I have to confess that there plenty of bands that I like, but despite liking them I still can’t name most (if any) if their members. This means sometimes I miss making connections between bands, as well as overlook interesting solo material. Wedding Hotel is one such case. Nikki Sudden was a founding member of Swell Maps and the Jacobites, while Rowland S. Howard was an original member of The Birthday Party. And if that isn’t a good enugh post-punk pedigree, I don’t know what is. So if I didn’t know Sudden and Howard’s names, how did Wedding Hotel find its way to me, you ask? Well, this is where knowing your local record store owner well pays off, because while I was flipping through the bins over at Mercer Island’s Volver Records owner John pulled this out of the New Arrivals and pressed it into my hands. “This is right up your alley. It’s Rowland Howard from The Birthday Party.” And after a quick spin on the store’s listening station, I realized that once again John was correct.
The title track “Wedding Hotel” is a gorgeous, languid lament, the rare moments of electric guitar stabbing through the acoustic and drums like needles to the heart. “Hello Wolf” continues with the same general feel, though the vocals here feel a bit sloppier which detracts from the overall beauty of the song. The B side’s “Girl Without a Name” brings the vocals back into focus, the electric guitar now a bit more active and not as cutting. The side’s other track is a the original take of “Wedding Hotel”, which to my ears seems to include some bass that is absent from the side A version. I think the bass-less performance is more powerful due to its sparseness, but the bass and the echo on Sudden’s voice does make for a more polished song. Wedding Hotel is drenched with melancholy and longing, and it’s wonderful.
There’s a tragic aspect to Wedding Hotel, too. Both Sudden and Howard died too soon. Sudden was found dead following a show in 2006, widely reported of a heart attack, at the age of 49. Howard passed four years later in 2010 at the age of 50 from liver cancer, also suffering from hepatitis C and cirrhosis. Perhaps even more tragic is another album the duo appeared on that came out the same year as Wedding Hotel, Jeremy Gluck’s I Knew Buffalo Bill. Five artists are mentioned on the cover of that album – Gluck “with” Sudden and Howard, and “featuring” Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Sudden’s brother Epic Soundtracks (aka Kevin Godfrey). Soundtracks died in 1997 at the age of 38, while Pierce (best known for being the frontman of Gun Club) passed that same year at the age of 37. Not appearing on the cover but credited pedal steel guitarist Neal Gauntlet also left us too soon at the age of 48.
Wedding Hotel never got a reissue, nor do any of the songs appear on the duo’s full-length from the same year, Kiss You Kidnapped Charabanc. “Wedding Hotel” is included on compilation CD from 1988, however, as well as a Nikki Sudden CD comp (that is also on Spotify) from 2013 called The Boy From Nowhere, Who Fell Out of the Sky.