Depeche Mode - Spirits in the Forest (2019)

'If there was a movie about them,' observed my friend Nick, 'they'd be running round the corner to escape the police in Basildon, and then be in a massive stadium with heroin addictions in the next frame.'

Surprisingly, there is a movie about them, and although Nick was off the mark where the plot is concerned, I nevertheless feel his comment expresses some deeper truth fairly well.

I recall Depeche Mode from way back, at least since they first started turning up in the pages of Sounds.

Ollie who worked in Discovery Records in Stratford referred to them as Depeche Toad, which was amusing; and Photographic on the Some Bizarre Album seemed like a fairly decent impersonation of Cabaret Voltaire, albeit without any of the funny noises which made Cabaret Voltaire interesting; and yet somehow there was a pervasive wholesome quality about them, something guileless, something a bit youth club with synths set up on the ping-pong table. This quality, whatever it was, lingered, rendering subsequent transgressions inherently comical, deeds effortfully undertaken as part of a futile effort to shake off the image, like kids with their first ciggies, lighting the wrong end and taking theatrical drags as though cameras might be running; and then there was the time they found those special sex clothes in that box at the back of dad's wardrobe, and then with the tatts and the arm candy...

I'm sure it was all real, but nevertheless, that's how it looked to me, and how it still looks despite everything. Even a few legitimately great songs - Two Minute Warning, Never Let Me Down Again, Enjoy the Silence, and probably a couple of others - can't quite shift the stench of pop, crisps, and jumpers knitted by your nan, which I propose even whilst holding that Dave Gahan is blessed with a genuinely powerful voice. I'm not even sure what it is - the ballsachingly appalling lyrics, Martin Gore's hair - which doubtless ensured that his dinner money never once saw the inside of the school canteen cash register, the plinky-plonky quality of certain songs, or something else, some emergent property resulting from a combination of indelibly wholesome factors.

Still, it was a free ticket for a film showing for one night only, so I wasn't going to say no, despite my reservations. I anticipated a documentary accounting for their transformation from Herman's Hermits into SPK and then ultimately into U2, but thankfully it was better than that. Spirits in the Forest has six Depeche Mode fans from across the globe tell their stories, interspersed with footage of a predictably massive concert in Berlin. It works because the fans, or at least these fans, are more interesting than the band, so they may as well be Lieutenant Pigeon obsessives for all the difference it makes; and I particularly enjoyed the story of DMK, a tribute act featuring a father and his two kids playing Depeche Mode covers on toy instruments. Actually, I think I liked them more than I liked the main feature.

The live footage, which punctuates the progress of our six fans as we follow them to the gig, fails to shed any light on the mystery of Depeche Mode, at least for me. What subtle qualities their less comical songs may have is lost once blasted out on a scale more suited to some Laibach parody, and Martin Gore standing around like a lemon with a guitar fails to make much difference to anything, and then we come to Dave Gahan, now a troubling hybrid of David Niven and John Waters whose face is too big for his head. His arms and legs are similarly too long for his body, which his weird Jagger impersonations only accentuate meaning that he now vaguely resembles one of those things from Ice Age. I don't understand why you would go to see this band, or why you would go to see them in a stadium the size of the Grand Canyon; but then I found it nevertheless watchable with a couple of decent tunes, despite it being Depeche Mode, so if that's your bag, I've no doubt that Spirits in the Forest must seem amazing.

Ice Cube - Raw Footage (2008)

The odds seemed stacked against this disc, the eighth solo album of a career spanning two decades by someone increasingly better known as a film maker and arguably creator of the hood chuckles genre - a rapper who had seemingly had his day; but not quite, at least not on close inspection. The last three albums had been less than amazing, but none were without their high points and whatever their problems may have been, it was never Cube's delivery. Surprisingly, Raw Footage is either his greatest single work, or just the one which made the most sense to me.

Admittedly, I picked this up on what was probably the equivalent of the first day of the rest of my life, new job in a different city, and a future which would either be disastrous or interesting but would at least be an alternative to rotting away in south-east London; and Raw Footage cemented itself immediately into my head, seemingly capturing the moment - which probably doesn't make any sense given that amongst all which Cube had on his mind when recording this album, moving back to his mum's house in Coventry and getting an agency job at Parcel Force doesn't seem to have figured highly. I guess it felt like a soundtrack for a future which once again held possibilities.

Ice Cube has forever moved with the times, musically speaking. It hasn't always quite worked, as on the War and Peace discs which have a bit of an also ran quality in relation to whatever else was going on at the end of the nineties. Raw Footage on the other hand sounded like it was about six months ahead of the curve with a sparse, spacious, yet luxuriant production of deep, deep bass and digital crunch, phone pings, detuned voice, yet more waveforms copied and pasted from place to place on a screen, and yet with Marvin Gaye levels of feeling. It's an album by an old guy, one happy to be older, wiser, and still very much disinclined to put up with any of your shit. Ice Cube's strength, aside from the obvious lyrical gymnastics, has forever been maintaining a fine balance between blasting your head off with the raw stuff whilst delivering one painful truth after another - black consciousness backpack with no qualms about punching you in the face, if you like; or regardless of whether you like it or not.

I Got My Locs On, Cold Places and Jack in the Box are as powerful, terrifying, chilling, and joyous as any of the man's greats, and this is one of those rare albums which is good to the last drop, an album which makes you want to rob a bank.

I didn't, by the way.

Nocturnal Emissions - Beyond Logic, Beyond Belief (1990)

I never quite got to the bottom of what this one was about beyond that it was clearly about something. It initially seemed to be some kind of celebration, an acknowledgement of Nocturnal Emissions first decade - the ten year anniversary of the release of Tissue of Lies without necessarily representing an extension of the same, at least not so far as I was ever able to tell. The sleeve claims the material to have been recorded between 1980 and 1990, which I assume refers to sound sources more than it does to any notion of previously unreleased tracks, so perhaps this is Nigel engaging in recycling, or at least making collages from his own back catalogue; which would account for the sample of Caroline K operating a hand drill - which I'd swear I've heard elsewhere, although not on Tissue of Lies at least.

Internet sources refer to some light having been shed in the first issue of Network News, which it isn't because I've checked. In fact I've checked the first three or four issues, none of which seem to contain this observation from our Nigel:

What's important in this culture we're now cultivating is we can gain an understanding of the world which speaks to us directly without the filters of belief which go within a spirit system, without the filters of logic that go with a science system.

So, if that's from the first issue of Network News, then I guess it isn't the one published in my reality; which may actually be approaching the elusive point, at last.

The last decade of the twentieth century had just begun, and Sterile Records was recently reborn as Earthly Delights, sort of its thematic opposite given the preoccupation with fertility and growth, but still releasing art which channelled rather than described its world - not quite refocussing so much as working from a much broader, even cosmic palette rather than limiting itself to the human cultural sphere of society ruined by industry. This was the point at which Nigel noticed how his earlier works had been changing hands for silly money and so decided that some of this money might be better spent in support of living art rather than historical documents, so this was issued in an edition of just 250 copies for what seemed a lot at the time, being more than the customary tenner, but I'm fucking glad I had the foresight to buy one. One bloke on the internet suggested this might even be Nocturnal Emissions' greatest work, and even if it isn't, it's easy to see why someone might have made such a claim.

