PREVIEW: SOUL ASYLUM

SHINING THROUGH


Fame may have been a long time a-coming for SOUL ASYLUM but having achieved worldwide success with their last album, they look set to build on it with their latest release Let Your Dim Light Shine!


Natural Progression

After working for ten years honing their act, SOUL ASYLUM eventually achieved the 'overnight' success they so richly deserved with Grave Dancers Union. An album which spawned the huge hit single Runaway Train and cemented the band as media darlings the world over.

Following that success the band has re-emerged with Let Your Dim Light Shine, an album which is once again written in the main by frontman Dave Pirner and as such follows as a natural successor to Grave Dancers' Union. That is to say that it's an honest slab of great rock songs, played by people who love to play. In the main, Shine may sound a mellower record than Union, but track for track Shine comes out with the heavier content.

Light at the End of the Tunnel!

Produced by Butch Vig of Nirvana fame and Dave Pirner, Let Your Dim Light Shine features fourteen tracks, beginning with Misery, a folky tinged tune which winds up in a brain-snaring chorus, through to the rootsy rock of I Did My Best, which evokes memories of Creedence Clearwater Revival, among others.



Lyrically Pirner once again pulls no punches, training his sights, this time out, on such topics as misery, insecurity, disappointment, disillusionment, prostitutes, caged rats, and, er, two-headed presidents! As you can probbaly surmise, this ain't no ordinary sex, car, and beer band! But then Soul Asylum were always far better than that!

A New Beat!

There is a difference to the band in 1995, though, and that is that drummer Grant Young left the band to be replaced by Sterling Campbell. For the remaining three members, Pirner, Dan Murphy, and Karl Mueller, the split was the end of an era. However, the seeds of this split were laid during the Grave Dancers sessions when Campbell came in as a session player and proved himself to be a more than adequate replacement. Thus during the lengthy tour Young's position became increasingly scrutinized, the change becoming unavoidable. With the album already established in the charts, it secured advanced orders of over one million copies before it was released in America, and with the single Misery permanently on MTV, Soul Asylum are now turning their attentions to what they do best, and that is to play live!



Live and Kicking!

The last date of their Grave Dancers Union tour was in Osaka, Japan, on April 16th, 1994,  the day of Dave's birth, which was subsequently well celebrated. As you can deduce, these boys don't exactly hang around. Europe has already seen them play to ecstatic response at many of the large festivals such as Glastonbury, and in order to inject some excitement to their round of press interviews the band also played a selection of small club dates, most notably in Amsterdam and London.

The club environment is where the band plied their trade for years leading up to Grave Dancers success, and as such it is in this environment that you can actually hear, taste, breathe in and smell the new tracks. On the evidence of their recent London shows, these songs won't need any deodorant as they smell fine as they are!


Joe Mackett
Riff Raff
1995
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