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THE CATHERINE WHEEL
Wishville (Chrysalis)
Reviewed by Jason Thornberry
No testicle-shriveling screams from the lead singer. Unlike his cousin, Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickenson, Rob has never needed to make the audience "scream for me, Long Beach!!!," or have a huge puppet-corpse/mascot fly over the crowd's head. In fact, when I saw Catherine Wheel in 1993 (back before they added "The" to the name, and when people used to say "yeah, that chick can rock!") they didn't even get to encore #3. Four songs into their set, the Claremont Po-Leece pulled the plug on the show because the stupid neighbors were complaining (it was on a tree-lined college campus, instead of a humid rock club). That's because that shite band Greta (yeah, I don't remember them either) played their "our-singer-wears-a-skirt-on-stage, even-though-he-has-a-penis, and-that-makes-what-we-do-somehow-valid" brand of diet-alternative-rock for over an hour and a half. Then some other crap, bearded support acts hogged about two hours worth of CWheel stage time, and shiiit! If I hadn't snuck in, I'd have been furious! Catherine Wheel were pushing their masterpiece Chrome, one of my all-time favorite albums, and four tunes was just fine by me. They were still the best band I had seen that year (and that's saying quite a bit, after I got convinced to sit through The Spin Doctors, whose vocalist was, and still might be, a transient). I actually nearly wrote Catherine Wheel off after the Happy Days"cd and that silly video of Dickinson getting tossed about in an airplane with Japanese stewardesses acting out perhaps a band-sanctioned fantasy by playing quasi air-guitar and looking hungry for more crack. The video seemed to be a letter from our boys, crying out "This is the first and last time our label's gonna throw Big Money at us, so fookin' buy the album!"
Momentarily a trio, and having a name that'll make death-metal kids go "heheheh...cool" when Rob explains what a Catherine Wheel really is, they bring out issue number four (not counting the Like Cats and Dogs odds and sods collection, or their numerous singles), and it finds The Catherine Wheel minus bass player David Hawes as they step into Y2K as almost a whole different group. Singer/guitarist Rob Dickinson, guitarist/vocalist Brian Futter, and even drummer Neil Sims each add bits of four-string low, but Benjamin Ellis has been happily employed since the release of this album. Their web-site group photo with them as a quartet again is the same as the one inside the cd tray on Wishville. Except they didn't crop Ellis out of it this time, so I guess he passed whatever constitutes 'hazing' in the band. Neil Sims employs a variety of tape loops as well, which are the foundation of opening track "Sparks Are Gonna Fly," but in the end, this album didn't really grab me the way their older cds did. I don't know if it's the fact that "guitar-based-alternative-rock" is facing extinction, hope that it's not that The Catherine Wheel have grown up and become a band my parents would now approve of.
The song "Idle Life" introduces a calm, nearly jazzy introspection that could be a welcome evolution. "Mad Dog" is similarly laid-back, and "Wishville" takes a momentary left turn away from the 'shoegazer' tag that has dogged the band since they brought out the She's My Friend EP in 1991, and decided to tour with the likes of Slowdive.
Tim Fiese-Green produced the album, and actually lent a hand in co-authoring five of the nine songs that made it onto Wishville. There are good and bad things about letting someone who "devises" your record have any say in what really goes where. Case in point: "What We Want To Believe In" harkens back to the "Black Metallic" era of the band, as does "Ballad of a Running Man;" however, "Gasoline" would have probably served the group better had it remained a demo. It just comes off a little rudimentary, half-baked, and below a band I've always considered too clever for such an obvious move. Sample chorus: "I love Gasoline!" That thought-provoking lyric, added with the exclamatory prison rape squeals midway through the song make it my least favorite tune ever penned by them. I enjoyed much of Wishville's songs more which were, like standout "Lifeline," bashed out by the band themselves. "All Of That" was actually recorded at a home studio by Dickinson, away from any potential influence from Friese-Green. Sara Lee adds a nice vocal touch with her melodies on "What We Want to Believe In," and the sequenced-sounding percussion makes this an engaging listen throughout, but on the whole, I'd have to say that it just didn't grab me the way Ferment did. Or even 1997's Adam and Eve. Perhaps it's just become a J-O-B to The Catherine Wheel. Pity that.
I still have to say that even if the Great Yarmouth-based band never really achieve true 'huge-ness,' they'll always be one of my favorite bands. I won't listen to Wishville that often, most likely, but it may grow on me. In which case, I'll re-appraise my observations. Even so, ten years since their formation, they still can make Greta seem silly and self-indulgent.
8/10
© 2002 - Jason Thornberry