Beyond Logic, Beyond Belief is well into what has been poorly characterised as the ambient years, but isn't really anything of the sort. It's atmospheric, evocative, and powerfully emotional without quite doing anything musical in the traditional sense, possibly excepting the oddly bluesy Memphis. Aside from the obvious sampling, it's not even particularly electronic. At the risk of turning into Paul Morley, and in light of the few clues afforded by titles, sound, and the above quotation, I'd say this is Nocturnal Emissions scrabbling at a description of reality analogous to Plato's ideal forms, the thing in itself, whatever the hell is there before we muss it up with sentences such as this one, or any language for that matter; and that's what the best art is all about. If I were able to describe it, it wouldn't need to exist.

Genuinely magnificent.

Stephen Mallinder - Um Dada (2019)

I wasn't really expecting a whole lot of this one, having been somewhat inundated with newly unearthed Cabaret Voltaire material of late; but bloody hell - it may even be the best thing he's ever had a hand in. His previous solo album was Pow Wow, a couple of decades back which, although it sounds so different in terms of instrumentation as to have been recorded by someone else, somehow feels similar. Actually that's probably a redundant observation given that Um Dada similarly shares common ground with the very best Cabaret Voltaire material in being extended grooves rather than songs; and while there's always been a funky element, this time it verges on nu disco. Benge is involved in some capacity, which may - I suppose - be significant in how this relates to the last couple of Wrangler releases with that same popping analogue bop underpinning the beats like nothing so much as a distant descendant of Jack the Groove - which isn't a comparison I make lightly.

Um Dada is seven tracks of electric disco-house perfection and stands as contender for album of the year, possibly the century, and possibly also Mallinder's entire back catalogue. I'm told Cabaret Voltaire still exist as Richard H. Kirk's solo thing due to his having taken a bit of a funny turn in recent times; so I don't know what he's been up to in Mallinder's absence, but it would have to be pretty fucking skippy to come close to this one.

I'm not sure I've heard a stack of bleeping, blooping machines ever sound quite so human or organic as what we have here.

Dickies - Dawn of the Dickies (1979)

I find it strange to think that I bought this, one of my all-time favourite albums, almost by accident. Pete had just discovered his new bestest band ever, probably Echo & the Bunnymen or something similarly floppy, and so he was selling his recently purchased Dawn of the Dickies. I wasn't really that much of a fan, but Nights in White Satin was okay and I figured I probably needed some representative Dickies material in my collection, and Pete only wanted three quid which would save having to pay more at some later date. I coughed up the money, took the album home, salivated over the blue vinyl, played it once or twice, and then dutifully added it to the collection between Devo and Fad Gadget. I only truly realised what I'd bought a couple of years later when I played it out of curiosity, having noticed that, excepting the singles, I couldn't remember what it sounded like.

I don't recall seeing the Dickies noted as anything special in any of the four million true history of punk things I've read, and they don't seem to be remembered as anything much more than having existed and briefly flogging a shitload of novelty records to people like me, or at least like Pete. Whenever Kenny Everett or some other late seventies comedian took the piss out of punk, ignoring the bright green comedy mohican and the hilarious safety pin through the head gag, it usually sounded like the Dickies - ninety miles an hour, whiny, and with a shitload of jumping around. In more earnest circles, their stock seemed forever undervalued through being American and having supposedly missed the point - at least according to Gene October - and, well - for all the implied chaos, those records seemed suspiciously well played.

The Dickies formed after a couple of them went to see the Damned on their first American tour - which makes one hell of a lot of sense when you think about it; and the rest of their crimes come down to having failed to hang out with the usual set of New York wankers in the early days, aside from supporting the Ramones - which also makes one hell of a lot of sense when you think about it; but what surely matters is the music, and the music is fucking astonishing, particularly this album.

The singles were funny, better than they probably should have been, and The Incredible Shrinking Dickies was a decent debut, if not necessarily a life-changing one, but here's where it all came together. Essentially they were, or probably are, a more complicated Ramones, at least technically with the middle eights and saxophone solos, but with that same cartoon aspect, albeit a west coast version trying to watch Saturday morning kid's shows but unable to keep still for the corn syrup jitters; and the reason it works is that they never even seemed to acknowledge the gag, powering through their own ninety mile an hour odes to disposable culture with the same ferocity as any of the more obviously ludicrous covers, cheerily embracing everything with the delirious enthusiasm of Zippy the Pinhead. I actually bothered to check the credits for Manny, Moe and Jack just to be sure it isn't a cover of some long lost commercial for Pep Boys automotive supplies, and it isn't, but it really could have been.

The thing which makes Dawn of the Dickies greater than the sum of its parts, and more than just some novelty record, is the expertise with which all of those parts are joined together, so bubble gum melody is never sacrificed to mere velocity or even to volume, and Leonard Graves Philips' absurd nasal vocal starts to sound kind of poignant after a while, even soulful; and so, regardless of subject, cuts like Fan Mail or Attack of the Mole Men have an epic quality, as though some timeless truth is revealed as we learn how they climb up on ground and then attack. Great wisdom is seldom found in the places you would most likely expect to find it, and even if Dawn constitutes great stupidity, it carries itself with enough dignity to fool the best of us.

Pixies - Beneath the Eyrie (2019)

It's a couple of years down the line and I'm still reeling from the Pixies having reformed without sounding like their own remember the eighties tribute act. I suppose it will eventually sink in, and Beneath the Eyrie may go some way towards dulling the novelty. It's nothing shocking, and it sounds like the Pixies, which in itself seems pretty special - at least compared to Indie Cindy which felt a little closer to a Pixies impersonation that didn't quite pan out.

The element that's different this time, the new thing brought to the table, or at least that I've only really noticed with Beneath the Eyrie, is how the Pixies really are a very traditional rock band. Of course, I knew this from the start, part of their appeal being in the contrast of the homespun with the weirder stuff. Here it seems particularly pronounced, although I still can't tell whether this is the record or simply something I've only just noticed. It's not that they're actually a marginally spikier Small Faces or anything so obvious. It isn't even the occasional instance of country twang or Tejano, or the boogie of St. Nazaire. Some of these songs, once you subtract the volume, wouldn't have been out of place Beatling away in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. They remind us of what rock music is supposed to do, shimmering as though it's the first time we've heard it - and I mean rock music generally, not just this record.

It seems like one hell of a feat, using these ingredients to come up with something so breezy, so free of stodge, so unlike anything recorded by fat old cunts in mirror shades wishing they were smoking weed in seventies California; so I suppose that would be the customary teaspoon of weirdy supernatural piss and acid added for flavour, to throw everything into stark high definition contrast. It's like the Wire you can play to your dad without having him pull funny faces, or something. Beneath the Eyrie is yet another slab of genius routinely and apparently effortlessly turded out by one of the greatest rock bands of all time, all of which will probably sound like hyperbole, at least until you come to Silver Bullet at the end of side one.

