Station For Imitation - Dark Corner

Hear The Track Here

Its a cast iron fact that as you get older you lose track of the things that stirred you in your youth. Me, I was shaken and stirred to within an inch of my life growing up through the 1960's (yep, THAT old) and the music that informed my early years still holds a resonance I find missing in a lot of todays music. The only place I find that resonance these days is right here on the internet. Let me clarify. There was a time when music connected with you and me - Mr, Miss, Mrs Joe Public. What's more it passed on lessons that a lot of us learned to put to work in our own lives so if the 1960's really was revolutionary, it was a revolution of the mind. As the artists of the time learnt more, they passed it back to us - their audience - in their music and lyrics.

Imagine that happening today? Not ferkin likely...

The only place where a musician has real immediate contact with his/her audience is right here, but that carries its own problem. As well as telling you how great you are, your average internet audience is just as likely to rip you a new butt and no one is more painfully aware of that than the now defunct Station For Imitation. All reviewers have had a hard time with this band AFAIK, even while we all seem to have a sneaking admiration for what they do. Not an easy listen by any means, and a very difficult thing to review too, especially if you don't necessarily see the point of it which was always one of my main problems with this artist. Being one of my earliest 'experimental' reviewees probably didn't help either because I've heard considerably wilder stuff since making SFI's acquaintance (around mid 2003) but listening to Dark Corner (released in 2005) I wonder how different things could have been.

See, I have reviewed shedloads of this artists material and in all that time NOT ONCE have they given me a track like this. Had they done that, then I might have adopted a whole different outlook. Why? Because Dark Corner is sublime, is why. Sure it's as rough as my grandma's left boot and as lo-fi as you can get but its as moody as my wife at 'that time' of month and thrilling in a way that I could never have imagined SFI to be. Why o why has it taken this long for this track to come to my attention? The thing that most defines it for me is because it's a song, although somewhat unconventional structurally and full of flubs and errors, has a power that reaches beyond all those things. Not sure who is doing the vocal honours here but its f*** you tone and lazy bastard delivery fit it like a glove. It reminds me slightly of the early Velvet Underground in sound and feel and I suppose that is one of the reasons I like it, but there's a definite power and fury to this track I have never heard from this quarter before.

Recommended. A flawed, extremely lo-fi, lo-rent sound but dammit, it has something...