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.

Peter Hope & David Harrow - Wrong Acid EP (2019)

At the risk of turning this enterprise into something resembling Disney's Mouseketeers but with Peter Hope as the point of focus, here's yet another one on the grounds that he keeps sticking stuff out and it's usually decent, and I therefore keep buying it. Wrong Acid represents, as you might expect, a further helping of acid, techno, or whatever else you might feel like calling it in the vein of Gut Acid from 2017. Actually Wrong Acid borrows both Muthaload and Planet Wrong from the aforementioned, presumably remixed - I found it difficult to tell, but the information you need is that taken as a whole this seems a somehow darker, punchier set which surfs that crest of a pharmaceutical wave which never quite decides whether it's coming down on the side of euphoria, or if you've just signed up for a really shitty trip; but the repetition keeps us going. It's edgily hypnotic, as you might expect, belonging to the whole acid thing without sounding like it's simply duplicating all the right noises. Unusually for this sort of music, at least in my experience, most of the tracks are vocal cuts urging the rest of us to spend all that energy on fighting the power, so it's acid with the feel of punk rock as was, or as it should have turned out - jagged and trippy and resistant to coercion; which works because the vocals are heavily treated and share the space with all the weirdy effects and surges rather than dominating as a more traditional vocal might. The result, should you need any further point of reference, reminds me a little of Underworld, although it should probably be noted that I only really know Born Slippy due to it having appeared on the Trainspotting soundtrack.

As a sort of pendant, or possibly an epilogue, KinetiK Records of Greece issued a lathe cut 7" by Hope and Harrow more or less contemporaneous to Wrong Acid - two tracks, Feel with Fear and Love on the other side. You can tell these came from the same people but the mood is more sombre, positively downtempo, yet with that same feel of digital so dirty you could quite easily mistake it for analogue. Being a lathe cut record, there's a limit to the run, but they still had copies here at time of writing, so you'd be advised to move quickly if you want one - and you should if you have any fucking taste whatsoever.

Someone really needs to throw money at this man and start getting this stuff preserved on vinyl for the benefit of future generations.

Blur - Leisure (1991)

It could be that I've remembered some of the details incorrectly, but I seem to recall this - Blur's debut album - greeted with a degree of cynicism, subsequently sinking into mumbling about how such a band could have had such an inauspicious beginning. It was baggy, as was everything else at the time, and the record label was EMI pretending to be an indie so as to be down with the kids, meaning this was actually Phil Collins trying to pass himself off as the first four Wire albums, or summink.

However: bollocks.

Blur were fucking great, and this was a fucking great debut by a fucking great band, which was fucking great. Suggestions that the lads should have maintained their integrity by saying no thank you, Parlophone, we were actually hoping to sign with United Dairies, aren't really worth taking seriously, beyond which we're left with the notion that Blur somehow lacked authenticity, which usually translates into failure to have been born in Manchester; because being from Manchester is not only a biographical detail, it's something in the music, something which defies definition, rather conveniently. Being from London is different and means you're not real, you sip cocktails with Eamonn Holmes at the weekend, and when you walk like a monkey and claim to be mad for it, you're just pretending.

Leisure is like a spikier version of early Pink Floyd, plenty of substance abuse, and some swagger, but it's balanced by a certain chemical ambiguity, a sense of come down or hangover which is neither mad for it nor necessarily sane for it. The baggy aspect may simply have been timing, or it may have been something emphasised in production, but it seems significant that for an album which hints at the psychedelic experience with such conviction, Leisure still doesn't sound dated, and is easily as good as anything the Stone Roses ever came up with. These be some killer songs, regardless of Damon Albarn having eventually turned into Sting.

Shellac - 1000 Hurts (2000)

'What the hell is that?' my wife chuckled from the other room as I was listening, and I didn't really have a reply aside from simply naming the artist, which probably wouldn't have answered the question. I assume it was kill him, just fucking kill him over and over which caught her attention, that being the refrain of Prayer to God, the first song on side one.

To the one true God above, here is my prayer,
Not the first you've heard, but the first I wrote.
Not the first, but the others were a long time ago.
There are two people here, and I want you to kill them.

It's a song about a guy who has discovered that his wife is having an affair; except, it isn't. It's about the impotent rage of the guy, helpless and overwhelmed by something too terrible to consider, which is why he's praying, asking a God in whom he probably doesn't believe to kill the fuckers because it seems as good a solution as any. I guess this sort of thing has been a fairly common feature of Albini's lyrics, namely the stunted fury of the little guy, like a self-portrait of an angry Robert Crumb, eyes bulging, sweat on his brow, shitty crumpled suit and his fist shaking at the sky - either for the piano which has just been pushed from the top of a tall building and which is about to crush him in the most stupid way imaginable, or at an unjust and uncaring universe. This guy comes back again and again, too smart for his own good, forever the subject of indignity, doomed.

Hey man... I wanna have a fight with you,
Regardless of my feelings on the subject
it appears that I am going to.

Weirdly, I find that this folksy small town focus reminds me a little of the Talking Heads back before they went all world music, and it's probably why Shellac works so well, or at least works a whole lot better than simpler, angrier stuff recorded by lesser bands. The strangeness of the material also helps, the song about arranging the numbers in a different order, for example. It makes no fucking sense, and yet has an emotional impact for no reason I can quite identify beyond qualifying as the cogitation of someone with problems.

The production shouldn't even require an introduction at this point - finely crafted and at least as powerful as being right in the same room as the band, maybe even in the same room as the guy asking God to kill his wife or the one who wants a fight. This is music crafted - rather than merely played - for the sake of music, for the appreciation of something beautiful, or beautiful by its own awful terms - no shortcuts, no short hand, no additives, no artificial flavouring.

Shellac are amazing.