Bernadette Cremin & Paul Mex - Mutual Territory (2018)

Poetry still makes me anxious godammit, but I'm trying, and I'm not actually having to try too hard with this one because it's excellent. As before, Mex effortlessly soundtracks Bernadette Cremin's words with jazzy, bluesy touches which hint at familiar forms without simply duplicating or impersonating, and the whole reminds me, of all things, of Clock DVA's Advantage album - hard stories told with a collar turned up against bitter winds howling down rain soaked streets, but with a whole lot of soul.

What differentiates Mutual Territory from what I may appear to have described, or tried to describe, is that whilst the music and images form a near seamless, moody whole, a perfect synthesis of atmosphere and narrative, I suspect the parts would work as well alone - as witnessed by the closing instrumental - because Cremin's testimony is shocking, chilling and yet powerfully familiar, and her words - softly spoken and measured - are delivered with the sort of gravity that silences a room. Cremin captures and dissects tiny instances of daily life, the prosaic and the painful, working at each one until it's as sharp as the point upon which someone's entire existence might change, hopefully for the better but there's a lot of room for ambiguity. It can be tough to listen to in the same way that Gary Oldman's Nil by Mouth is tough to watch, albeit possibly not quite so dark or relentless, but similarly it draws you in.

Mutual Territory has some of the intensity usually credited to records by Nick Cave - which I can never quite see, personally speaking. It hurts a bit but is not without redemptive qualities, and musically, it could be one of the best things Mex has ever had a hand in. My only complaint is that the musical setting of Hipsway Cabaret emulates that Venga Boys Eurothrob a bit too faithfully for comfort, although maybe that's the point given that this is hardly cosy listening.

Get it here.

Cabaret Voltaire - 1974-76 (2019)

I realise this one has been around for yonks but I've only just heard it. I missed out on the Industrial Records version by a couple of months, and was never tempted by any of the CD reissues because they all seem to have been reissued at the same time as five million other things, representing a tidal wave of rarities, and I didn't feel like taking a second job just for the sake of keeping up with all that Grey Area stuff. Now, however, it's been issued on vinyl as is only right and proper, so here we are.

Pleasingly, this material is somewhat less rudimentary than I imagined it would be, based on Is That Me (Finding Someone at the Door Again?), the b-side of Nag Nag Nag dating from the same era. Nevertheless, the music is fairly rudimentary, recorded on a domestic reel to reel - it says here - therefore possibly not even a four track; electronic rhythm is provided by one of those lounge boxes with five or six settings, samba, bossanova and so on; instrumentation is sparse, everything on the cheap, with a few rudimentary effects filling in. In other words, they did as much as they could with whatever was available, so it's somewhat noodly, like very early Gristle without the arts council funding - swooping sine waves, clangs, bleeps, and farts - but it's very atmospheric, and pretty impressive for something recorded around the same time as Diamond Dogs. Most peculiar of all is that 1974-76 seems more like a forerunner to the moods and loops of The Voice of America than to the velvet distortion of Mix-Up, their first album proper.

Oddities of particular interest include Do the Snake and She Loves You. Snake is what you used to get when suburban whitey rendered his low-fi interpretation of disco music safe in the knowledge that no-one outside the band would ever hear the thing, stilted and self-conscious exhortations to get on down and so on - we've all been there, I'm sure; and if you listen closely you will notice that She Loves You is actually a cover of the Beatles song, with all of its moptopped screamarama pared down to something weird and paranoid which sounds as though it was recorded inside a cupboard, which may well have been the case. Elsewhere on these two discs, you will find nothing obvious or overstated - as has generally been true of Cabaret Voltaire's work - and neither is there any padding, anything which could have been shed for the sake of brevity. As always, the strength of this band are elements which emerge and which remain difficult to pin down, never anything flung directly in your face; and even if it's a little basic in places, this collection holds its own in relation to the likes of Voice of America, Red Mecca, Microphonies or any of the others.

WC - Revenge of the Barracuda (2011)

Not really having a finger on anything you could describe as a pulse, I'm not quite sure what's been happening with this guy since Revenge of the Barracuda. I can state with some certainty that he isn't President right now - more's the pity - and I don't think he's hosting any game shows, but otherwise I have no idea. I get the impression he still hasn't quite achieved the kind of recognition which would justify a magazine cover, at least not without being stood next to Ice Cube pulling a face; and so the only thing I can really say for sure is that this is a great album.

The name is pronounced Dub-C, in case you were wondering, therefore sparing us any comic misunderstandings involving Charles Hawtrey. He was one third of Westside Connection, with Ice Cube and Mack 10, and has been looking more and more like one of rap's most underrated as the years have passed. Rap, lest we should have forgotten, wasn't really designed for albums, not at first - being more about tunes spun in the park then quickly onto the next one while we're still squinting at the deliberately obscured label trying to catch the name of what the hell we just heard. Most rap artists have trouble filling an album, particularly since the advent of the compact disc, without a few duds being snuck in under the radar. Exceptions to the rule are just that - exceptions, but even those rare artists who manage the occasionally consistent album have rarely kept it going for more than a year or two; except for WC, so far as I can tell. Every single album has been great, no filler to be heard, and - Holy Mary mother of God - even the fucking skits are funny!

So let's have a listen to this one and see if we can't work out how the magic happens. There's probably not much joy in attempting to identify the greatest rapper who ever lived, so I won't. It probably isn't WC, but he's nevertheless in the premier division with an immediately recognisable voice no-one could possibly mistake for that of anyone else. It's the rhythm, the way he twangs those syllables making the words jump and pop like an instrument, combined with an above average wit, dexterity, and a weirdly jovial menace. He sounds like he'd be a fun guy to hang out with, but you really wouldn't want to get on his wrong side.

Combined with what I guess must be an ear for just the right sort of track, WC shines as few others have done without really doing anything obviously different to anyone else. Most rap albums, or most of those that don't quite get there, are usually let down by substandard beats which, as I say, never seems to occur with this guy. The west coast bounce harks back to p-funk ancestors without getting bogged down in mere karaoke, slow, soulful, but with a hard edge, never getting drippy, modern touches without ostentatious displays of weirdness - it all adds up to something almost stately, even mythic without having had to try too hard, and which packs one fuck of an emotional punch; and yet it's still music for those cars which go up and down. I'm hesitant to describe anyone as a genius, but as the single factor common to at least three other albums as great as this one, WC seems like a contender.

Wreckless Eric - Transience (2019)

I'm trying to think of any other individual who has managed to keep on chucking them out for four decades without any evidence of sag. I'm sure they exist, but excepting Billy Childish no-one springs to mind right now - and obviously I'm excluding bands on the grounds that they can replenish themselves with younger members as the older ones kick the bucket or otherwise run out of steam. Eric seems to have had about ten quiet years in there somewhere, but you'll have a tough time identifying the comeback point on your wall chart given that I'm not convinced he ever fully went away, and the pinnacle of his musical career seems to be what he's doing right now, at least since AmERICa.

