Limp Bizkit - Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavoured Water (2000)

Outside of this album, I find it really difficult to get past the off-putting impression of Limp Bizkit as having been a bunch of jocks - essentially what happens when members of the football team start writing poetry because someone told them it was a great way to up one's pussy-getting average. I also have Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$, their debut album, and I've tried to listen to the thing but it only seems to reinforce the aforementioned off-putting impression of dudes emptying cans of beer over their own heads whilst bellowing awesome! Maybe I need to give it a few more spins. I don't know.

So what's different here? Why does this one sound so good?

I wasn't going to buy the thing. I looked at their pictures in Melody Maker and understood them to be nu-metal - which sounded like a pile of wank to me, sort of like metal apologising for itself. I'd encountered Slipknot fans in Southend-on-Sea with their ludicrous black flares and eyeliner, the most harshly commodified rebellion I had ever seen - boutique punk rock at its most comical. I wasn't going to buy the thing, but I was curious at DMX apparently having turned up on one track, and there was some sort of poorly defined association with Eminem; and then my girlfriend's little sister gave me a freebie because she was working at the record company.

I've never quite taken the view of rap metal being inherently worthless - although most of it clearly is - or that white guys can't rap, but Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavoured Water falters on both counts and the strength of the album is paradoxically that it works because of that. It isn't that Fred Durst couldn't rap, but he was never anything amazing in that department, and this whole thing would have sounded fucking ridiculous as a rap record with samples or whatever replacing the guitars. Durst's rhymes are mostly average and with that whiny upper register delivery he sounds like an eight-year old kid who just had his gameboy taken away from him, which itself accentuates the absurdity of all the homeboy schtick about Limp Bizkit being in da house and picking a fight with Trent Reznor for some innocuous comment or other; and it's because what is basically an American Walter the Softy crying into his ruined homework contrasts so starkly with the crushing riffs that we get a sound much greater than the sum of its parts. The beats are hard with a deep pensive bass and Wes Borland's guitar alternating between sharply gated walls of fuzz and something sounding surprisingly close to U2 without the bluster; all of which is pulled together as would be a hip-hop production yet without the end result sounding even like it's considered the possibility of calling itself rap. A few tweaks here and there and it could have turned out like one of those horrible whiny teenpunk bands, Green Day or Sum 41 or whatever, but the big difference is how that stuff parades its angst as a selling point, whilst all Durst's dirty laundry sounds so awkward and horribly personal - and with a bizarre mix of bragging and self-recrimination - it comes closer to the vengeful shit muttered under your breath when you're absolutely certain of no-one else being able to hear you. So despite everything, it's pretty intense stuff, like the volcanically impotent rage of the bullied kid who half feels that his muscular nemesis might even be right about some of that stuff. I should probably also point out that Durst sports a half-decent moody rock croon when he's actually singing.

That's why it works for me, and because the music is great.

Bernadette Cremin & Paul Mex - Guilty Fist (2015)

Just to get the customary objections out in the open, whilst it isn't strictly true that I hate poetry, I probably hate enough of it to render the assertion more or less accurate; although, to break it down a little further, the specific sort of thing which brings me out in hives is poetry which knows that it is poetry and which introduces itself as such with either a wry Stilgoe-esque smirk or the sort of studied glacial nonchalance that can only be perfected by many hours spent gazing either into a mirror or up its own bumhole. It's the teenager who has somehow managed to have seen it all before and who understands just how shocking his words must seem to the audience at the - ugh - poetry slam, enunciating cock like the word might be new to us. It's my former housemate Steve poeting about how fucking her is like escaping from a drowning helicopter, when we all know he never even got close, and that the unlucky lady in question had more sense than to let that passive-aggressive little misanthrope anywhere near her ha'penny.

On the other hand, I very much like Charles Bukowski, Billy Childish, Bill Lewis and others whose work I tend to think of just as writing, because that's what it is. So my criteria seems to rest upon how much the work is involved in the mythology of its own self-importance. In other words I like writing which just gets on with the communication without having to tell us what form it's going to take; and getting at last to the point, the writing of Bernadette Cremin, whoever she may be, very much belongs in this second category.

