The Waterboys - This Is The Sea (1985) (Vinyl)

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This Is the Sea is the third The Waterboys album, and the last of their “Big Music” albums. Considered by critics to be the finest album of their early rock-oriented sound, described as “epic” and “a defining moment”, it was the first Waterboys album to enter the United Kingdom charts, peaking at number 37. Steve Wickham makes his Waterboys recording debut playing violin on ‘The Pan Within’ and subsequently joined the band, appearing on the video of “The Whole of the Moon”. This Is the Sea is the last album with contributions from Karl Wallinger, who left the group to form his own band, World Party.

Mike Scott, the album’s principal songwriter and leader of The Waterboys, describes This Is the Sea as “the record on which I achieved all my youthful musical ambitions”, “the final, fully realised expression of the early Waterboys sound”, influenced by The Velvet Underground, Van Morrison‘s Astral Weeks, and Steve Reich. 
Regarding the end of the groups sound being tied to “The Big Music” after completing the album, Scott stated, “I finished with that kind of music to achieve whatever it was I was trying to achieve with that album.

Mike Scott has said words to the effect that this, the Waterboys’ third album, marked a culmination point for the band of the “big music” he’d been writing and they’d been performing up till then. Listening to it now, I can see that it would have been easy for him to go all U2 and chase the stadium-rock audience that was obviously out there waiting for so many artists in the mid-80’s. 
Of course, as we now know, he took, quite literally, a left turn towards the rootsy, folky music of Ireland, losing Karl Wallinger to form his own World Party in the process and if I’m being honest, losing me a bit too. 
I can’t question his artistic integrity with his urge for change, but I definitely like the band better doing this style of music.

That music is certainly committed, ambitious, angry and often loud. There’s a sense that Scott is standing on the shoulders of giants as I detect nods and winks to the likes of Dylan, Lennon, Van Morrison, Springsteen and even Miles Davis but the end result still sounds very individual and personal, which isn’t something you can say about too many of the Class of 1980 onwards I was alluding to earlier.

Consider the opening to the album, as it starts off with an extended fanfare of trumpets before it crashes into the pummelling attack of “Don’t Bang The Drum” (sidebar – this album contains a song called “Don’t Bang The Drum” which has the biggest drum-thwack to it this side of Max Weinberg and another called “Trumpets” which is sung to a saxophone with not a trumpet in sight. Go figure!). 
As well as seeking out big tunes, Scott is seeking out big themes if sometimes ambivalently, with big words and phrases to match and if he occasionally trips over his own verbosity in the process, it’s not for the want of trying.

Scott strives throughout for the poetry to match his music and when it works, it can be magnificent. At times, he seeks to evoke the spirits of Yeats and Joyce with the power of his words, most obviously in the classic “Whole Of The Moon” with its “close up – far away”, if he’ll forgive a “Father Ted” reference, couplets, the afore-mentioned storming “Don’t Bang The Drum”, and for me the album’s highlight, “Old England” where Scott eviscerates the present-day England of Thatcher and traces its gradual demise down the years. 
It’s set to a rumbling piano motif, accompanied by blaring trumpets and ironically chiding bells, sounding like the Lennon of “Remember” and “God” from the “Plastic Ono Band” album and a lyric which sounds like a U.K. as opposed to U.S. inspired “Give Me Some Truth”. 
It’s absolutely magnificent and if you listen closely you’ll hear the echo of that old empire song as a snippet of “There’ll Always Be An England” is hummed as if from some old forgotten battlefield before he returns to the attack. 
Almost its equal is the epic album-closer “This Is The Sea”, where all the various tributaries of Scott’s work to date come together in one majestic outpouring of epic hypnotic, Morrison-like expression.

Also striving for grandeur but for me just lacking greatness is “The Pan Within” which failed to convince or move me either musically or lyrically. “Spirit”, of which I believe a longer version exists, seems almost like the kind of brief linking track the Beatles might have used on their later albums and again doesn’t make that big impression on me. 
“Medicine Bow” is better, a short sharp rocker kicking off with a rush reminiscent of “Born To Run”, but “Be My Enemy” for all its vitriol, in truth is nothing more than a rewrite of “Tombstone Blues” That just leaves the set’s only real clinker where Scott’s lyrical pretensions collapse in a heap. 
I remember once watching a TV dramatisation of Madox Ford’s “Journey’s End” where one of the characters very loftily and very sillily described love as being “like literature” but Scott runs that empty inanity close with an awful lyric with bonehead Bono-like lines like “Your love is like trumpets” and which for good measure gets no help from an empty, shapeless piano and saxophone melody behind it.

Nevertheless, in a decade where we saw the adoption of denim waistcoats and air-punching anthems as band after band went for empty bombast often coupled with equally empty rhetoric, Scott’s Waterboys went down a truer path, making some truly great music on this fine, if occasionally inconsistent album. That the path proved to be a dead-end ultimately sending him into Celtic retreat is a pity but he and his band did at least leave this enduring 80’s monument which for me still stands as one of that much-maligned decade’s best.



Side A
A1.  Don’t Bang The Drum - 6:42
A2.  The Whole Of The Moon - 4:55
A3.  Spirit - 1:44
A4.  The Pan Within - 6:08

Side B
B1.  Medicine Bow - 2:44
B2.  Old England - 5:28
B3.  Be My Enemy - 4:15
B4.  Trumpets - 3:34
B5.  This Is The Sea - 6:26


The Waterboys

With:

Production credits
  • Mike Scott (tracks 1, 2 & 8)
  • Mike Scott & Mick Glossop (tracks 5, 6, 7 & 9)
  • Mike Scott, John Brand & Mick Glossop (track 4)
  • Mike Scott, Mick Glossop & Karl Wallinger (track 3)
  • Barry Clempson, Felix Kendall, Graham Dickson, John Brand, Keith Andrews, Mick Glossop, Nigel Gilroy - engineer
  • Lynn Goldsmith - front cover photography

Notes
Released: 1985
Format:  LP, Vinyl
Genre:  Alternative Rock, Folk Rock
Length:  42:16
Label:  Island Records


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