If you're familiar with any of the arguably better publicised stuff from before the internet, you'll know what to expect up to a point, and this is quite clearly the same man who recorded Reconnez Cherie and Whole Wide World - the uncertain warble in the voice, a faint trace of punk rock without being a dick about it, the suggestion of everything held together by sheer force of will, songs which sound as though they've been punched in the face so many times that they've stopped noticing, but above all the suspicion that nothing can keep this man down. The rock and roll basics have evolved into something approaching psychedelia without getting too affected. The distortion of songs about to collapse under their own weight on Construction Time and Demolition has been further developed into something which might look like a significantly more pissed off Jonathan Richman covering mid-period Beatles whilst trying to drown out the noise of Stereolab rehearsing in the next room, at least if seen from a fast moving vehicle - but that's just because language sometimes lets us down, leading to sentences which look like the one I've just written. Without even being particularly lacking in cheer, Eric's music seems to capture that frame of mind where you're so irredeemably fucked off or bewildered or otherwise beaten down by the forces of everything which is shite in the world that you can't even be bothered getting upset over it, not anymore; and so there's something weirdly comforting here, like he's the only one in the entire firmament who could possibly understand.

To be fair, as a fellow immigrant, an old bloke and another former resident of the Medway towns who moved to America, it could simply be that I'm suffering from overidentification with someone in the same boat, or at least a similar boat, and the previous paragraph is at least as ridiculous as I suspect it may well be; but whatever the case, Transcience really nails it for me, describing a lot of my present existence, particularly how it feels and why half of it makes no sense - the dead ends all over the place, and those tiny fucking houses. I've a feeling this means that there probably isn't anything useful I can say about this record except that it's genuinely wonderful, and Eric is probably the Bob Dylan of my generation, or someone of equivalent stature who didn't end up hanging out with that complete knob from ELO.

Nicht Gut - Grönland (2019)

Here's another cassette tape from AUT, the label which brought us Att Förstå Ensamhet and Beppria Bepria, amongst other goodies from Sweden. Nicht Gut released a couple of cassettes through what I assume must have been their own Some Fun label back in 1984, neither of which I've heard, and this is in any case all new material representing a resumption of activity. I haven't been able to find out much about the author or authors, beyond the possibility of it being the work of someone with the surname Jansson, presumably not the creator of Moomintroll, so I'm left with only the terrifying prospect of writing about the music. Grönland feels a little like a film soundtrack, comprising abstract but not quite ambient music of electronic derivation, but I'm probably thinking Chris Carter more than Tangerine Dream. It's also fairly expensive sounding, which makes for a pleasant change in the context of my usual listening, although is not overtly digital. Also, it's a mixture of longer pieces with shorter, some as short as five or six seconds, reinforcing the suspicion that some of this was probably composed as soundtrack material, even if we're only talking imaginary films.

In any case, it's lush and enveloping, wrapping the listener in an intoxicating world of sound with apparently little effort, which is enough to get me excited at the possibility of Nicht Gut's eighties material having a reissue, which apparently might happen.

C.W. McCall - Black Bear Road (1975)

Having spent the first decade of my life in a rural area - specifically growing up on the farm which eventually became the set of Teletubbies - trucks, trucking, farm machinery, and country music loomed larger than they probably would have done had I grown up in some more urban setting. Amongst my school friends were a significant group of three - Paul and two other kids, both named Tom - who seemed particularly attuned to the rural automotive current and would spend hours yacking on and on about trucks, engines, mileage, differential gearboxes, and so on. They were quite naturally way ahead of the curve when CB radio kicked in.

To get to the point, Paul was one of the first kids I ever knew, living on the farm along the road from ours and so we were friends at a very young age, and he taped me a few tracks from this album once I got my first tape recorder. Having long since recorded over the tape, I spent years wondering what this music had been - admittedly without breaking much of a sweat in my efforts to find out given that it was clearly the work of the guy who recorded Convoy - only finding out in the late nineties that it was an album called Black Bear Road, because er… Nigel of Nocturnal Emissions kindly ran me off a tape of the record, somewhat substantiating his claim of never having been particularly industrial.

Now finally, I've splashed out on my own copy of the fucking thing; and I knew it wasn't my memory playing tricks. I knew it was worth getting hold of.

Peculiarly, it turns out that C.W. McCall may be considered an early form of idoru, a virtual entertainer, an image serving as a front for the men behind the music. He began life as a trucking character in a television commercial for Old Home Bread, eventually developing a life of his own as the creation of William Dale Fries Jr. with music written by Chip Davies. The strangest realisation for me is that it could be argued that Black Bear Road - which sounds so ruggedly authentic that I've actually had to wash the dust and grit from myself after listening to the thing - is actually so manufactured as to make the New Kids look like Bob Dylan; therefore fuck!, beyond which I guess it doesn't matter. The first six tracks, side one plus Convoy, represent what country music does best, or did best before it turned into that rhinestoned spangled autotune shite we have now: crafted, populist, full of soul, genuinely funny and witty when it's cracking the jokes, homespun and sentimental without quite tipping over into parody - what white people had instead of blues music and very much a parallel to the extent that it's difficult to miss the common ground now shared with rap: urban folk tales told amongst a small community using a language very much exclusive to itself, private jokes, quick talking, plenty of blues and telling it how it is.

Unfortunately, whilst none of the last four numbers - tracks seven to ten on side two - are terrible, the drop in quality following Convoy is weird and dramatic. We start with a record where no two tracks sound the same, powerful heartfelt music which makes you feel as though you're there, songs so strong that you forget you're listening to any particular genre; then suddenly we have four b-sides, songs which do a job and tick certain boxes, but which sound like every other seventies country record you've ever heard whilst channel hopping past a commercial break for some fifty disc golden oldies boxed set aimed at retired persons.

I don't know how the album could end as it has, but maybe it doesn't matter, because few artists have ever recorded anything as powerful as McCall's Ghost Town, and probably never will.

Mex - Dark of the Moon (1981)

Dark of the Moon is a stage play from the 1940s written by Howard Richardson and William Berney. I hadn't heard of it either, but it sounds distinctly gothic - in the sense of Edgar Allen Poe rather than black clothes and too much hairspray - set as it is in a rural Appalachian community, and telling the tale of a witch boy who wishes to become human, having fallen in love with a human girl. This CD is the soundtrack of a 1981 production composed by Paul Mex with Cliff Silver of Sad Lovers & Giants.

Dark of the Moon is instrumental and fairly minimal - so much so that I imagine it could have been performed live for the production without too much of a headache incurred. The sound comes from guitar, delay, and a couple of gas-powered monosynths, one of which sounds suspiciously like a Casio VL-Tone at certain points. More than anything it reminds me of some of the German stuff from the seventies, things involving Conny Plank and the like, Cluster and so on. Obviously I have no idea how well any of it would have worked in the context of the play, but it nevertheless makes for a fairly powerful CD in its own right. The disc comprises thirty or so fairly short pieces, nothing longer than a few minutes, and all heavily reliant upon the repetition and recurrence of certain themes. This being the year 2019, Dark of the Moon initially sounds fairly primitive, as I guess it is, but its presence makes itself felt with repeat plays, and one ceases to notice the technology as a very specific mood is summoned, one which might not have settled so heavily upon one's soul had it been sprung from a more digital source.

