Echo and the Bunnymen

An album that works end to end, Ocean Rain is Echo & the Bunnymen's moment in the sun. The grand, majestic strings, the band's obvious energy and Ian McCulloch's borderline nonsense lyrics mesh perfectly, creating an album with roots in Psychedelic/Baroque Pop and Post-Punk while maintaining its own identity. One of the finer records you could hope to track down.

Suspended somewhere 'twixt heaven and hell, Echo and the Bunnymen take an oddly
visceral pleasure in their spiritual limbo, evoking a vast, white, arctic expanse that's silent,
unbroken and pure -- but also deadly. The band's fourth full-length LP is too often a
monochromatic dirge of banal existential imagery cloaked around the mere skeleton of a
musical idea. Even the livelier songs -- e.g., "Silver," "My Kingdom" -- tend to beat... More >