On the face of it, Guilty Fist is someone reading poetry to the accompaniment of suitably atmospheric music, except it's nothing so mannered as the description might suggest. Bernadette Cremin speaks her own words with the sort of gravity which demands you stop whatever you're doing and pay attention, and her testimony is spot on - clear and straight to the heart of the matter with chilling precision, neither showboating anything too ostentatiously shocking nor necessarily reducing everything to its lowest common denominator. She gets the balance exactly right, perfectly blending the narrative with the mood of the music, dispelling the suggestion of either being mere accompaniment; and this syncretism is further achieved when she slips into song and turns out to have a pretty decent bluesy voice.

Her subject matter seems to be highly personal and quite intense, so listening is a profoundly psychological experience. The music, mostly arranged by Mex, takes a downtempo direction with bluesy, jazzy, even occasionally pseudo-classical inflections. I'd say it reminds me a little of Portishead, except I never really liked them that much, and this is better. At times I'm reminded of In the Nursery when they were slapping marble columns on the covers of their records and pretending to be French, or maybe even Cranes, if anyone remembers them. Certainly there's a gothic element, gothic as in reading Mary Shelley with a glass of whine rather than dressing up like Nosferatu. Anyway, whatever it is, it's very powerful.

Treat yo'self!

Mudhoney - Superfuzz Bigmuff (1988)

The only reason for my failing to have nabbed this when it came out nearly thirty years ago that I've been able to come up with is that I was never a tool who based my record buying habits on whether or not a band was from Seattle and might thus be friends with that hunky Kurt with his dreamy blue eyes; plus it's not like I was short of stuff I wanted to buy that year. Mudhoney sounded like they might be the kind of thing I liked, not least because almost everything I played in the Dovers - the band of which I was a member at the time - was played through the same Electro-Harmonix pedal after which this was named, or at least after which the original six-track EP was named. This version also includes the preceding singles.

Still, better late than never seeing as this turned up in my usual store and there didn't seem like any good reason to not buy it. Nothing really stands out for the first couple of plays, but it quickly gains ground third or fourth time around. Mudhoney, as I now appreciate, were pretty much a slightly hairy garage punk band in the general vein of Iggy & the Stooges, wild but tuneful, and sounding very much like they'd be a blast live. The fact of their having been fans of Billy Childish isn't difficult to understand. In fact - if you'll pardon the supreme wankiness of such a digression, dear reader - they kind of remind me of the aforementioned Dovers, which is curious. I suppose we should have capitalised on having occasionally stood in the same room as Billy Childish, but never mind.

Providing they haven't turned into Supertramp in the intervening years without my knowing - which is possible given that I've only just realised they had albums other than this one - Mudhoney lacked the musical sophistication of Seattle favourites Tad, who I suppose might be characterised as a concrete mixer rendering expertly played Led Zeppelin covers; but on the other hand they sound a shitload more fun than Nirvana ever did, and I realise that view is probably mainly just me and no-one else. It's self-loathing and booze through a fuzz pedal cranked up far too loud, and yet you can sort of tell it wants you to have an air-punchingly good time; so there are none of those songs about only wanting cool people at their shows. I really wish I'd bought this at the time instead of that shitty Revolting Cocks record.

The Streets - A Grand Don't Come For Free (2004)

This is one of those albums where I've had to forcibly extricate myself from all the irritation generated by everyone else who liked it before I'm properly able to appreciate the thing. I didn't bother buying it at the time mainly due to having got a bit bored of Mike Skinner's face looming out at me from every other page of newspapers I probably shouldn't have bothered reading in the first place. The Grauniad in particular couldn't get enough of the fucker, the most excruciating case of which I seem to recall being a twenty page illustrated feature based around Mike explaining his philosophy whilst playing board games in some local pub with his parents - and no I haven't made that up; I expect Dynasty Crew were busy that day, or maybe they were just too scary and nobody ever compared Bare Face What to Squeeze or other civilised songsmiths specialising in bitter-sweet kitchen sink balladry. Whilst not having anything against Skinner personally, and having enjoyed some of the beats he recorded for others, and at least recognising him as a force for good by some description, I just couldn't get past the Streets being rap for people who don't like rap - Stephen H. Morris for example, who in his musical history of the Medway towns compares Kids Unique to the Streets, presumably because that's what he's heard on Jo Whiley sandwiched between tracks by the Kaiser Chiefs, Editors, and all those other unlistenable indie wankers. It's rap for people who don't like rap because of all those black people sexist rappers singing about drugs and guns, like they do.

