v/a -soft as fire in the house of love

Oft overlooked and underrated, The House of Love headed a list of a select number of bands that had us feverishly returning to the independent record stores following a short period of vinyl buying abstinence borne out of a boredom of the 80’s and a general stagnating malaise and market engineering that haunted the music market as a whole. A special breed, the house of love slipstreamed between the generic settings, call it aloofly, in reality is was coolly, detached from easy pop parcelling, indelibly iced with a 60’s shading and appreciably torn in a graceful crystalline majesty, their shimmer toning craft emotionally close, naked and prone to turbulence often scratched beneath the surface gloss of love and it wasn’t always pretty, it stung like hell – see ‘blind’ and ‘the girl with the loneliest eyes’. Brazil’s persistently wonderful the blog that celebrates itself have seen fit to gather a collection of souls to pay homage to this wilfully uncelebrated ensemble in the shape of ‘soft as fire in the house of love’. As ever time constraints deny full investigation, if we remember, there’ll be further visits in the coming days. Alas no ‘the girl with the loneliest eyes’ cover, a shame, though instead a truly stirring rendition of ‘blind’ by appeal to heaven’ who hoist the original’s hurtful wide open vulnerability into pacier pastures and daub upon it what is by its close a jubilant sense of hymnal celebration. ‘Christine’ appears twice courtesy of citrus clouds and 93millionmilesfromthesun, the former staying pristinely faithful to the original’s shade adorning haloes whilst simultaneously drenching it in a lysergic lacing of vapour trailing surges while the latter endow the proceedings with all manner of bliss kissed psychedelicised hazes that to an extent anchor to a trip-a-phonic toning not unlike that of Ultra Vivid Scene in a head lock with John Moore’s Expressway. Elsewhere sneaking out of the Small Bear records house Postcode gouge ‘crush me’ in a shadowy psych prog refitting whose heavily set riff snarls and disconnecting waywardness would, had we not known, had us thinking that this retooling was the work of Bickers’ post HOL combo Levitation in cahoots with Richard Green’s Somatics. On a final note for this particular mention, we suggest you also seek out Dulce Sky’s take on ‘yer eyes’ one of the great lost killer cuts from the Chadwick et al canon, here seduced and set to the kind of spectral stateliness that admirers of the Church will be all too familiar with. http://theblogthatcelebratesitself.bandcamp.com/album/va-soft-as-fire-in-the-house-of-love