Yes, I did just refer to this music settling upon one's soul, which is because there's a lot of power here, possibly specifically because the thing is so minimal and hence so direct. It has none of the idle, noodling quality of Cluster, or whoever it is I'm thinking of here. I gather Dark of the Moon is produced as a freebie thrown in with orders of other material from Mex, which I suppose makes sense given it being quite unlike anything else I've heard from the man, but this shouldn't be taken as indicative of it representing some kind of also ran or even a booby prize. Had this been slapped onto inch-thick vinyl by one of those boutique labels, I'm sure someone or other at the Wire would have been wanking themselves silly over it by now.

Laibach - Opus Dei (1987)

I first heard this at the home of my friend Anders one new year's eve, and I was kind of shocked. I'd heard of Laibach and seen things mentioned in Sounds, but had assumed them to be one of those groups beloved of David Tibet, therefore featuring bells, monks chanting, windy noises and probably something being read out from some dense philosophical text amounting to a record which would be fine providing no-one expected you to sit down and listen to the thing. Opus Dei was conversely over the top, ludicrously stern, funny, and difficult to resist; and the funny part lay in the possibility that maybe they actually meant it. Anders, one of the most sardonic people I've ever known, was endlessly amused. He waved the inner sleeve at me so I could see the massive swastika formed from four axes bound together much like the Italian fasces symbol beloved of Mussolini.

'What's that about, eh lads?' Anders chortled at the sleeve, as though speaking through it to directly address Laibach in person.

So are they or aren't they?

Ignoring more recent material on the grounds of my not having heard much of it - recent here meaning everything since 1992's Kapital, which never really grabbed me - Laibach represents a satire of totalitarian and authoritarian politics utilising pseudo-classical images and sounds pushed to a Teutonic extreme which borders on parody, without ever quite fully crossing over into Mel Brooks or Freddie Starr territory. This, as one or two of you will have noticed, leaves room for ambiguity, because their satire is more or less indistinguishable from the real thing. I suspect this is on purpose, unless we allow for the possibility that it actually is the real thing playing the get out of jail free card in the name of art. Opus Dei in particular attempts to stir the listener with the same classical pomp which worked so well for Elgar and others, essentially forcing us to gaze into what amounts to Third Reich propaganda, appealing to our primitive patriotism - as Orwell called it - and daring us to deny that we too are moved, daring us to remain unstirred, and to dispute with a straight face that just a little bit came out of the end. Laibach represent a study in the appeal of Fascist and Nationalist imagery, because that's what they set forth for our consideration, stone faced and without any obvious trace of irony.

I console myself with the idea that the point of this is just how deeply fucking ludicrous am I, asking are they or aren't they as they recreate the Nuremberg rallies in a rock video.

Nevertheless, despite everything, despite the repurposed art of Werner Peiner - a favourite of both Hitler and Der Blutharsch - despite Queen's One Vision seemingly rewritten as One Race, despite those troubling in-character interviews - not least the dark mutterings of supposed Jewish infiltration of the music industry which hopefully I imagined because I don't seem to be able to find any reference to them now - I genuinely don't believe that they are. Interviewed by Peek-a-Boo magazine, Laibach's spokesman reports:

You can find Nietzsche all over our work, although we are in principle not Nietzscheans, we consider ourselves Duchampians.

This squares with the axe-swastika I mentioned being nicked from one of John Heartfield's anti-Nazi posters - no longer a symbol of an ideology so much as of an ideology revealed as a brutal, corrupting influence; but of course this aspect only becomes clear under close scrutiny, doubtless so as to preserve the ambiguity; and there's ambiguity everywhere you look on this record. In fact, it's the one thing which is stated openly, as on F.I.A.T., itself seemingly titled so as to hold back from its most obvious suggestion of shedding light upon things we don't understand.

You are in black darkness and confusion.
You have been hugger-muggered, and carom-shotted into a war, and you know nothing about it.
You know nothing about the forces that caused it...
...For you know next to nothing.
You ought not to be in this war.
You cannot win this war.

The darkness and confusion is reiterated in How the West Was Won in which the dumb can only guess and gaze on, which seems significant in regard to what Laibach are actually saying. It isn't that they don't actually say anything, but their overpowering authoritarian neoclassicism transmits none of the content which traditionally comes with the form. There's no actual nationalism, no racism, no dubious invocation of any lost golden age, indeed none of the stuff with which the lyrics of Death in June are positively dripping, and the closest we come are neutered quotations bearing no more resemblance to the original source than do the covers of Queen or power-balladeers Opus.

Where the sort of nationalism to which Laibach alludes tends to occur as a social phenomenon, populist yet often on the fringes of the mainstream as with Skrewdriver, Von Thronstahl or any other actual fans of Adolf Hitler you care to mention, Laibach are a definitively post-modern repurposing of authoritarian archetypes and as such, for better or worse, are best understood as a living breathing art installation. It's satire like Jeff Koons is satire because it makes no bones about presenting the appearance of the actual thing it purports to present. It's the appeal of jackboots on the march, flags in the breeze, chests bursting with pride at the sound of drums and trumpets, and you're free to respond as it expects you to respond, which must surely reflect the question back at the listener, asking what does your response say about you?

Nova Akropola, the previous one, was a little less easily decoded, being very much a Slovenian thing, and as I've discovered, Yugoslavian humour seems to be an unusually layered and complex deal which doesn't always make sense to outsiders such as myself. Opus Dei however sets its sights firmly on the west, and the hypocrisy of the west, drawing parallels between the mass psychology of Fascism and the cult of rock and celebrity, then closing with a Churchill speech cut from the exact same cloth as everything else which has spent the last thirty minutes performing blitzkrieg on our lugholes.

Of course, as we've seen, such subtleties are generally beyond the comprehension of your average Tom, Dick or Tony, and as Tom Hawking of Flavourwire writes regarding what he terms Laibach's use of shock imagery:

It's an entirely self-indulgent, narrow-minded form of "protest" as performance (not the other way around), showing off a pretence of subversiveness at the expense of the feelings of actual oppressed groups. Really, what this means doing is using real tragedies as a springboard for your own self-serving needs. For a gaggle of white gentiles from a country whose Jewish population hovers somewhere around five hundred, it isn't a good look.

He has a point, although it refers to how Laibach are perceived more than it does to whatever the hell they may be trying to say; but then how they say it must surely be informed by a concern for the fidelity of the transmitted signal, beyond which I suppose we get into all sorts of circular debates about what an artist should be able to say - in which case Laibach still leave us looking like craven wankers, and maybe that is the point.

It's a wonderful album, and that's why it's terrible.

