As someone whose first introduction to The Wedding Present was through their side project Cinerama it came as a major surprise when I stumbled across a Wedding Present album produced by Steve Albini. A collaboration between a very British indie band like The Wedding Present with the American grand duke of grunge production – a man who is rumoured to have spent most of the 80s listening to nothing but hardcore drumbeats on his walkman who fronted such seminally confrontational bands such as Big Black and Rapeman – seemed like an inconceivable combination.
Obviously I had to buy the album to see just how in hell this link up would work, and after buying it I fell in love with the record and realised just how perfect they really were for each other, neither The Wedding Present nor Albini’s production have ever sounded better than here. This album, for those unaware, was Seamonsters – and the chance to see what is one of my all time favourite records performed live in its entirety was something I just could not miss.
I’ve been to a few of these shows where bands play a key album in its entirety and as such am aware of the formulae: the band come on, perform the album from start to finish and then play a collection of other songs from their career. So it took me by surprise when The Wedding Present started playing songs I didn’t recognise – indeed I had to ask my mate whether these songs were from Seamonsters and I had just gone mad or whether they sounded totally different live. After it was confirmed that neither my sanity nor hearing was in any more doubt than they had been earlier in the day, I realised how little I really know about The Wedding Present’s other songs, and just how different the songs from Seamonsters are to the rest of their material. The savage intensity, raw brutality and grunge style buzz saw guitars I so admire from that album don’t seem to make an appearance in any of their other songs. Don’t get me wrong, there is enough guitar noise to make the twee label that the press collared the band with seem ridiculous – but there is nothing that grabs you by the throat and forces you to listen.
It was only after about twenty minutes or so when they started up Seamonsters that The Wedding Present became the band I love; full of intensity, anger and raw emotion. From the start of Dalliance right through to the final notes of Octopussy, The Wedding Present were enthralling, impossible to take your eyes off, as David Gedge sang and hollered every word as if his life depended on it. The guitars crunching and screaming proved that it wasn’t just Albini’s legendary engineering skills and attention to detail that brought these songs to life on record,and that these are songs that stand up to live performance and still over 20 years later are as vital, intense, gripping and important as they ever were. If Seamonsters had been made by a band from Seattle in 1991 it would be held up alongside Surfer Rosa, Nevermind and Bug as a key genre defining record that changed a generation.
Instead, as it was from a little indie band from Leeds who never quite fitted in to any notion of cool, it has been largely passed over by critics. If you’ve never heard the album, make sure you do -that is an order. You won’t regret it, trust me – nor will you regret seeing it performed live, though as this show proved to me, the rest of The Wedding Present’s songs are very different and require a lot more listening before they can ever find a place in my heart alongside Seamonsters. But to put it bluntly: The Wedding Present could have a back catalogue as awful as One Direction but thanks to Seamonsters they are a band who deserve your love, because for one album at least they made music that rivals anything that has been produced on either side of the Atlantic in the last twenty plus years.
Picture Anni Timms