The irony is, I suppose, that I'm not sure the Streets quite count as rap, at least not unless we're adding Ian Dury, Bernard Cribbins, and George Formby to the canon. It's certainly urban in so much as that the influence of rap, hip-hop, garage and the rest are obvious, but that isn't quite the same thing.

Skinner spins a decent story once we've got over that thing he does of self-consciously meting out one syllable per beat, like it's some kind of reading exercise during school activities week. It sounds like he's drawing attention to his own shortcomings so as to let us know he's not taking himself too seriously and he won't be twisting his fingers into funny shapes like those rappers do, at least not unless he needs to make air quotes around any of those spicy words which kids on the street are always using; but yeah - once we're over that hump, A Grand Don't Come for Free is a highly listenable album. It's also a concept album, although the story is difficult to follow - something about splitting up with his girlfriend, having a shit day, renewing the TV licence, then finding that the missing thousand pounds was down the back of the telly all along, although where it came from in the first place is never quite clear. As belching working class concept albums go, A Grand is nothing like so rounded or satisfying as Sham 69's That's Life - and yes, I really did just write that sentence - but has some wonderfully tender moments, notably Could Well Be In, Blinded By the Lights, and Dry Your Eyes, none of which do anything which would startle Paul McCartney. The beats, as you might expect, are great, seamlessly working soft soulful acoustics together with the buzzing and bleeps of grime and the like - never cluttered, always clear and with a very much human pulse. It's a very good album aspiring to be a great album, but never quite getting there because the narrative just isn't as compelling as it thinks it is, and Skinner's voice isn't sufficiently interesting to keep it all rolling along for the duration; and it's only a great rap album if it's the only one you've heard; which is still a thumbs up, roughly speaking.

Front 242 - 06:21:03:11 Up Evil / 05:22:09:12 Off (1993)

Dammit - I used to love me some Front 242. I bought 05:22:09:12 Off - the second of these paired albums - when it came out, despite the alarm bells which went off when I noticed them subject to full page advertisements in various Vertigo comics of the time. I bought 05:22:09:12 Off when it came out and never fully warmed to it, which is why I didn't bother buying the other one. It sounded like half a record, something incomplete, which I guess is exactly what it was as I now realise. These two were originally meant to be a double CD, two halves of the same thing, roughly speaking a concept album about good and evil...

I suppose I could leave the review at that.

Front 242 were the greatest thing ever, at least for a short time, at least for most of the period beginning with Official Version and concluding with Tyranny > For You <, providing you don't hang around too long in the general vicinity of Front by Front. Sadly, 1993 seems to be the point at which they lost sight of what made them great in the first place, the moment where those lesser artists upon whom they'd had such a massive influence started to make the better records. Richard 23 didn't have a whole lot to do with either of these albums so I assume his input was in some way crucial, even if it was just telling the other two when something was crap. This was the point at which they turned up in Melody Maker wearing tracksuits and baseball caps and with a rapper now in the band.

So I already had 05:22:09:12 Off on vinyl, but I saw the two CDs for ten bucks which seemed like a good buy, potentially. It turns out that the two discs actually feature slightly different line-ups of the crumbling band, so I suppose the division is justified. 06:21:03:11 Up Evil features collaborative work with members of Parade Ground, whom I vaguely recall as being one of a million EBM also-rans perpetually clogging up nineties compilation albums with grunting tracks about working, obeying, stomping, marching, wearing Doc Martens and being really strong. Consequently the album is mostly generic techno of the kind made by people who don't actually dance - overproduced, too much going on, and with an excess of reverb invoking the same mood as is featured on every other cunt's record. It misses the point of what made Front 242 so special, namely that it wasn't the repetition. Unlike all those other aviator-goggled clowns, Front 242 worked because their music was composed along lines closer to the classical and orchestral than to the traditionally dance-orientated. There's repetition, but beyond the repetition there'll be some new element entering the picture with almost every bar, often details occurring just once during the track; so whilst it's nevertheless all very much programmed, it's a highly individual approach to programming. By contrast 06:21:03:11 Up Evil is mostly just your bog standard thump thump thump thump pulse pulse pulse rumble rumble obey my commands, weaklings goth chord goth chord and back to thump thump thump... It lacks variety.

