Track Listing

1. Don't Sing
2. Cue Fanfare
3. Green Isaac
4. Here On The Eerie
5. Cruel
6. Couldn't Bear To Be Special
7. I Never Play Basketball Now
8. Ghost Town Blues
9. Elegance
10. Technique
11. Green Isaac II

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8924 in Music
• Released on: 2001-10-01
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .23 pounds

CD Description
Alongside debuts by the Smiths, Aztec Camera, Lloyd Cole, and others, Prefab Sprout's debut album, SWOON, announced a new, more guitar-based sound in British pop. In the case of this Newcastle, England, trio, that new sound features quirky, off-kilter acoustic-guitar-based songs equally beholden toElvis Costello, Cole Porter, and Hank Williams and unique, knotty lyrics offering an idiosyncratic, often obscure, new slant on classic subjects like death, sex, and politics. While singer/songwriter Paddy McAloon's later albums are increasingly smooth and sophisticated, SWOON is prickly yet inviting, with songs like "Here on the Eerie", the harmonica-tinged "Don't Sing", and the whirling "Technique" simultaneously deeply strange and instantly engaging. While McAloon's graceful piano ballad "Cruel" foreshadows the compositional clarity and refinement of later albums like JORDAN: THE COMEBACK,the rest of SWOON is the sound of a young band with almost more ideas than it knows what to do with.

Customer Reviews

Complex but all the more rewarding
This album is chock full of complex song structures that perhaps initially seem too clever by half. However, if you are prepared to put the effort in you are richly rewarded with an album that seems to come out of nowhere. What are the precedents? People make references to Steely Dan but I can't see it. This is erudite complex music for the head and the heart. Some years ago I had the good fortune to work briefly alongside this band and I opined that 'Swoon' was the best thing they had ever done. "Yes" said Martin "but how often do you listen to it"? At the time I thought he had a point - 'Steve McQueen' is the one you play.
Now 17 years later I realise I was right - 'Swoon' is genius the like of which rarely comes along. Take the opportunity, buy it and yes - you will always be coming back to play it.

the best or the worst?
I rushed out and bought this album on vinyl back in 1985 after hearing "Appetite" on MTV late one evening. (Yes, I know that's on Steve McQueen, but Swoon was the only Sprout album the record shop had in stock).

It soon became one of my favourite albums/music of all time (up there with Elvis Costello's Spike, Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Gentle Giant's Power and the Glory, Bartok string quartets and anything by Steely Dan - and, er, yes, Steve McQueen).

It's the one I play just as much if not more.

I read somewhere that Paddy hates it and would like to withdraw all copies or replace them with new recordings of the songs.

Paddy, if you're reading this, I knew you were a nutter but perhaps they should change your medication ;-).

Steve McQueen is the more "beautiful" and lavishly produced of the two and "When love breaks down" is possibly the greatest song since John Dowland's "I saw my lady weep" (along with "Couldn't bear to be special").

But:

for sheer originality, imagination, weirdness, insights that hurt, and, in spades, the grit that is sadly lacking from post-protest-songs sprout this is the one to go for.

I am a sprout completist, and do not regret buying any of the albums, despite some disappointments when it got too lush, but this one is the essential mr hyde to steve mcqueen's dr jekyll.

Tortuous but Charming
A murky but beautiful concoction, Swoon is really difficult to get to know, but well worth the effort. It appeared out of nowhere, sounding like an obsessive fragment of some lost tradition - apparently McAloon spent years in his bedroom polishing everything up way past boredom, and ended up with a record of microscopic shifts, changes and observational ticks which somehow wove together in a bizarre narrative.

The song structures are very odd, and much less predictable than his later poppier efforts. Instead of classic verse-chorus-verse they seem to bring you round in an ever-decreasing orbit, and you keep meeting familiar musical figures, then it disintegrates into a different shape. At first this is very irritating, but later takes on this magical charm. You don't so much listen to this album as navigate your way through it! Most songs have 'too many bits', but you get used to it.

McAloon's vocal mannerisms veer between the opposites of an almost excruciating lack of self-consciousness and painfully shy introspection. He sings like someone forcing a sound for his own scrutiny and never really lets rip naturally. Trying his best to emote freely - "bo, bo-bee" - he only traps himself with 6th Form intellect, Jodrell Bank, and "four good A'level passes". What else can you say about a song which hero-worships chess master Bobby Fischer?

A very masculine record, Swoon substitutes restless intellectualising for real emotion, but every now and then McAloon hits a bullseye. Men the world over will pause and sigh for a moment each time they hear "Cruel", an assembly of the most perfect couplets in songwriting "But I Don't know how to describe the modern rose, When I can't refer to her shape against her clothes". We've all been there!

An anthem for the middle classes, Swoon's biggest achievement was to make romance of the real lives that most people really had back then. From a time when the united youth against Thatcher disowned its middle class identity whilst Dad drove them back to Uni, Swoon was the secret favourite, today it sounds like a real classic.