David Gedge is the only original member of the recently re-formed Wedding Present, and he’s still got plenty of his old bile on the new Take Fountain (Manifesto): last year Gedge broke up with Sally Murrell, his longtime girlfriend and collaborator in the post-WP project Cinerama, and that’s stoked the fire under his already simmering cauldron of bitter rhetorical questions and nasty double entendres. (In 1991’s “Rotterdam,” for instance, he succinctly describes lusting after someone whose intelligence he doesn’t respect: “I wanted you but not the way you think.”) The new Weddoes record, their first since Saturnalia in 1996, employs all of Cinerama’s personnel (except Murrell, of course) and many of that band’s characteristic film-music gestures, like spaghetti-western horns (on “Interstate 5”) and lugubrious strings (“Perfect Blue”). Even the album title is a movie reference: “Take Fountain,” as in Fountain Avenue, was supposedly Bette Davis’s advice to aspiring actresses coming to Hollywood. I just wish Gedge would’ve brought back a little more of the cathartic passion from the Wedding Present of yore–though the lyrics on the new disc are still blistering, only a few tunes, like “Ringway to SeaTac” and “It’s for You,” have the buzzing guitars, aching melodies, and throbbing rhythms that used to propel them. I know this makes me a bad person, but I like Gedge better the more angry and jealous he gets–and this time around, the relatively levelheaded music just makes him sound resigned. With any luck, though, he’ll give his back catalog a good therapeutic workout onstage.
