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Spherical Objects, "Further Ellipses / No Man's Land"
Part two of Boutique's extensive reissue campaign of obscure Mancunian post-punk group Spherical Objects, this disc collects the band's last two albums, released in 1980 and 1981, showcasing Steve Solamar's restless search for an artistic resolution to his inner contradictions. While the music here is reliably interesting in an anthropological sense, it doesn't always work.
Further Ellipses was recorded with an entirely different personnel than the first two S.O. albums. By 1980, guitarist John Bisset-Smith quit the group to concentrate on his work in Grow Up, and the rest of the band followed suit, citing various other reasons. The first lineup of Spherical Objects had performed live only a few times, including one gig opening for Magazine, during which they were booed and spat on by an impatient audience. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that it was so easy for the band to move on to other projects. In their place, Solamar recruited guitarist Roger Blackburn (also from Grow Up), and session players drawn from the ranks of the Manchester Musicians' Collective. (It's worth noting that the MMC was an organization that Solamar actively promoted during his time in the music business, releasing a compilation LP called A Manchester Collection on Object that showcased the work of these young artists.)
Not least because of the fact that right around the time of its release, Solamar finally made the decision to become a woman, Further Ellipses has the feel of a transitional work. As an album, it is neither here nor there, and for much of the time, the session musicians seem like they are anywhere but present as they are playing. It's hard to escape the lackluster feeling of much of the record, and even virtuoso touches like the Spanish guitar on "The Final Part" or the saxophone solo on "Regular Condition" sound terribly corny with the benefit of hindsight; competent, but poorly conceived. Even Solamar's lyrics feel a bit wedged into the melodies here, unlike the first two records, where he was rarely off his game.
Even with its obvious flaws, there are some interesting moments here, mostly because Solamar's identity crisis has reached its zenith, and the tense, self-interrogating lyrics attest to this intense emotional state. On "Regular Condition," he speaks ironically about his gender dysphoria: "Don't worry, this is a regular condition/Thousands of people have to deal with this every day." On "The Root," he sounds like a man frantically searching for a solution to an unresolvable paradox: "I wish I could get to the root of the problem." On "Don't Worry About Me," Solamar sings: "Don't worry about me, I've got my therapy/The image in my mind's eye, it just frees me." Though all of these lyrics certainly could be expressing universal emotions, it seems unavoidable to relate this to Solamar's transgenderism, and this pervasive, unconscious theme succeeds in redeeming the album, which otherwise has not aged particularly well.
No Man's Land is Solamar's swansong, and the final album released on his own Object Music imprint. By now, the transgender theme has become explicit, and tracks such as "One Way Out" cannot be read any other way: "I get confused, too much doubt/Made up my mind, just one way out." On tracks such as "Terminal Romance," Solamar unceremoniously shifts his low vocal growl into a higher, feminine quaver, striving to achieve his gender transformation vocally. The music on No Man's Land is almost completely given over to Solamar's peculiar take on the blues, with many tracks retaining a basic 12-bar structure, and containing harmonica solos. This makes for a particularly odd end product, as Solamar's unmistakable Mancunian accent and punk sneer are utterly at odds with electric blues. Additionally, transgender identity issues are not the sort of problems usually tackled by blues musicians. These strange, off-putting juxtapositions gives the entire enterprise the feel of bizarre song-poems or outsider music, even though by this time Solamar and his fellow bandmates were very much "insiders."
Knowing Solamar's biography is pretty much essential to experiencing these last two albums by Spherical Objects. Without this context, the music might strike most listeners as deserving its obscurity. With the historical context provided by Louise Alderman's great liner notes, these albums can be experienced as artistic autobiography, a unique document of an artist poised on the edge of a drastic, life-changing decision. To the extent that art can provide us with a "forgery of the unconscious," as psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan claimed, Spherical Objects represents a fascinating case study.
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