Laughing Stock / Mark Hollis

There are many ways for a band to follow up a hit. None of them is guaranteed to work, but some are more likely than others to flop, artistically or otherwise. This reissue of Talk Talk's final album, 1991's Laughing Stock, presented here without any distracting "bonuses" on immaculate vinyl, helps tells the story of Talk Talk's fraught, exhausting, confounding, brave, and ultimately brilliant final act. (There's also a postscript, in the form of frontman Mark Hollis' solo album, but we'll get to that.) Though you're more likely to describe Laughing Stock as lovely or otherworldly or even gentle, in its way it's as uncompromising as any apocalyptic noise record. And in a weird way it exists only because Talk Talk were at one time a hit-making pop band.

Formed in 1981, by 1986 Talk Talk were enjoying the biggest sales and best reviews of their short career, thanks to their third album, The Colour of Spring. Having started out as a moodier-than-average synth-pop act-- Duran Duran with the glitz and hedonism swapped out for nervous jitters and existential dread-- they'd transformed into the avant-garde edge of 1980s M.O.R. Even at their most acceptance-hungry, there'd always been something faintly left-of-center about Talk Talk, from Mark Hollis' haunted and word-swallowing singing to the musical hints that the band was more interested in 1970s prog than 80s dance-rock. On The Colour of Spring, the big, romantic ballads were still there, but they were strangely muted. They had an eerie jazz-like minimalism and attention to atmosphere that suggested an appreciation for Eno's ambient records.

This canny mix, stadium-friendly melodrama in an experimental but not too out-there package, paid greater commercial dividends than probably anyone would have guessed. With EMI's accounting department more than pleased, the label gave Talk Talk carte blanche to make any damned album they wished. The result was the band's fourth album, 1988's Spirit of Eden. Talk Talk took up this new freedom with a perverse relish, racking up countless hours and major dollars recording Spirit, a gorgeous but amorphous epic that proved that ruthless quiet could be just as difficult as ear-harassing volume. Talk Talk took this go-ahead from their label as their chance, possibly their last, to explore their truly envelope-pushing ideas, rather than the hints they'd offered on Spring.

By the time of Spirit, Talk Talk had fully rejected the sleek and kitschily futuristic music that first brought then to prominence. In its place, they crafted an immersive and ever-flowing style, alternately hushed and loud, lush and arid. It was a brand of unashamed art rock that was completely out of step with both the underground's unkempt roar and the manicured mainstream. Jazz became a more major component than ever, both in the overall style of playing, especially drummer Lee Harris' steady and cymbal-heavy swing, but also in the band's increasingly complex and usually improvised interaction. These improvisations were stitched together after the fact into what sound like carefully thought-out compositions that still somehow vibrate with the surprise of in-the-moment exploration. Which partly explains how "I Believe in You", Hollis' most comprehensible performance on an album where a lyric sheet is very necessary, can feel like a singer-songwriter ballad floating in and out of a swirl that evokes avant-classical at its least forbidding and electric jazz at its most beatific.

This genre-blurring fearlessness, along with the way Spirit and Laughing Stock bloom from extreme quiet to extreme loudness only to slowly recede again, is why these albums get tagged as precursors to post-rock, when no post-rock albums much resemble them in sound, construction, or especially ambition. Talk Talk use ideas from jazz and classical to build the subtlest gradations of drama. But despite the restraint, it's also not polite, musically or otherwise.

Hands were wrung on a corporate level over Spirit. Some old fans understandably balked, though new fans did gradually accumulate. An note of puzzlement could be read in the press notices, whether they offered praise or derision. The band decamped to Polydor and made an even more opaque fifth and final album, using much the same methodology as on Spirit and seeming to give even less of a shit about how it would all be received.

This is the oft-repeated and probably too-pat story that gave Talk Talk a second life as fame-spurning and journey-hardened underground icons. But it's also not hard to understand why the band broke up after Laughing Stock, or was simply broken. There's more going on in these six tracks than on Spirit, but the song structures are even stranger, built up from the tiniest musical gestures, clashing in mood from track to track, frequently more improvised-sounding than ever. The goal, assembling a coherent album from all this stuff, probably seemed quixotic to many of the contributors as it was being made. The recording process has long been described as one of the most arduous and prone to control freakitude ever. The band members were probably relieved to dissolve Talk Talk, move on to less demanding projects, or recede back into private life, once Laughing Stock was finished, despite the monumentality of what they finally made.

