorus that, in an alternate reality, would be getting regular VH1 Classic heavy rotation alongside the Icicle Works' "Whisper to a Scream (Birds Fly)". But if "Nerve Pylon" finds the Lines prepping for their close-up, the fact that it never came might explain why they spent the rest of their brief career recoiling from it. As Memory Span delves into the band's final 1981-82 singles, the delicate post-punk/paisley-pop balance that defined the band's prior releases topples over into extended dub ("Part II"), disco-punk ("House of Cracks") and proto acid-house ("Old House") workouts that, while providing illuminating displays of the Lines' increasingly tangential trajectory, sound timid next to more adventurous avant-dub experimentalists from the era like Pigbag and 23 Skidoo. (Tellingly, Conning would go onto a career in producing and engineering for clients including Wire and Depeche Mode.) So the fact that Memory Span closes with an abrupt reversion to winsome 1978 "White Night" B-side "Barbican"-- a last-call pint-raiser that points to the corrosive indie pop of the Clean-- feels less like a novel, full-circle conclusion than a necessary reassertion of where the Lines' real strengths lay.
Wavelength
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