05:22:09:12 Off is marginally the better record with the grammatically dubious Serial Killers Don't Kill Their Girlfriend and Crushed recalling the majestic solemnity of Tyranny > For You <; except once you get past those two and dispense with the underwhelming rapping of Animal, you could still be listening to the first record. So we have two cracking tunes and the rest of it may as well be that scene from The Matrix where Samuel L. Jackson takes Neil to his underground kingdom of totally awesome tattooed crusties and they all listen to really loud rave music. There's also a Foetus remix of one of the tracks, I suppose, but the most that can be said about it is that it answers the question of what Front 242 would sound like if remixed by Foetus. This really didn't need to be two discs where a 12" of Serial Killers Don't Kill Their Girlfriend and Crushed would have done just as well.

MERZfunder (2016)

Kurt Schwitters was an artist associated with Dada and Surrealist art movements, but mainly Dada. His best known work mostly comprised collages of found objects - bus timetables, scraps of newspaper and so on - and of all the Dadaists, he seems a strong candidate for the one who best tapped into the appeal of random images and juxtapositions, the way our eyes might fixate on a particularly interesting pattern caused by damp on the ceiling. Certainly he seems to be the one whose work has remained an enduring influence on everyone from Billy Childish to Nurse With Wound; and it turns out that he lived in England for a while, which I didn't even realise. He lived in Cumbria, specifically the town of Ambleside, and whilst there he turned a local barn into art. This barn is now known as the Merz Barn and, as the name probably implies, MERZfunder is a compilation aimed at raising money so as to ensure that the thing is preserved for the benefit of future generations. I guess England probably doesn't really have money to spare right now, especially not for art, the province of the liberal media elite, homosexuals, and people who don't like football.

This seems worth supporting, I said to myself, even though I don't ordinarily do downloads. The Shend from the Cravats is on there, and it features 114 songs by all sorts, so I envisioned something in the vein of the Residents' Commercial Album or Morgan Fisher's Miniatures compilation. I realised I was mistaken in at least one respect when the thing took over an hour to download. As stated MERZfunder features 114 individual pieces of music, but of course being associated with no physical format, it's under no obligation to keep it snappy. There are a couple of tracks of at least twenty minutes duration, and plenty of around ten - all adding up to nearly eleven hours of music.

Jesus.

Needless to say, reviewing this as I might review the latest collection of Miley Cyrus hits could take years being as I've thus far only listened to the thing all the way through once - albeit over successive weeks, so I'll stick to just the facts embellished with comments where I feel qualified to offer them. Contributors I've heard of include the Astronauts, M.Nomized, Band of Holy Joy, the aforementioned Shend, Security, Hagar the Womb, Neil Campbell, Rapoon, and Nik Turner whom older boys and girls may remember as having had something to do with Hawkwind. I've actually only heard of Security because I used to be in a band with one of them, although I've also had intercourse with both the Shend and Neil Campbell - not sexual intercourse, obviously; so this is one of those reviews of something featuring blokes I know, but given that the contributor credits for this thing probably account for a decent percentage of the current human population, you probably know someone with a track on this collection too, dear reader, statistically speaking; and accordingly MERZfunder features every single style of music ever, more or less.

As you might expect, there's Dadaism aplenty in myriad forms - everything from the sound of marbles chucked at a dustbin into which someone is doing a poo, to peculiar songs written by aspiring Martians. There's punk, free jazz, reggae, trad jazz, easy listening, ambient, just plain strange, and everything in between. Numbers which have impressed me enough to mention them here include Woefully Tired by Pampered Fists, the Shend's Pixie Denial, In the Here and Now by Deviant Amps, and the Staggs track which forges techno with a sample of Jon Inman saying I'm free! I feel fairly confident that the other hundred tracks are probably also decent on the grounds that I don't recall skipping any during my first marathon month's worth of listening. Another year might pass before I've heard MERZfunder all the way through more than twice, but in the meantime the sheer scale and range of the thing becomes a quality in its own right, almost amounting to pins stuck in random lists of names by virtue of how long it will take for this thing to achieve familiarity. I'm sure Schwitters would have approved.

