Melody Maker - June 1984

THE WATERBOYS
A PAGAN PLACE
(Ensign)

This record triggers a massive, sweeping relief: that the Waterboys are here, complete, everything to hit us with. Huge heartbeat drums. Racing, flurrying guitars. Choirs of brass. This exquisite sax. And the songs and voice of Mike Scott.

Last year’s album hinted, but the single ‘The Big Music’ - here included - was the first real taste of this brilliance. Though there’s a nod to the past, the epic ballad ‘Red Army Blues’, this is a new Mike Scott. Talking big, as promised.

Immediately, ‘Not Made With Hands’ uncovers the secret, a knowledge of something huge, infinite: “She is in the shadows, the ocean and the sand/She is everywhere and no place, a church not made with hands/Not contained by man...”

What? But we all know, and when we discover it married to this sound, expressed so perfectly, that is when music defies reason, when hearts jump and throats tremble.

But Mike Scott’s greatest song (yet) is ‘Rags’: for its duration, the greatest song ever, perhaps the last ever, a continuous euphoric shiver.

Imagine a piercing guitar, possessed by a racing pulse, tearing towards an inevitable end. Imagine all the greatest brass sections ever pushing like on the Teardrops’ “Reward”, had that been an eternal being rather than a mortal human.

Eight songs. No discord, no fractured exposition of brutally new musical theory, worlds away from, say, Nick Cave or Black Flag. And so anyone (there will be plenty) reaching for supposed superlatives might suggest a Springsteen, a Dylan or, a Bunnymen.

Forget inaccurate understatement, though. Because when you’re sick and tired of all the shit and logic and tedious excuses in music, and when simultaneously and album like this embraces you and takes you where every sense is awakened and little else matters, then all it can be is innovative, magnificent and essential.

ROBIN GIBSON