Album of the day (#4258): Secrets Of The Beehive

[albummaster]

Today's album of the day

Secrets Of The Beehive by David Sylvian (View album | Buy this album)

Year: 1987.
Country:
Overall rank: 1,172
Average rating: 80/100 (from 162 votes).

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Tracks:
1. September
2. The Boy With The Gun
3. Maria
4. Orpheus
5. The Devil's Own
6. When Poets Dreamed Of Angels
7. Mother And Child
8. Let The Happiness In
9. Waterfront

About album of the day: The BestEverAlbums.com album of the day is the album appearing most prominently in member charts in the previous 24 hours. If an album, or artist, has previously been selected within a x day period, the next highest album is picked instead (and so on) to ensure a bit of variety. A full history of album of the day can be viewed here.

[MadhattanJack]

There are a couple of things I remember about this one. When I first saw it in a record store I immediately assumed Sylvian had moved to the 4AD label because of the cover, but then I picked it up and and saw he was still on Virgin, which somehow led me to think that maybe Virgin had bought the entire 4AD label. At the time I would have considered that to be a really bad thing, so I didn't immediately buy it, at least partially for that reason. And it wasn't until much later that I learned that 4AD's in-house designer, the late-great Vaughan Oliver, didn't have an exclusive contract with 4AD and Sylvian had just asked him to do this particular cover as a one-off. (Eventually I bought the Vaughan Oliver coffee-table book and that pretty much explained everything, at least from his perspective.)

The other thing is that this album kind of disappointed me because he'd been sounding less and less like Japan with every album, and I was too rock-oriented at that age to appreciate that he was pioneering the whole "ambient vocal" genre and thereby becoming quite influential in his own right. Nevertheless... the previous two LP's had included one or two almost-rock numbers ("Red Guitar" on Brilliant Trees and "Silver Moon" on Gone To Earth), but this one only had "Orpheus," which barely qualified as "rock" at all. For the CD version (at least in the US) they added "Forbidden Colours," which was a little more upbeat, but I was still buying vinyl in 1987 so I didn't hear that song until years later.

Now that I'm older I can better appreciate records like this, but even now it's hard to shake those negative first impressions. And TBH, at times this album sounds like improvisational jazz or even "relaxation music," which I've never been a huge fan of to be honest. I might add that this album is really less of a solo LP than a collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, which I would normally see as a good thing, but I guess both of them had basically given up on "conventional" pop/rock music at that point.

Long story short, it's hard for me to square the fact that BEA currently ranks this as his best solo album — it really should be Gone To Earth, which is way, waaaay better but ranked #3 for some reason. I think it might actually be the album cover that makes people like it more, but I'll admit that's a pretty cynical attitude for me to have.