Get thineself one at yonder link.

Fat Joe - Jealous Ones Still Envy (2001)

This being a rap album, it has occurred to me that I might like to skip the usual preamble about middle class wankers, given how I always end up writing the same thing. It would be nice, but I'm still reeling from Monday's facebook encounter with one David Yeomans, an Australian gentleman with a home page dominated by the Sonnenrad and praise for President Trump. The Sonnenrad is a symbol which was very popular amongst high-ranking members of the Third Reich, and surprisingly Yeomans is not a fan of rap music.

Hip hop is not my thing though, I do not like the beats or the culture and environment it emerged from. To support it is to popularise ghetto culture and that is wrong. You cannot say it doesn't either, just remember the number of teenagers in Australia with gang bandannas and acting like "homies".

Furthermore:

Yep, but it is a very destructive one and a very vicious one. For the most anyway, I will not deny there are a small few who do not sing about rape, violence and drugs, but it is the minority, and for certain not the popular ones.

I'd bother to address some of this, but 1) the opinion of a person who knows nothing about the subject upon which they have chosen to opine isn't really worth taking seriously, and 2) neither are the views of anyone with a big fat Nazi sun wheel as the masthead of their facebook page, so screw you, Dave.

This was Joe's first album following the death of Big Pun, his partner in rhyme and best buddy - a bereavement which led to the hugely acrimonious bust up with Triple Seis and Cuban Link of Joe's Terror Squad. I never quite worked out what happened there, but it sounded like a series of stupid misunderstandings piled one on top of the other. Anyway, at the time I was surprised that he even had a new album, given the circumstances; but I suppose I shouldn't be because those circumstances are what shaped this record. There are lighter moments, but it really isn't a happy collection.

He is really singing a lot about rape, violence, and drugs, Dave.

Joe has often spoken about how, whilst Pun was lyrically a natural, he himself has always had to work at his art, but it doesn't really show here. He isn't in Pun's league in terms of the weirder crossword puzzle clues, but there's nothing shabby or obviously laboured about Joe's testimony and he makes up for shortcomings with a delivery which renders almost every other track a declaration of war - complete with the trumpets in a few cases. King of NY and My Lifestyle both attain face-punching levels of bellowed swagger you wouldn't ordinarily expect to hear outside an M.O.P. record; and then M.O.P themselves guest on Fight Club a couple of tracks later so that all gets a bit sweaty and no mistake.

I guess they must be his "homies", Dave.

Half of Jealous Ones Still Envy sounds like the work of a man who just had his best pal die, and who's going to keep on cracking skulls until the pain goes away - supported by dirty, steel-toecapped east coast beats of the kind which otherwise customarily fail to score in the pop hit chart parade, which nevertheless became one of our fat friend's specialities - namely smuggling that grimy, uncommercial shit right into the heart of clubland and getting everyone moving like it's Britney Spears. The other half of the album makes concessions and is arguably more musically populist, but somehow without it ever quite feeling that way. The bittersweet What's Luv?, for example, could almost be the theme from My Little Pony, and yet there's a rough edge keeping it in line with the rest if you listen close. Only the Latin-tinged It's OK really spoils the pattern with a little Ricky Martin dance, but Joe is of Latino heritage so I guess he has as much right to indulge as anyone - although it's the only point at which I noticed what a long album this is.

I spent roughly fifteen years listening to little else but rap music, and mostly the stuff where they sing about rape, violence and drugs; and with hindsight I've noticed how this period was also the one during which my life became pretty tough going in certain respects. It makes sense, because there's nothing like this kind of music when you feel as though you're living under siege conditions by one definition or another. It really gets you through the tough times. Coincidentally, since January the 20th, I've found myself listening to a lot more rap than has recently been the case, and I've a feeling I may be listening to little else over the next couple of years.