From The Lions Mouth

“Winning” is an unusually defiant word with which to begin an album so often described as dark. That contradiction is the key to From the Lions Mouth. The Sound’s second studio record has the urgent bass, austere keyboards and shadowed guitar associated with early-1980s post-punk, but its emotional character is not simple defeat. Adrian Borland’s songs repeatedly sound like attempts to push through pressure rather than surrender to it, giving the album a tension between bleak surroundings and stubborn momentum.

Recorded at Rockfield Studios in Wales and released in 1981, the album was produced by the band with Hugh Jones. Keyboardist Bi Marshall had left after the debut Jeopardy and was replaced by Max Mayers, while the production became smoother and more polished than on the first record. That clarity suits the music. It gives Graham Bailey’s bass and Mike Dudley’s drums real force, while Borland’s guitar can cut through the mix without turning everything into a wall of sound.

The single “Sense of Purpose (What Are We Going to Do)” makes the band’s central tension explicit even in its title: uncertainty converted into forward drive. “Winning” works similarly, using a rising, insistent arrangement to make resolve feel hard-earned. Elsewhere the record is more atmospheric, with Mayers’s keyboards widening the space around Borland’s voice. The songs rarely rely on decorative excess. Their power comes from the way a small number of parts lock together and keep pressing.

From the Lions Mouth was well received critically but did not bring the Sound the wider public success their admirers expected, and the band subsequently acquired a substantial cult reputation. Hearing the album outside that story is useful. It does not need the romance of an overlooked group to make its case. The playing is precise, the melodies are strong and the emotional stakes are clear. Even the cover, using Briton Rivière’s 1872 painting Daniel in the Lion’s Den, reinforces the sense of someone surrounded by threat yet refusing collapse. This is dark music with its eyes open.