Imagination - Scandalous (1983)

I never had any strong feeling about Imagination back in the day, apart from finding them amusing and being fairly certain that at least one of them was probably batting for the other team. If questioned, I probably would have mumbled something dismissive about bland disco music and how I preferred the work of someone or other that you've never heard of; but picking up those memories in 2019, flipping them over and having a look inside, let's face it - I knew Just an Illusion was fucking amazing even if I wasn't admitting it in front of any bigger boys in leather jackets, much less to myself. The breakthrough came when my mother began hanging out with young Algerian men for reasons which are too complicated to go into, and which aren't quite as exciting as I've probably made it sound. One of them - Arezki, as I recall - had an album he needed taping but no tape recorder, and as the nearest available westernised teenager I was called in to assist. The album was Scandalous.

I spent a long time looking at the cover because it was hilarious, and realised I was actually curious about what the hell this thing would sound like. Of course, I knew it would be awful and probably in a highly amusing way, and not a patch on the work of Portion Control or Bourbonese Qualk or others I'd routinely namedrop without having actually found any of their records in the local shops. I slapped it onto the turntable, hit play and record, and immediately had my nuts blown off by New Dimension.

New Dimension is the first track on side one, a breathy extended funk epic running on phased hi-hat with a touch of maybe Soft Cell, a suggestion of grandeur, and which sounds like the sexier cousin to something from Cabaret Voltaire's 2X45, albeit a sexier cousin which gets out of the house a bit more. It's a long way from the sort of novelty fun-time dance jingle you might expect from three blokes trying to smoulder whilst wearing bin liners.

Naturally the rest of the album seems a bit of a step down once we're past the first track, but it catches up with a few more spins. Imagination slinked and oozed at least as hard as Prince or Rick James whilst managing to remain light and breezy, never quite collapsing Schrödinger's Diva down to any single sexual state.

The boys who paint their faces,
The girls they look so strong…

Yet, I still don't know if they were batting for the other team or not, regardless of Shoo Be Doo Da Dabba Doobe with its chorus of this means war suggesting nothing so much as the Wayans brothers wearing tiny hats. To be honest, I didn't actually realise Marc Almond was gay, so maybe it doesn't matter, or maybe the idea that it might is at least as absurd as that of there even being another team, if you see what I mean.

What does matter is that Scandalous probably remains one of the sexiest albums ever made. It's funky, romantic, classy, sensual, sweet, strangely elegant in all of the right places, and anything the eighties ever had going for it can be found at its finest on this record; and State of Love for one really should have been on one of those Crucial Electro compilations. Don't be fooled by the marketing department which seemingly had them down as the Seaside Special version of Parliament.

Princess Superstar - Princess Superstar Is (2001)

This is the amazing first album by my latest discovery, and I'm going to tell you how great it is because you've probably never heard of Princess Superstar. That's not really how the voice sounds in my head, but it's thinking something along those lines, which probably serves to illustrate what it's like being in your fifties, as am I. The album came out nearly two fucking decades ago; she's tickled the UK singles charts twice, both occasions when I was still living in England, numbers eleven and three respectively; and this was her fourth album, so once again I'm the last to know, not having received any of the previous four million memos. Never mind.

I vaguely remember Princess Superstar Is coming out, but the sales pitch had her down as the female Eminem which didn't exactly sell it to me. Princess Superstar's own take on the issue of her identity is that she's the black Shirley Temple, which is more informative than she probably realised. Contrary to established wisdom, or what I definitely recall as having been established wisdom at some point, white rappers were never that much of a rarity, and if white female rappers were admittedly a little thinner on the ground, what distinguishes Princess Superstar is that she isn't wearing an African hat, effecting a weird accent, or pretending to be Monie Love - who was, in any case, never much of a role model by my estimation. Princess Superstar's deal is that she keeps it real, as we say in the business, and of course that she's lyrically amazing. She's a girl of undeniably Caucasian ethnicity; she's intelligent, witty, and very, very funny without ever quite seeming like a novelty act; and she doesn't mind admitting to enjoying sexual intercourse, to which she makes frequent reference on this album without coming across like some kind of hoochie mama - so one thing which Princess Superstar Is isn't, is one of those albums of a female rapper cramming in as many references to blow jobs as the wax can support because that's what the dudes want to hear; other dudes, I mean - It just sounds kind of desperate to me because I'm elevated and amazing.

All of this and everything else is communicated with a machine gun spray of syllables at least as dizzying as one of those Marx Brothers routines or some of Big Pun's stuff, not quite so fast that you miss what is said, but some of these tracks definitely benefit from repeat listening. Lyrically the female Kool Keith comparison she offers at one point applies some of the time, but she's otherwise very much her own thing - sex, money, rap, all the troubles of the world, and a shitload of sarcasm scored to a hard, beat heavy soundtrack of late nineties hip-hop drawing on the legacy of DJ Premier, big band, sixties television shows and the like. There's no filler, plenty of standouts, and then Too Much Weight with Bahamadia which is one of those once in a lifetime numbers that tears your fucking heart right out of your chest, and which is astonishing. Also, the excellent J-Zone and the aforementioned Keith pop up on a couple of tracks, possibly literally, so that's nice too; and there's a token reference to Pat Sajak, which I find pleasing. Now th8tz gangsta, as the Reverend Westwood would surely observe in that funny voice he does.

I've just had another look at Wikipedia and additionally realise I actually sort of know one of the blokes* on this record. I have accordingly just invented a new emotion combining pride with the suspicion that I'm actually a complete fucking idiot.

Next week I'll be listening to REO Speedwagon. You probably won't have heard of them. They're new.

*: Ollie Teeba of the Herbaliser to whom I delivered mail back when I was a postman. This really must be what it's like to be senile.

Chrome - The Visitation (1976)

This was Chrome's first album, recorded by Damon Edge and others prior to the involvement of Helios Creed, and it's a significantly different beast to the ominous android chug with which they became associated. The pulp science-fiction obsession was already well and truly cemented in place as indicated by titles such as Sun Control, Return to Zanzibar, and Memory Lords Over the Bay, and was already well and truly cemented in place with a ton of drugs by the sound of it, and not the mellow ones either. You may recognise the guitar solos fried in acid from later Chrome recordings, and also the tendency to shove things through various industrial strength flange pedals, but otherwise The Visitation is garage punk, albeit fucking weird garage punk rooted in bad trip psychedelics. Warner Brothers said it sounded like the Doors but didn't want to release it, obliging Edge to start his own label. I don't quite see the Doors thing, but there's a lot which reminds me of very early Devo - particularly in terms of subject matter - and even Sparks; and Kinky Lover comes pretty close to being a warped cover of the Beatles' Come Together.

That said, despite these differences, The Visitation is somehow immediately recognisable as Chrome, and you can play Alien Soundtracks straight after without really missing too much of a step. The point of continuity is the vibe, which was cold, dirty, scary, and deeply alien even back when they could have covered the Eagles without anyone doing too much of a double take.

If you're unfamiliar with this band, then they're almost certainly the thing you've been missing all this time.

You're welcome.

