Any Other City

Long live the singers who never intended to be singers; they're the ones that make you feel like there are still new ideas under the sun. Life Without Buildings were a short-lived, mathy art-rock band from Glasgow fronted by a painter/sometimes-spoken-word poet named Sue Tompkins, who ended up in a band almost by accident and sang like a kindergarten playground bully reciting her older sibling's copy of Horses from memory. No one since has sounded quite like Life Without Buildings, and to even try would miss the point. Their music valued invention, risk, wonder, imagination, and—perhaps above all other virtues—fun. And like very few bands, they were smart enough to walk away as soon as the fun stopped. "When the band began of course none of us really thought anyone would be interested, so there wasn't anything at stake," guitarist Robert Johnston recalled about a decade after their amicable break-up. "For Sue, I think it turned from a laugh into being a commitment she'd never signed up for." Lucky for us, though, that laugh was caught and forever immortalized on tape.

Released on Rough Trade's Tugboat imprint in 2001, Any Other City is Life Without Buildings' only proper record. (There's also the very good live album, Live at the Annandale, which was released in 2007, a few years after the band broke up.) It came out to mild hype but has grown to be a cult favorite in the years since, its reputation all the more storied and elusive because the CD went out of print and it has never been available on vinyl in the U.S. until now. That the band has yet to capitalize on the reunion show/deluxe-reissue trend keeps with the lack of careerist tendencies that defined its entire run. There's a story that, in 2001 at what would end up being the Strokes' first-ever headlining show in London, Life Without Buildings got bumped down to a supporting act at the last minute. Even if it's apocryphal, I suspect this tale gets repeated by fans so often because it cements LWB's underdog status—their indifference about jumping through the hoops that would have made them the Next Big Thing and the inability of most people to appreciate them in their time. Reviews of Any Other City were either breathless raves or pans that questioned the sanity of anyone who could listen to it in full. "I remember one [review] that said only mad people could like us," drummer Will Bradley said years later. "I was happy with that. Not long afterwards, we seemed to get a lot of guys coming to our gigs with fresh head wounds, like unstitched lobotomy scars."

The most distinct (or to those who prefer the safety of convention, the "maddest") part of Life Without Buildings' sound is Tompkins' singing, which lands somewhere between scatting, talking, and speaking in tongues. "No details, but I'm gonna persuade you!" she insists with electric charisma in the record's first seconds, and opening-line mission statements do not get much truer than that; all you'll want to do for the next 45 minutes is follow her blindly, even when you don't know where the hell she's headed. To Tompkins, language is bubblegum—something exhilaratingly sugary to chomp, crack, and stretch between her fingers. In that opening song, "P.S. Exclusive", she repeats the phrase "the right stuff" 44 times, but it's too dynamic to ever grow repetitive; it's almost like she's playing a game with herself to see all the different ways she can pronounce it.

Tompkins' lyrics often resemble collages. Familiar words are stammered, stuttered, and chopped up until they sound disorienting and strange—which is a sensibility that carries over to the visual art she's been making since she left the band. (A line from the program of one of her recent gallery shows could easily double as a description of a Life Without Buildings song: "Through her typed and spoken works she represents snatches of material gleaned from the everyday, distorting meaning by metering their arrangement and delivery.") She delights in found phrases, homophones, and the serendipity misunderstanding. In fan favorite "The Leanover", she chants "If I lose ya, if I lose ya, if I lose ya in the street" enough for it to start sounding like "if Illusion Street." Or something else entirely. On the song's entry on SongMeanings.net, there is a long comment written by someone who was once convinced that she was saying "a Fallujan street" and that the song was about the Iraq War. Although this theory has been debunked, I have no doubt that this poetic misunderstanding would delight Sue Tompkins.

For all its art-rock leanings, Any Other City never feels too self-indulgent. A lot of this has to do with the interplay between Tompkins' freewheeling style and the dependable (though wonderfully crooked) backbone provided by Johnston, Bradley, and bassist Chris Evans. Inspired by Pittsburgh math-rock heroes Don Caballero, Life Without Buildings were first an instrumental band before they convinced their art-school friend Tompkins to meld her spoken-word poetry with their antic, skittering sound. (Even the band itself is a kind of collage.) Sometimes the disconnect in their sensibilities is a little too wide (the tonal palette of "Young Offenders", the most overtly Don Caballero-esque, is a bit too dull for Tompkins' bold, primary-color exclamations), but more often it creates a novel and unique energy. One of the band's signature songs is "New Town", in which Johnston's quiet, steadily chugging riff and Bradley's muted beat suddenly explode alongside Tompkins' vocals in the chorus. "Looking in your eyes/ I'm looking in your eyes!" she shouts, as combative as she is jubilant, issuing these words like a challenge for everybody else to look, live, and love a little bit more emphatically.

The reissue mostly leaves the original record to speak for itself. The only extra included here is a 7" containing the more ramshackle original versions of "The Leanover" and "New Town", which are interesting because they let you hear Tompkins working out phrasings and pronunciations she'd sharpen on the record. When Any Other City came out, most people assumed her vocals were heavily improvised, but as the spot-on renditions replicated on Live at the Annandale Hotel proved, they're actually carefully metered and display an extraordinary sense of rhythm. Life Without Buildings were most impressive—and influential—in the way they balanced sheer technical skill with a sense of ecstatic playfulness, which is a sensibility carried on after them by bands like Ponytail, Perfect Pussy, Marnie Stern, Los Campesinos!, and more. Hopefully this reissue will add more names to that list.

It's hard to talk about Tompkins' vocals without using the word "childlike", which is too often an annoying cliché people use to infantilize female vocalists and refrain from taking them seriously. (Many of the 2001 pans of Any Other City are tainted with sexism; in one baffling comparison, an NME reviewer faulted Tompkins for not sounding like Whitney Houston.) Here, though, it's apt. This record is all about the wild wisdom of youth; here are four musicians who have managed to recreate that sense of wonder and invention and play that most people (and, let’s face it, bands) lose when they get older. “Look around!” Tompkins insists. “Just information in the leaves, in the leaves, in the leaves!” The phrasing is a little awkward, like an expression stammered out before you knew the proper rules of grammar, or a big word uttered before you knew how to pronounce it right. But who cares. If the sound doesn’t exist, she seems to be saying, invent it. Which is exactly what Life Without Buildings did.