Every Album I Love — 2. The Raincoats : The Raincoats

Every Album I Love is a series where I try to write about every album that I love, or die trying. Sometimes I’ll explain why I love them, sometimes I’ll tell the stories behind how I fell in love with them, sometimes I’ll do both. Most importantly, I hope you love them too.

It was Kurt and Courtney who first introduced me to The Raincoats, albeit not personally. Kurt was a huge fan of the band, wrote the sleevenotes for the re-release of their self titled first album and booked them as a support band for Nirvana when the band reformed in the nineties. Courtney’s band Hole, covered ‘The Void’ also from that same debut album.

As Nirvana were my favourite band in my early teens, and then Hole my favourite band in my mid teens, that meant ‘The Raincoats’ had the seal of approval from two of my musical heroes. It was unsurprising, therefore, that I decided to go out and buy that debut album, despite never having heard a note of it. When I did hear it, it was quite a shock.

Released in 1979, it shared with other music of the immediate post-punk era a lack of interest in rock and roll conventions and traditions. It could be said it ignored the history of rock and roll completely, starting again from year zero, wanting to build something completely new from scratch. It didn’t rely on 4/4 beats, or verse/chorus/verse structures. The prominence of the violin in the group’s sound was non-traditional, as was the fact there were no men in the group (all female bands were still pretty rare in the mid 90s when I was first listening to The Raincoats, let alone back in the 70s).

It was so different to any music I was listening to at that time that, to be honest, I just didn’t get it. I had nothing to hold on to, nothing to connect me to music I already loved, apart perhaps from a cover of Lola by The Kinks, and put the album away after a handful of listens, not expecting to return to it again.

Fast forward a decade or so, and I’m on a bus in Brighton and, on a whim, I decide to give it another try (my entire music collection being on my iPod, which certainly dates the moment). Suddenly it all made sense. The intertwining vocals, the changing time signatures, the intricate little melodies that had been there all along, I had just failed to notice them. Lola was no longer the only interesting song on the album, but the least interesting (although still a great deconstruction of a rock standard). The Raincoats was suddenly the only album I wanted to listen to, and I found new delights each time I did. No Looking and No Side to Fall In are particular favourites of mine, but the album is near perfect.

Another fifteen or so years on, and I still listen to The Raincoats on a regular basis, which is not true for all that many albums I owned in the 1990s. I can see why Kurt and Courtney were so keen to bring them to a wider audience. A love for The Raincoats is one you want to share, and if you meet someone who’s a fan you know there’s a good chance that they are one of your people (I don’t make new friends that easily, now that I’m a parent of young children with limited time on my hands, but one of the few I have made in recent years was because we started talking about the Raincoats t-shirt I was wearing to my kids playgroup).

The Raincoats shows that great music doesn’t always come easily. There are some records that you love immediately, and some that take work. As with people, there are albums you just don’t meet at the right time, but you could be right for you at another time. In this moment where almost all of the worlds music is available to us instantly, it is all too easy to dismiss a band or album (or person, frankly) too soon, to skip track, to swipe right. I am as guilty as anyone of this, but The Raincoats is a reminder that the greatest treasures can be right under your noses, and with a little patience, a little effort, those treasures can be uncovered.

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Originally published at http://markjwray.com on March 24, 2024.