Lil Nas X - 7 EP (2019)

As I write, Old Town Road is apparently the singular most enormous pop parade hit song of all time. Being old as fuck and isolated by choice from almost all aspects of contemporary culture, I only encountered the song whilst rummaging around on YouTube in hope of finding some evidence of rap music not having gone completely down the toilet; and thankfully, here is that evidence.

It's weird and disorientating to realise that I'm this old, and that my opinion of Lil Nas X doesn't make much difference one way or the other. I first heard of Billy Ray Cyrus when my friend Eddy did an impersonation of him in the pub in order to illustrate just how shit was Achy Breaky Heart, which would have been 1992; and Chris Rock's Bigger & Blacker was July 1999, at which point Lil Nas X would have been just three months old.

Three months old…

Anyway, no genre has been so historically ready to drown its own kids as rap, usually because someone dared to poke a toe out beyond the established boundary dividing fake from that which is kept wearyingly real; and it sounds a bit like rock music, or there are too many naughty words and it's not very empowering, or it lacks the lyricism of LL Cool J, or It Takes a Nation of Millions is the greatest rap album of all time, in my humble opinion…

If rap has a problem right now, it's probably due to trap poisoning, adult fans of My Little Pony, and grown men who think growling the word represent for three minutes constitutes a flow. Lil Nas X avoids the pitfalls by sticking to tracks which sound good rather than ticking boxes. If that's a problem, maybe just pretend you're listening to Outkast.

Old Town Road samples Nine Inch Nails and features Billy Ray Cyrus, autotune, and line dancing in the video - a recipe for disaster which has somehow resulted in sheer brilliance. I've now seen a few sneering reviews grumbling about it being a gimmick, just a meme, a novelty record, hardly comparable with Big Daddy Kane or someone else you weren't actually listening to first time round, but it's all bollocks. Old Town Road feels a lot like life in San Antonio, at least in certain respects, and does what it sets out to do to perfection, so I couldn't really give a shit if it's somehow a less important cultural artefact than Bohemian Rhapsody because says you.

Lil Nas's success is in making good use of all the shit which usually ruins a song, not least the autotune which features heavily here. Most often the effect turns an underwhelming vocal into a musical component, and one which sits poorly with whatever else is going on, reducing words to an extraneous embellishment. Our guy on the other hand gets the balance exactly right, using tracks which never get too crowded and yet pack enough of a punch in the equalisation department to sound pretty darn beefy; so the treated vocal has space and nothing gets clogged up in the pipes; and you don't have to call it rap if that bothers you, because it still works, and still does what rap should do.

Ridin' on a horse,
You can whip your Porsche,
I been in the valley,
You ain't been up off that porch.

There are also a couple of pseudo-trap numbers, but this is a bizarrely eclectic set without any two tracks quite sounding alike, and Bring U Down could almost have been on that last Pixies album, if that's any indication. Even Cardi B, of whom I didn't particularly think I was a fan, sounds blistering on Rodeo.

Whatever you want to call it, 7 is a fucking great set, pop music done right - simple without being stupid, moving without simpering, smart and snappy in all the right places, and it bangs like a motherfucker, as I believe is the parlance. My only criticism is that there doesn't seem to be a physical release, but never mind.

Charlatans - Some Friendly (1990)

I bought this when I was ill. I can't remember what was up with me but it was genuine for once. I was living in Lewisham and it was wet and miserable. I staggered out to the shops in hope of buying something which might cheer me up a bit, and this was the only album I could find in my local WHSmith which seemed even marginally promising, based mainly on The Only One I Know being so great a single as to have smashed through all of my growing resentment towards both baggy and what I have since come to think of as Austin Powers music. I got the album home and struggled back into bed. It sounded okay, if somehow a bit muted, but I nevertheless played side one again and again because I didn't have the energy to flip the record over; and it was quite a good illness soundtrack, possibly due to the neopsychedelic codeine swirls of Hammond organ reproducing the cotton wool effect of being confined to bed with a fever, drifting in and out of consciousness.

Weirdly, it still sounds as good now, perhaps even better. It may simply be an after effect of my hammering side one whilst feeling unwell, only coming to the flip a few weeks later, but Some Friendly feels a lot like a concept album, specifically one of those with the sides divided between head and dance floor. The first is powerfully immersive, a series of swells and lulls coming to a crescendo with the genuinely incredible Then and somehow reminding me of Faust IV. The second side veers a bit more towards Austin Powers music, requiring a few plays to dispel unwanted images of that fucking twat Mike Myers, but it gets there, and comes to resemble a more populist take on krautrock in a surprisingly short time, particularly Sproston Green, which seems an interesting parallel given that Happy Mondays were essentially a Can tribute act.

Stranger still, Wikipedia describes this as a problematic record with which the band were never particularly happy, not least due to having gone into the studio with only a handful of songs. Nevertheless, for my money it pisses over the efforts of most of their baggy contemporaries, but maybe it's just something to do with listening whilst unwell. It might also be something to do with their Birmingham origins, because Birmingham is better than Manchester.

Stex - Spiritual Dance (1992)

There was a point about halfway through the eighties at which it seemed like Some Bizarre were the only label of substance and I'd never need to bother with anyone else's records ever again. It seemed as though pop music had stopped being a wanker, or was at least doing something kind of interesting; and then the Smiths came along to restore order, to calm the fears of those who foresaw the extinction of proper music made by white blokes with guitars and a love of the jangly sixties, like we knew before all those - well, you know, can't say no names or nuffink but name me one good reggae song, yeah?

Then Cabaret Voltaire were suddenly on Parlophone, The The were similarly elsewhere, Psychic TV failed to be anything like as interesting as promised, and Stevo's thing had seemingly vanished off the map. Excepting a vaguely recalled clip of something trading as Blowzabella on some youth TV show, it had all gone quiet. I suppose it may be significant that this apparent disappearance probably coincided with my giving up on music papers, but I don't know, and the subsequent history of Some Bizarre is a strange and obscure tale populated by artists you've never heard of - Monkey Farm Frankenstein and others.

That said, I'm not sure I'd actually heard of Stex, but Johnny Marr of the aforementioned Smiths plays on this record so I assume it will have been paid at least some attention, even if I was looking in the wrong direction at the time; and I assume from the scarcity of posthumous information on the internet (a realm wherein one may learn even the birth dates and respective shoe sizes of all three members of Naffi Sandwich if you look hard enough) that they're probably still owed at least fourteen of their allotted fifteen minutes.

I say they're but, so far as I can tell, Stex was he, and specifically a he of Lewisham - which is actually where I was living in 1992, but never mind. Stex seems to have been something to do with the developing garage scene, and I gather that, aside from Johnny Marr twanging away on a couple of numbers, we also have the involvement of an Altered Images dude, with Dave Ball possibly twiddling something or other. Spiritual Dance is uptempo bluesy soul of a kind which was admittedly fairly common in 1992, but done with the sort of feeling which connects it firmly to its roots, and which therefore distinguishes it from the formless, generic pish gratuitously emoted by all of those Alexander O'Neal types. Guitars chop and chunk like Nile Rodgers, and the computer bass squelches with a warmth I hadn't even realised I'd missed, and the mood is uplifting without getting stupid, whilst smouldering like Imagination's New Dimension, or the broody opening bars of Diana Ross's Love Hangover; and really it's just a fucking tremendous soul album, a lost gem in every sense. Stex may have seemed an odd labelmate for Einstürzende Neubauten, but if you listen close it becomes difficult to miss the kinship with The The and even Cabaret Voltaire's funkier material.

