"The Enchanted Net" by Edmund J. Gates from Frank G. Smedley's Mirth and Metre, 1855
I've never found an entirely satisfying album by the UK indie-pop band Trembling Blue Stars, but I refuse for some reason to believe that they're just a singles band. I decided that maybe the answer was Her Handwriting, the Trembling Blue Stars' debut album from 1996. Trembling Blue Stars was never meant to be an ongoing concern - indie-pop songwriter Bobby Wratten wanted to record a single solo album of songs about his relationship and breakup with Annemari Davies. The two had been in the seminal Field Mice together and then Northern Picture Library, so there was a lot of history there that Wratten wanted to get out of his system. And so a single sad-sack indie-pop record somehow turned into a ten-year string of sad-sack indie-pop records.
Her Handwriting isn't the kind of tortured breakup record that can be really hard to listen to. Wratten's penchant for atmospherics and wry humor lighten the mood somewhat, and it's hard to build oppressively dour songs on drum machine and jangly guitar. The bad news about Her Handwriting is that it doesn't have a home-run single like "I Still Feel the Bruise" or "The Ghost of an Unkissed Kiss". the song that is often touted as the Trembling Blue Stars' crowning achievement, "Abba on the Jukebox", is found here, but I have to admit that it doesn't do anything for me. At seven and a half minutes, it has two verses (no chorus) and a whole lot of ambient washes that go nowhere. I might like the 7-inch version of the song better, but I haven't heard it. Her Handwriting also has the common Wratten problem of songs being stretched to the five-minute mark just for the sake of it. This debut doesn't suffer from it as much as later albums, but there are plenty of songs here that could lose two minutes of repeated arpeggios or a really slow fade-out.
The good news about Her Handwriting is that it is a more consistent than any other Trembling Blue Stars record I've heard - it's much more like a Field Mice record in that way. There is none of the obvious filler that disrupts more recent releases. Once you get past a rough patch at the beginning - "Abba on the Jukebox" and the tracks before and after it - you have seven of the best songs Bobby Wratten has ever written. "Less Than Love" and "Do People Ever" are excellent acoustic ballads, while "Last Summertime's Obsession" and "Saffron, Beautiful and Brown-Eyed" have nice Eastern-tinged psych touches. The album closes with the piano-and-harmonica-driven "To Keep Your Heart Whole", a real heart-breaker with some pretty direct words about Wratten's breakup: "I thought it would be the easiest thing to keep your heart whole - To keep your eyes dry - To never drop your hand - To always hold it tight."
My favorite song on Her Handwriting might be "A London Story". It's a reminiscence of better times as a couple, leading to Wratten wishing he could recapture the feeling of that time and asking, "Has she never thought along those lines at all?" The jangly guitar and synths are joined by cello and drum-machine castanets on the choruses in a clever arrangement that shows why Bobby Wratten is considered one of the direct forebears of modern indie-pop. Maybe Trembling Blue Stars are more of a singles band than anything else, but Her Handwriting is worthwhile for being a cohesive set of great songs, especially since there is no Greatest Hits collection to be had for now.
"A London Story" by Trembling Blue Stars
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