The Lodge (band) - Smell of A Friend

The group’s only album - Smell of a Friend - was recorded in New York in 1988 (with overdubs added in Cambridge, UK). It was released by Island Records the same year. Kristoffer Blegvad handled most of the lead vocals, although those on the title track were split with Jakszyk. (Elsewhere, Greaves recited the words on "Old Man’s Mood", and Lisa Herman briefly joined the ensemble to contribute lead vocals and piano to "Swelling Valley" as well as backing vocals elsewhere on the album.) Additional musical backing was provided by Gary Windo (tenor saxophone), David Hofstra (double bass), percussionist Michael Blair, future smooth jazz star Chris Botti (trumpet), and backing singers Deborah Berg (Eye To Eye) and Jane Edwards.

Influenced by the time of its recording (and perhaps by Jakszyk’s more direct approach as a performer), the music of The Lodge was much more compact and straightforward than that of Henry Cow or Kew. Rhone., with a stronger emphasis on rock guitar riffs. Some pieces, such as “The Little Match Girl” were effectively straight-ahead rock songs (albeit with typically Blegvad-ian lyrical twists and word-games). Others, such as “Not All Fathers” and “Old Man’s Mood”, showed elements of tone poetry mixed in with African and art-rock rhythms, piano balladry, chants and chamber chorales. The Lisa Herman showcase, “Swelling Valley”, was a romantic piano-and-solo-voice performance which had more in common with an Aaron Copland American landscape piece than with the muscular art-rock songs elsewhere on the record.

The album’s most experimental aspect was in its approach to words. Several songs dealt with the topic of milk, explored from a symbolic or ritualistic perspective and in a manner which Blegvad referred to as a pursuit of its “occult subtext”. The title track and the songs “Solitary” and “Milk” used cut-up texts sourced from writings about milk by various writers (including philosopher Gaston Bachelard, dramatists Jacques Audiberti and Antonin Artaud), and classical scholar/mythologist Jane Ellen Harrison) which were arranged into “what seemed to be a congruent order” and then edited into lyrics. Blegvad also employed three “word chords” (multiple different words spoken simultaneously) to close “Old Man’s Mood”. He described these as “meta-phonemes, in which a story is told vertically instead of horizontally.”