Felt's first album, 1982's
Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty, is skeletal and mysterious, equally influenced by the intellectual New York City scene of the '70s and the gloomy psychedelia of the '60s while laying out in very clear terms the vision of the band's frontman, Lawrence. The songs are built around the dueling guitar interplay of Lawrence and the very skilled
Maurice Deebank, whose silvery filigrees dart around Lawrence's strums like flashes of baroque lightning. The two guitarists build intricate structures of sound that jangle like bells, cut like knives, and are buffered perfectly by Gary Ainge's muffled tom-toms and Nick Gilbert's simple basslines. The instrumentals that make up a chunk of the album are majestic and strange, with the guitars twinning together in epic cathedrals of sound, the drums thundering, and the bass wandering about below. They are lovely moments of atmosphere between the songs that feature Lawrence's pain-wrecked, buried-in-the-mix vocals. He's not the assured vocalist that he became later, but his barely audible vocals fit the subdued mood and cloudy melancholic drama just right. Most of the songs are structureless and loose, with the band repeating chords and parts while Lawrence mutters bitter poetry under his breath, but occasionally a clear melody escapes ("Cathedral") or the band works up a head of steam that Lawrence matches with some strong vocal work (the almost poppy "I Worship the Sun").
Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty is an auspicious debut that's very much a band effort, with each member pulling his weight and turning in exciting, expressive performances. The record showed
Felt standing pretty much alone as sonic innovators and as a band that could break one's heart with an arpeggio, a sad melody, or a well-turned phrase. ~ Tim Sendra