The Chrysalids // Neither Love Nor Money
It is pleasant enough, but certainly nothing new to get too excited about. Nothing more than a Scott Walker tribute band.
Release Date: 6th August 2012
The Chrysalids – Neither Love Nor Money (Pronoia Records)
Type in the word bland and see what you find online, pleasant, mild, lacking in special interest, insipid and dull. This was the first word (bland) that came to mind when this first came on in the car as I did the daily grind around the roads of East Anglia and after many more listens, I am still thinking the same.
The Chrysalids were formed in Manchester in 1988 by One Thousand Violins lead singer, John Wood and Corsican multi instrumentalist Yves Altana at a time when every A&R man wanted to sign the next Stone Roses or Happy Mondays as the heady ‘Madchester’ music scene took off at an explosive pace.
Both founding members relocated to the City hoping that the then music scene would rub off on them. It didn’t!
These tracks despite a lot of major label interest in the band at the time, never got to be released back then, so here we are some twenty plus years on and at last the band get to see their music get a life.
‘Neither Love Nor Money’ has a really moody sixties feel to it, that at times is at least attempting to create a big dramatic, cinematic wall of sound, but yet it doesn’t even reach the heights that were achieved by a great underground band of a similar period, one that came so close to being really massive. One, My Life Story led by the charismatic Jake Shillingford. Now there was a band that had some quite brilliantly bold and epic songs.
Some of the tracks here were re-recorded in 2011 and frankly I wouldn’t have bothered as some things really are better left where they are. It should be a big romantic story for Wood and Altana, but I doubt very much that it will be.
It is pleasant enough, but certainly nothing new to get too excited about. Nothing more than a Scott Walker tribute band. It is I believe a collector’s item only for those die hard fans that loved them back then in the late eighties and still think even today that they should’ve have been the next thing.
I do not believe that this well deserved release will win them many new followers, if any? I hope that they prove me wrong as they deserve some respect for making it at last to a release date after all of these years.
Sadly for them, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time back then and sadly they still are, some twenty years on.
4/10 Steve Plunkett
