#effigy

Effigy’s music is fairly easy to parse with the kinds of subgenre savvy we possess with our digitally mediated relations to music history. We can navigate from an early Killing Joke single to a stream of Abrasive Wheels’ Black Leather Girl to the Smiths’ winningly low-grade video for “Hand in Glove” in seconds. Follow the algorithm and you might eventually end up watching bootlegged footage of a Christian Death gig during the Catastrophe Ballet period. Effigy located themselves somewhere amid those punk and post-punk sounds, but one imagines they fought a lot harder to hear and express the sounds they wanted to make. There are occasional traces of a goth sensibility (check out the refrain for “Reaching for the Light” and the riffs of “Wicca Man”), and the recording, originally self-released on cassette and sold at gigs by the band, has the sort of rawness we might associate with the anarcho-punk of the period — vocalist Birdy recalls Eve Libertine’s most stately turns.

The very obscurity of Burnt Offerings may increase its appeal, and for sure there’s a musicological relevance to pressing the record and putting the songs back into circulation. London, Leeds and Manchester get a lot of the attention in historical narratives of post-punk’s development, and deservedly so. But it’s also crucial to account for more localized events, like walking around a small city or market town in the early 1980s, spiked hair and layered black. Take note, from Effigy’s stand-out track “Ghosts”: “Her eyes were sunken and piercing / She was thin and so spare / She was concealed in a sombre scarf / Her robe was flowing and long…” It could be a goth girl on the high street or a revenant out of a Horace Walpole story. In any case, Effigy’s songs have been exhumed, and we know more about the shape of English music. We can dance to it, too — just don’t step on my sombre scarf, punk.