Popping down

Heavenly come in from the ether

by Charles Taylor

Listening to Operation Heavenly (K), the fifth -- and perhaps last -- album from the Oxford (England) pop band Heavenly, I thought of this passage from Hanif Kureishi's screenplay Sammy and Rosie Get Laid: "On Saturdays we like to walk along the towpath at Hammersmith and kiss and argue. Then we go to the bookshop and buy novels written by women . . . On Saturday nights, things really hot up. If we can get cheap seats, we go to a play at the Royal Court. But if there's nothing on that hasn't been well reviewed by the Guardian, we go to an Alternative Cabaret in Earl's Court in the hope of seeing our government abused. Or if we're really desperate for entertainment, we go to a seminar on semiotics at the ICA, which Rosie especially enjoys."

Heavenly aren't near as self-consciously boho-intellectual as Kureishi's characters. But the lovers who make their way through Heavenly's songs are just as preoccupied with dissecting their relationships. As a result they find themselves almost always in a state between a kiss and an argument.

Powered by the often-intertwined vocals of Amelia Fletcher and Cathy Rogers, Heavenly's sound takes its cue from the deceptive sweetness of their voices. The band have been described as "twee rock," a moniker that fits the wispiness of their second album, 1992's Le Jardin de Heavenly. But on the EP that followed, 1993's P.U.N.K. Girl, particularly the devastating date-rape song "Hearts and Crosses," it became clear that they were using the pop brightness of their sound as a contrast to what was happening in the lyrics. The result was often unnerving. On the first cut of last year's The Decline and Fall of Heavenly, Fletcher, in a slight, sing-songy voice, sang, "Cut my hair/And then I cut my skin/Hurt myself/Instead of hurting him."

I don't want to give the impression that Heavenly are looking down on pop or using its artifice as the springboard for mere gender politics. No outfit that doesn't love pop makes music this catchy. Operation Heavenly rocks harder and more confidently than anything they've done. The band work with pop music the way Truffaut described the way some filmmakers work with musicals: using the idealized perfection of the genre to sharpen the surrounding heartbreak.

Operation Heavenly plays like a pop fan's wish for what might result from scrambling genres, the singer/songwriter preoccupation with relationships, punk's linking of personal and public politics, and pop's undimmed promise of romance. The band process influences the way most of us listen to records, going from song to song, from performer to performer, being guided by rational and irrational connections, by sensibility rather than form. When they're really cooking, Heavenly simultaneously suggest the Slits, Abba, and Joni Mitchell. They're not about to opt for just one thing, anymore than the girl in "Trophy Girlfriend," of whom we're told, "She's kissing boys/And girls/Trying to decide which she prefers."

For the most part, Operation Heavenly is the band's most playful album. Joyfully cheesy organ lines and even cartoon sound effects career through the songs. The band tip their hat to Eurodisco for a cover of Serge Gainsbourg's "Nous ne sommes pas des anges." And there's a cheeky wit to the lyrics. On "Ben Sherman" (named for the button-down back-pleated shirts that have been a favorite of Brit-boy pop stars from the Small Faces to Oasis), a song about wanting your boyfriend to get in bed with you and not with his fantasies, Fletcher sings, "He's saving up to buy a new Ben Sherman/He's says he'd like to fuck Uma Thurman."

But the mood is quite different on "Pet Monkey," the album's closing track. What hovers over the song is the suicide this past spring of the band's drummer, Matthew Fletcher (Amelia's brother), after the album's completion. A duet sung by people who are in entirely different worlds, the song begins with a woman (Amelia sounding her sweetest) singing, "I just can't quite explain why it's not the same with you anymore," and then, a little later, "Something inside your brain trips a switch again/And you lose all hope," while the man she's singing to joins in lurching counterpoint. "Pet Monkey," that title so childishly affectionate and at odds with the deep sadness of the number, is a love song to someone who puts the people he loves through hell. And with the future of Heavenly uncertain, it might be their leavetaking. It's the only place on Operation Heavenly where the line from an earlier song, "Gravity is dragging me down," is remotely true. Whatever happens, Heavenly should know that if they haven't been the best pop band in the world the past six years, it isn't because they haven't tried.