The Head on the Door

Ten songs in under forty minutes, and the record is lean: nothing is padded, and the longest piece is the closer, whose length is its point. In Between Days must open; it states the record’s pace and its subject, love outlived and the self suddenly older. Push needs its long instrumental opening, which is the song’s argument, a surge withheld and then released. Close to Me must sit at the centre of side two, and Sinking must end. The subtractive test bites twice. Screw is a sketch, an abrasive bass figure with little song on it, and could go with small loss; The Baby Screams restates side two’s anxious mode without turning it. Two of ten are permitted rather than compelled.

Score: 7.6 / 10

What can be stated is modest: a self caught between wanting and dreading closeness, in which love feels like ageing in In Between Days, like suffocation in Close to Me, with its breath and its cramped room, like a recurring dream of dying in Kyoto Song, like a sacrament abused in The Blood. Sinking turns the whole inward: a man watching himself go under, with no one to blame. Sound carries much of this and is credited fully: the bright tempo of In Between Days set against its regret shows how panic can wear a cheerful face. It is held well below the bar because most of it is mood, vivid but seldom stated as a condition that holds beyond the singer.

Score: 7.2 / 10

Elevation comes often and in several registers, though rarely at great height. In Between Days has a rush of exhilaration, the strum and the synthesiser line racing ahead of the voice. Push is the clearest arrival: two minutes of guitars building before the voice, then a release that lifts the whole side. A Night Like This reaches an anthemic height, and its saxophone solo lifts it further. Sinking reaches the other kind, a slow, dark gravity, and Kyoto Song an eerie suspension. Six Different Ways charms more than it rises, Close to Me is a marvel of smallness, and Screw and The Baby Screams have tension without transport. Five of ten rise, in moments, short of the long swells of Disintegration, whose Sublime stands at 9.1.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Myth is evoked in images and built nowhere. The title, a head at the door, is a figure of night terror, and the record keeps returning to that order of image: the dream of death in Kyoto Song, the drowning in Sinking. The Blood calls on the blood of Christ through a cheap fortified wine, the sacrament and the bottle in one image, and that is the strongest pattern on the record, given a moment’s real weight by the guitar’s Iberian colour. What holds the axis is construction: these figures flare and pass, no archetype organises a song, let alone the record, and the particulars, no place, no named person, no year, are too few for a pattern to take root in a life.

Score: 6.9 / 10

The inheritance is twofold: post-punk, and the band’s own manner, above all the dense, despairing records that ended with Pornography (1982). This record turns from that toward a bright eclecticism: acoustic pop, a Spanish guitar, a Japanese scale, a waltz, a saxophone, handclaps and breath. The turn is real, and the record is its fullest statement, a band able to do anything in four minutes and keep its unease. What holds the figure is stake and precedent. The turn had already been taken in public, by the singles of 1982 and 1983 gathered as Japanese Whispers and by the psychedelic clutter of The Top (1984). This record consolidates and clarifies it, a wager on a path proven a year or two before.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Change the form and the record loses part of what it knows. Its knowledge, one unease passing through many idioms, lives in the form of a cabinet of short songs in different manners; one long mood, as on the earlier records, could not say that dread wears many faces, cheerful ones among them. In single songs the form is the meaning: the withheld entry of Push, the cramped, breathing arrangement of Close to Me, the brisk major-key frame of In Between Days around its regret. The ends are placed with intent, but most of the inner songs could stand in another order, and the variety is more display than argument.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Forty-one years supply evidence, steady and mostly attached to two songs. In Between Days and Close to Me have been returned to continuously, and In Between Days has a second life: its brightness and its regret read differently at each age of the listener, which is a real yield. The record as a whole is returned to chiefly as the hinge of the band’s history, and some of that return is borrowed from Disintegration and the band’s standing. Close to Me’s percussion and Push’s guitars repay attention; elsewhere the arrangements give most of what they have at first, and the dream images do not reorganise much on return. Critical attention has been warm and recurrent, not intense.

Score: 7.3 / 10

The field is the rock and pop album of the mid 1980s. The intrinsic force is modest but real: the record showed that a band from post-punk’s darkest wing could write bright, eclectic, radio-length pop without giving up its unease, and it did so with craft. It does not reorganise what an album could do; its devices were in the common language of 1985 or the band’s own of the two years before. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record took the band to a wider, international audience and set the template of melodic, melancholy guitar pop that many later alternative bands followed. The named case is In Between Days, whose strummed, drum-driven shape is widely heard in later indie pop; much of the rest belongs to the band at large.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Survival is weighed over forty-one years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, and has been reissued. Presence is real and wide for two songs: In Between Days and Close to Me have been on the air and in the band’s sets for four decades. The album as a whole is present more narrowly: it has lived in the shadow of Disintegration and of the singles collections that carry its two hits, and that is charged. The fabric is lighter than much of 1985: acoustic guitars, piano and live drums age well, though the gated snare and some synthesiser sounds fix it to its year. It’s My Life, of the year before, carries a fabric charge as well and holds a tenth lower, at 8.4.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the recorded medium is strong and in places load-bearing. The arrangements are economical and exact: In Between Days’ interlocking strum, drum pattern and synthesiser line; Close to Me built almost from nothing, breath, claps and a toy-like riff, with every sound placed; Push’s layered guitars building over a steady drum part. Boris Williams’s drumming, light and precise, is the record’s engine, and Simon Gallup’s melodic bass gives Sinking and Screw their weight. Smith’s voice is more various than before, and the production is clean and spacious for its year. The limits are real: some keyboard sounds are thin, Screw is more effect than construction, the saxophone of A Night Like This sits a little apart, and the singing at speed can be more mannered than commanded.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: In Between Days, a fast, bright pop song, and Sinking, a slow, low descent. They obey one law at the level of voice and subject: the same man, the same fear of closeness and of time, in a fast tempo and a slow one, and the record moves from the one to the other with intent. The range is wide, flamenco guitar, Japanese scale, waltz, saxophone, abrasion, and the voice and the melodic habit of the songs bind most of it; this is not narrowness. But the law loosens in the excursions. Kyoto Song and The Blood obey their borrowed colours more than the record’s own physics, and Screw obeys mainly its bass. Temper holds the eclecticism together more than a single musical law.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no allowance for the form. Consciousness is held well: the self in dread, in desire, in self-disgust, in dream. The couple is held at close quarters in In Between Days, Six Different Ways and Close to Me. The sacred enters once, in The Blood, joined to drink and to abasement. Dream and night terror form a further order across Kyoto Song and the title’s image, and time, as ageing, is held in In Between Days. What holds the axis lowest is absence and closeness: no family, no labour, no city or state, no history, no natural order beyond the weather of mood. What is held lies in one voice and one inner room, and the sacred meets the couple only in passing.

Score: 6.4 / 10