Pitchfork

We're all so much older now and everything has changed. For example, I voted for Reagan in a mock school election in 1980-- the same year Echo and the Bunnymen released their debut album, Crocodiles. As it turned out, I wasn't listening to Echo back then; my first exposure came via the beautiful single "Bring on the Dancing Horses," a song that played during a key moment in the John Hughes film "Pretty in Pink."

I finally figured out that the reason John Hughes' shit hit so close to home is that I was the exact age of the main characters in just about every one of his 80's movies. I was just about to turn 16 when "Sixteen Candles" went to theaters, and by the time "The Breakfast Club" hit the big screen I already had three miserable years of high school under my belt. So rather than being the time of my childhood, the 80's were when I became a man. Legally, anyway.

In any case, it wasn't until I entered adulthood and cast my first real, non-mock vote in a presidential election (Dukakis and Bensten in '88!) that I became intimately familiar with an Echo and the Bunnymen album. My roommate Eric, who covered our dorm room with Bauhaus and Depeche Mode posters to balance out my Pink Floyd laziness, had purchased their self-titled record. It came to be their last true album before they broke up. It had a big college radio hit called "Lips Like Sugar" that Eric liked to put on when we had parties. The sound of it still makes me feel drunk and awkward.

Of course, that album couldn't compare to their "greatest hits" compilation, Songs to Learn and Sing, which is still all the Echo anyone really needs, and which also happens to be the first vinyl record I bought after getting a turntable again in 1996 (the year I voted for Ralph Nader). Now, in 2000, I'm almost certainly not going to vote at all, but I am going to spend some time listening to the new Echo and the Bunnymen album. I never would have guessed it, but it's actually pretty decent.

Fittingly, Ian McCulloch and friends have mellowed considerably on What are You Going to Do with Your Life? The over-the-top, bass-driven rockers of yore have been replaced with an album of introspective, acoustic songs appropriate for these aging geezers. The title track nicely illustrates this stripped-down approach, with gentle guitar strums and some light brushwork on the drums providing the only backing for McCulloch's rich, resonant voice. He sounds more like Bono here than I remember, but the quality of his singing is perfect-- a weary voice transmitting from some abandoned studio of yesteryear.

The strings on tunes like "Rust" and "Fools Like Us" remind us that Echo were always one of the more classic rock-oriented of the new wave bands, and there's something vaguely comforting and cute about their overzealous reach. More startling are the scattered horn accents, like the stately trumpet that gives "When It Blows Over" and "Get in the Car" their charms; these songs sound like the AM radio-aping Jim O'Rourke's been into lately. (Strange, yes, but it works well in this context.) And when McCulloch brings it all back home with the melancholy piano tune, "History Chimes," we realize why we liked Echo in the first place: they wrote, and continue to write, good songs. These old guys get my vote for most surprising comeback of 1999.