The Wedding Present

The Wedding Present- “Tommy”



I first discovered the Wedding Present on the behest of a coworker at the record store I worked at in college who referred to them as “my favorite Velvet Underground band that isn’t the Velvet Underground”. He played me their John Peel BBC record and I was pretty intrigued by the overall sound- the guitars, though certainly redolent of Mssrs. Reed and Morrison, had a unique ringing quality to them that I hadn’t heard before. The rhythm guitar seemed to be strumming impossibly fast, and high up the neck, too. Even though the odd, froggy baritone vocals threw me off a bit, my interest was definitely piqued. Later that week I went to the competing used record store of the used record store that worked at (Mystery Train, our rivals, were in Amherst and we were in Northampton) and found a couple of CDs. Afraid of spending my money on non-edible items even then, I stood at the listening station and carefully went through them to figure out which one was better, or at least which one I was most compelled to steal from. That, of course, was “Tommy”, the other was “George Best”. Now a lot of people will tell you that “George Best” is vocalist/guitarist David Gedge’s masterpiece, and maybe it’s somehow a more competent work than “Tommy”, but for me, “Tommy” was the one that got my attention and held it.

To be fair, “Tommy” isn’t actually a real album; it’s a compilation of B-sides and other unreleased presumed offal from corpus Gedge & co.. However, it doesn’t really lack much in the way of cohesion- the production in particular is pretty consistent, despite the fact that the cuts were culled from several different sessions. And the production is, in my mind, far more appropriate for the material than their official album efforts like “George Best” and “Sea Monsters”. The drums are fantastic-sounding, all high and thin and replete with a washy reverb, emphasizing the cymbals and snare rather than the kick and toms, which, antithetically to Lou Reed’s normally correct suggestion that “cymbals kill guitars”, bring out the ringing, abrasive percussiveness of the guitar work even more. My favorite track by far, and probably my favorite Wedding Present song in general, is “Go Out And Get’em, Boy”, which opens the record very nicely with its chiming, up-the-neck guitar arpeggios and blasts into a wonderfully twisted vamp with some slightly off-key-signature bass and simply awesome rhythm/lead parts that recall Sterling Morrison playing fuzzy Afropop. The vocals don’t come in for at least a minute and a half, and though normally I’d consider that a bad thing, what precedes them is equally compelling. When they do kick in, we’re treated to Gedge’s quirky baritone singing a conversational song of ambition or avariciousness, or whatever comes first. This is a song that a band could base their whole career off of (and some have), it’s so rich and full of invention..

Their obvious Velvets influences aside, nothing really sounded like the Wedding Present in the mid 80s, if you’ll forgive that egregious trope, and thanks to the blandness of contemporary indie rock, the more adventurous young pop musicians out there are taking a page from Gedge’s book- Human Television is an example of an excellent young group doing so, as well as the aforementioned VoxTrot, to a much lesser degree. I’m glad of it, and so is Gedge, hopefully. Now I’m just waiting for the Dead Milkmen to make a comeback.