What the hell happened, Stex? You should have been fucking massive.

Mrs. Dink - D(EE)P R(IS)K (2019)

Having followed Peter Hope down the acid rabbit hole, figuratively speaking, I now encounter Mrs. Dink, another name associated with the New York Haunted label and as such further evidence of its dedication to musical excellence and innovation. Mrs. Dink - whom it should probably be noted also has material available from her own Degenerate Trifecta label - crafts pounding progressive techno which overloads the senses with all manner of disorientating filtered clatter whilst keeping your ass locked firmly to the rhythm, thus overruling any problems derived from what you expected the music to do. Unusually for this sort of thing, it features that same blend of a light multilayered touch with something hard which once characterised the very best of Front 242, yet without any of the attendant testosterone poisoning. In fact Super-Mighty Pre-emptive Strike reminded me a little of John Barry, at least in terms of mood.

I'll shut up now, but this one is very, very good.

Get it here.

David Bowie - Tonight (1984)

Yes, I know, but it's not like he's going to be recording any new ones so it seemed like time I went in, just out of curiosity. After all, it might not be that bad.

Having been loyal to Bowie right up until Let's Dance, I spent most of the eighties looking in the other direction. It seemed as though he'd lost the plot from where I'd been standing, and I still loathe the plinky-plonky banality of ying-tong-iddle-I-China Girl, and it was surely only a matter of time before he turned up dressed as a foam rubber parrot on Celebrity It's a Knockout!

Anyway, I've grudgingly come to accept that I was wrong about Let's Dance - excepting Bowie's cover of Aneka's Japanese Boy - and I guess the same is true of this one, which is weird. I expected it to be worse, like Let's Dance with shoulder pads and blonde highlights instead of tunes. Firstly I should admit that both Blue Jean and Loving the Alien sounded all right as singles, even at the time, if admittedly not cut from quite the same cloth as Rebel Rebel or Drive-In Saturday. They've aged pretty well, particularly now that the glossy eighties production has begun to sound like a novel affectation rather than something from which there's no fucking escape. Loving the Alien actually comes surprisingly close to magnificent, particularly the Howard Goodall style staircase of ascending notes leading up to its suitably epic chorus.

The prosecution should probably also take into account that Bowie does cod reggae on this record, and twice, and one of those times in the company of his famous friend Tina Turner. It should be awful but somehow isn't, although I've never really had a problem with cod reggae, apart from finding it funny. It additionally provides a clue to why Tonight turned out as it did, at least once we take into account that it's produced by Hugh Padgham, father of the gated snare and other eighties crimes: Bowie wanted to be Sting.

Play Tonight enough and it sounds okay; another few days and it sounds decent once you've stopped noticing the haircuts and the jackets with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow; and by the end of the second week, it sounds better than either Low or Heroes, or if not better, at least like it had some idea of what the fuck it was doing.

Everything I've ever known is wrong.

Göran Lundh / Lars Larsson - Beppria Bepria (1984)

Following on from Att Förstå Ensamhet, here's some more Swedish goodness delivered in cassette form by Stockholm's AUT label. This time it's a sort of reissue, or would have been a reissue had the thing been released back in 1984 as intended, which apparently never came to pass. The previous label, Psychout Productions, famously first released Controlled Bleeding's Knees and Bones as well as material by HNAS, but this, a tape split between two individuals involved with En Halvkokt I Folie, remained sadly in the can.

Beppria Bepria very much sounds like something from 1984 in terms of technology, but nevertheless retains the element of shock through sonic effects seldom heard since we all discovered fancier, slicker means of doing this sort of stuff. Mostly it's heavy use of tape collage, with someone giving their pause button a serious hammering in the process, combined with what I'm pretty sure must have been a Boss DR55 drum machine with the tempo wacked up and used as a source of sound rather than rhythm. The DR55 - or whatever this was - is pretty basic, just clicks and pops with a stab of hiss in lieu of snare, and the result is arresting and hypnotic, particularly when multitracked with itself, achieving more than one might expect on such a budget; and apparently it was on loan from Roger, later of Brighter Death Now, if that makes a difference for anyone.

Lars Larsson's side of the tape is more reliant on tape collage, musical rather than spoken. As with Göran Lundh's half, a lot of the material seems to come from Swedish radio, so I'm probably missing something given my being unable to understand the language, but the overall effect suggests the sonic equivalent of collages by Hannah Höch or John Heartfield. Furthermore, contrary to any impression I may have given of this having been some noisy lo-fi exercise, Beppria Bepria seems to have been constructed mostly from tapes chopped up on a reasonably fancy music center, so we have the high resolution clarity of an expensive sampler without the usual predictable rhythm or gloss. Quiet sounds, breaths and clicks spill from the speakers without warning, amounting to something quite powerful, full of tonal variation, and almost hallucinogenic - weird and outstanding stuff.

Availabubble yonder.

RZA - Bobby Digital in Stereo (1998)

Just to get it out of the way, I vaguely recall the Analog Brothers - featuring Ice-T, Kool Keith and others - as having been some sort of response to the RZA's Bobby Digital, although there doesn't seem to be any obvious reference to anything Wu-Tang on the Analog's Pimp to Eat. In any case, if the Analog name truly flips the bird at the RZA as something lacking - off the top of my head - authenticity or warmth, it seems peculiarly misjudged. Bobby Digital is simply a pun on Robert Diggs yielding a whole set of associations upon which to hang images - the RZA's superhero identity for the duration of the record rather than any sort of technological manifesto set forth as a challenge; and besides, regardless of how it was recorded, the RZA's work seems defiantly organic in composition, making a virtue of all the dirt, the awkward pauses, the mistakes, and the crackle of the old Motown sound back when it was something noisy and dangerous.

The retrofuturism of Bobby Digital in Stereo makes for a strange record, even by Wu standards. It's minimal and understated with the feel of having been recorded on a Playstation in someone's attic, possibly due to the personal, autobiographical, and occasionally nostalgic ambience of the RZA excavating aspects of his own childhood. It's low on hooks, being mostly subdued grooves heard through a haze of either dope or memory, the sort of sound which imprints itself on you during childhood illness, tucked up in bed with a fever. So - if this is making any sense to anyone whatsoever - it's as though the whole record occurs as something not quite seen out of the corner of an eye, or I suppose an ear. Typically it was greeted with a certain quota of indifference when it appeared back in the nineties, which I suppose is inevitable for something so personal. Myself, I'd say it's one of the best things ever to come out of the Wu, right up there with Supreme Clientele, Liquid Swords and so on. I've been listening to it for the last twenty years, and it still does something different every time.