And it remains wholly singular, however many indie rock bands and experimental composers have genuflected toward it over the last 20 years. The half-dozen songs on Laughing Stock feel discrete, complete-unto-themselves, each one a little world that doesn't always seem to have much to do with the song that precedes or follows it. The underwater glide of "New Grass" is Talk Talk as a purely placid and lovely proposition, electric organ and lilting guitar endlessly circling around Harris' heartbeat-steady drumming, recalling the tranquility threatened with an edge of disquiet in Robert Wyatt's early solo work. "Ascension Day" remains the band's most chaotic and vicious song, like a small jazz combo being elbowed aside by a noise-rock band, with a climactic barrage of drumming that falls on your ears like an avalanche before the audible tape-splice cuts it dead. But even in this assault you can hear the monomaniacal care and craft that went into assembling and recording Laughing Stock, from the full-bodied throb of the upright bass to the little twitches and groans of horror-movie music lurking in the background on the verses. Laughing Stock was Talk Talk at their most demanding, and when listening to the spectral free jazz squeal of "Taphead", you understand why it was saddled for so many years with the "difficult" epithet.

The Laughing Stock reissue sounds amazing, as good as the album's ever sounded, in any format. Which is crucial, because on some level Talk Talk's later albums are all about sound. How startling, isolated moments of sound, or a formless wash of sound, can wring emotions out of listeners as powerfully as any conventional melody. How the ambient sound of the room in which an album was recorded can be used almost as instrument in itself, and how the studio can be used to create a sense of environment in the listener's mind that has nothing to do with recording booths and control decks. How far the sound of a rock song can be pared back and loosened up and still be "rock," or even still be "a song." And especially how sound can become all the more powerful when surrounded by silence, great gulfs of which are all over the later Talk Talk albums, especially Laughing Stock, captured here in a remarkable vinyl mastering job on Ba Da Bing's part.

Seven years after Laughing Stock, and seven years into the band's slow word-of-mouth rehabilitation from pretentious flop to shining example for independent artists, Mark Hollis returned with a completely unexpected solo album, which seemed to almost sneak out into the real world rather than be "released" with the usual promotional fanfare. Part of this feeling comes from Hollis' almost Salinger-grade rejection of celebrity, journalism, the industry, even making art for public consumption. (Talk Talk virtually disappeared as a public entity from Spirit onward, leaving the records to do most of the talking.) But it also comes from the startlingly private sound of Mark Hollis itself, like the kind of painful, personal document that's usually released only after the artist's death.

Where Laughing Stock creates multiple environments, Mark Hollis is intimate, almost shockingly so. Hollis often sings as if he's right up against your ear, at a volume designed to not wake spouses and small children. Listening, you often feel like you're eavesdropping on a musician working in the supposed seclusion of his home. Indeed, like few other records I know-- maybe Panda Bear's Young Prayer and Arthur Russell's World of Echo-- Mark Hollis creates the sensation that you're very much in the room where it was recorded.

But where those albums sounded very much like thrifty, one-man-band operations, Mark Hollis draws on a cast of musicians almost as large as Laughing Stock, and in their own self-consciously restricted way, these songs are as dramatic as anything on that album. Certainly they're as immersive, if only because you have to listen so closely, thanks to the lower-than-low-volume approach to recording and playing, in order to follow the even more classical-informed logic of their movement, whole songs carried by just an oblique dance of woodwinds or a long-decaying string melody. Over its eight minutes, "A Life (1895-1915)" plays like a novel whittled down to a haiku, tracing one WWI soldier's tragic arc from birth to early death on the battlefield, with Hollis' barely audible voice at the song's end communicating as much ache as any of his more full-throated performances. If the hermetic Laughing Stock was a scaling back of the wide-open grandeur of Spirit of Eden, then Mark Hollis is an even more radical reduction of scale.

So it's no surprise that Hollis has been publicly silent ever since, since silence always seems to be where the songs on Mark Hollis want to go, as if it took great effort to even decide to commit these particular sounds to tape. Perhaps Hollis just feels that he's said everything he had to say. Or perhaps he's still deliberating as to what, if anything, he's comfortable with releasing next. Unlike many reclusive musicians, though, you won't feel that Hollis absented himself before his overall project was completed. These albums still stand a good chance of alienating you, but if you find yourself vibrating sympathetically to them, there's enough mystery and beauty in them to sustain a lifetime's listening, whether Hollis or Talk Talk ever record another note.