Notes

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Size: 113 MB
Bitrate: 256
mp3
Ripped by: ChrisGoesRock
Artwork Included
Source: Japan SHM-CD Remaster

Juju is the fourth album by the British rock band Siouxsie & the Banshees. After a slightly electronic bent made on a few tracks of their last album, the Banshees returned to a more guitar-based sound for Juju, due to the now-official new Banshees guitarist, John McGeoch. Released by Polydor Records in 1981, this album also featured prominently, for the first time, the intricate percussion work of band member Budgie. Juju was remastered as a single-disc digipack in May 2006.

In 1995, Melody Maker placed "Juju" as "one of the most influential British albums of all time."

In 2007, The Guardian put Juju in its list of "1000 albums to hear before you die". Journalist Alexis Petridis wrote. "Perennial masters of brooding suspense, the Banshees honed their trademark aloof art-rock to its hardest and darkest pitch on Juju. With their musical alchemy at its peak and Siouxsie at her most imperious, pop marvels such as Spellbound and Arabian Knights were poised, peerless exercises in magic realism that you could dance to."

Morrissey stated to GQ in 2005 that Juju is to him the second best Siouxsie & the Banshees album, while Johnny Marr, of Morrissey's previous band The Smiths, stated on the BBC radio 2 in February 2008 that he rated guitarist McGeoch highly for his work on the first song on this album, "Spellbound".

One of the band's masterworks, Juju sees Siouxsie and the Banshees operating in a squalid wall of sound dominated by tribal drums, swirling and piercing guitars, and Siouxsie Sioux's fractured art-attack vocals. If not for John McGeoch's marvelous high-pitched guitars, here as reminiscent of Joy Division as his own work in Magazine, the album would rank as the band's most gothic release.

Siouxsie and company took things to an entirely new level of darkness on Juju, with the singer taking delight in sinister wordplay on the disturbing "Head Cut," creeping out listeners in the somewhat tongue-in-cheek "Halloween," and inspiring her bandmates to push their rhythmic witches brew to poisonous levels of toxicity. Album opener "Spellbound," one of the band's classics, ranks among their finest moments and bristles with storming energy. Siouxsie's mysterious voice emerges from dense guitar picking, Budgie lays into his drums as if calling soldiers to war, and things get more tense from there. "Into the Light" is perhaps the only track where a listener gets a breath of oxygen, as the remainder of the album screams claustrophobia, whether by creepy carnival waterfalls of guitar notes or Siouxsie's unsettling lyrics.

"Arabian Nights" at least offers a gorgeously melodic chorus, but after that the band performs a symphony of bizarre wailings and freaky imagery. As ominous as the cacophony is on its own, close attention to Siouxsie's nearly subliminal chants paints a scarier picture. A passage such as "I saw you...a huge smiling central face with eyes and lips cut out but smiling and eating lots of other lips" doesn't exactly brighten one's day. Siouxsie is full of such quips throughout the album's running time, but her delivery packs as much punk as her message. Her attack-the-world dynamic range on "Voodoo Dolly" predates and out-weirds Björk's similar styling years later. McGeoch, Budgie, and bassist Steven Severin deserve just as much credit for crafting an original sound that would inspire a diverse group of future bands from Ministry to Placebo. All the while, producer Nigel Gray maintains the sense that the album is an immediate, edgy performance unfolding right in front of the listener. The upfront intensity of Juju probably isn't matched anywhere else in the catalog of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Thanks to its killer singles, unrelenting force, and invigorating dynamics, Juju is a post-punk classic.

01."Spellbound" – 3:17
02."Into the Light" – 4:13
03."Arabian Knights" – 3:07
04."Halloween" – 3:42
05."Monitor" – 5:35
06."Night Shift" – 6:06
07."Sin in My Heart" – 3:38
08."Head Cut" – 4:24
09."Voodoo Dolly" – 7:04

Bonus tracks
Includes original track listing plus:
10."Spellbound" (12" Mix) (4:43)
11."Arabian Knights" (12" Vocoder Mix) (3:09)
12."Fireworks" (unreleased Nigel Gray Version) (4:15)