THE TRIFFIDS
Born Sandy Devotional
Domino
· Australian orch. pop classic reissued.
"Am I of the stuff of greatness, or am I just another of the thousands of ugly despicable beings in their bedrooms, clutching glasses of vodka?" asks David McComb (deceased 1999) in the liner notes. The answer, of course, is less important than the ability to ask the question. Twenty years before Wolf Parade and a decade before Divine Comedy, slightly bombastic guitar-driven orchestral pop found a home down under in the songs of The Triffids, an antipodean echo of the "big music" of The Waterboys and Echo & the Bunnymen. Struggling to find a musical identity separate from that of the contemporaneous Go-Betweens and Nick Cave, McComb tried to fuse the dark and gritty folk of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska with the romantic lushness of Brian Ferry and the contradictions inherent in this approach are pretty obvious in retrospect.
It’s hard to argue that Born Sandy Devotional should have done better than it did. The Triffids certainly got the critical acclaim they deserved at home and abroad, but it wasn’t until the followup single, "Bury Me Deep in Love," that McComb got his sound exactly right, while Nick Cave later scooped the underlying concept in his far more mature Boatman’s Call. Nonetheless, this reissue retains all the epic grandeur of an inspired failure, particularly in this deluxe package that almost doubles the original’s length with strong outtakes, and includes a booklet of McComb’s work notes.
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