Smell & Quim - Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome (1999)

It's strange that it should have taken so long for the power electronics scene to embrace the pitch changed voice as heard on Bowie's thematically ancestral Laughing Gnome and of course whatever it was that Alvin & the Chipmunks did, but it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that only Smell & Quim had the balls to step up to the bat when the time came. Unfortunately there were only fifty numbered copies in a fancy hand-crafted box - of which mine was forty-two, thanks for asking - but it's your lucky day because someone has been brave enough to unleash this monster on CD - at long fucking last.

Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome comprises an hour of Smell & Quim's characteristically batshit dada noise, opening with the eponymous gnomes telling us a little about themselves - our Pushy Gothic Gnome is from Bradford in West Yorkshire and very much enjoys the music of the Sisters of Mercy, for example. What follows may even be some sort of noise opera for all I'm able to tell, for certainly it feels as though a story is being told even if it's one which is more or less dependent on the listener's interpretation of the subsequent barrage of noise, feedback, backwards tapes, cheap and tinny rhythms, digital delay, air raid siren, howls, whistles, twanging noises, and other effects by which this work might be viewed as arguably the closest anyone from the noise planet ever came to sounding like the Residents. Then again the Residents second album was called Baby Sex and that was pretty chaotic, so maybe it's not quite such a stretch.

I've been listening to this bunch for thirty years now, and I still don't understand them, but on the other hand I just can't say enough good things about their work, of which this is a particularly fine representation.

Available from this lot.

Neil Campbell - Roll the Vole to the Owl (2020)

Well, this is all very nice nice. I have a vague impression of Neil Campbell having more releases to his name than all other recording artists put together - ever, and here's another one which he's slipped out without an excess of ceremony and which doesn't sound like any of the others I've heard. Actually, of the others I've heard, a great number of them have been fairly noisy, which this isn't. The subheading on the Bandcamp page seems to be music for thumb piano, flute, and voice, which is what it is, although the flute sounds a lot like a recorder - as such arguably representing one of the few examples of a recorder sounding as good on the album as it probably did inside the artist's head - and there isn't much voice that you would notice, plus I'm fairly sure I could hear a Casio VL-1 in there somewhere. Roll the Vole to the Owl comprises seven vaguely folky instrumental pieces - at least atmospherically speaking - definitely free-range and home grown without chemical interference. It falls somewhere between a slightly friendlier relative of the Residents' Eskimo and Robert Cox's Rimarimba without all of the mathematics. Repeat listening gradually reveals electronic activity way down in the mix, at least as pertains to the recording process, but it's not obvious.  Roll the Vole to the Owl is so unassuming, so lacking an agenda, that it's hard to know what to say about it once we've established that it's a truly beautiful and perfectly formed piece of work, so I guess I'll leave it at that.

The Totally Out Music of En Halvkokt i Folie (1992)

I first achieved an admittedly dim awareness of En Halvkokt i Folie back in 1984 or thereabouts as one name amongst many to feature in the catalogue of the Swedish Selbstmord label. Years passed without my actually managing to hear anything by them, at least not directly, although Lars Larsson seemed to turn up as a performer on other things I found myself enjoying with some regularity; and by 2020 I'd become sufficiently familiar with underground music from Sweden to wonder if there might not be something in the water, because most of what I've heard had been exceptional. Significantly, the name of En Halvkokt i Folie has been a constant presence lurking in the background as either an influence or even as a source of members in the stories of most of the Swedes whose work I've enjoyed, presenting me with the impression of their having been the Swedish equivalent of Throbbing Gristle, culturally speaking. Anyway, having finally made the effort to track something down, I realise that none of the comparisons quite fit and possibly the closest we'll get is that they are, or possibly were, the Swedish En Halvkokt i Folie.

That said, we're not talking music with no resemblance to anything else you've ever heard, but there's nevertheless something absolutely weird and unique about The Totally Out Music of En Halvkokt i Folie, which feels like a compilation but may not be. Musical styles are stolen and interfered with depending upon the demands of the track, although the production values are very much expensive samplers of 1992, at least as a starting point. Most surprising of all, at least to me, is how much of this disc resembles house music, and house music as in the pastel coloured stuff with a shitload of piano and vocal samples, although there's also a bit of rapping, and the general vibe is maybe if Front 242 had appeared on an episode of Father Ted and spent most of the time trying to get those samplers to impersonate a Bontempi organ; so it's kind of a great big stupid riot, but with a poker face of such intestinal fortitude that Laibach would have told it to maybe lighten up a little. Sebastian Jensen Grundberg of the AUT label, who acts as my Swedish music advisor, suggested that much of this may get lost in translation given that my understanding of Swedish doesn't extend much further than one song by the Stranglers, but it feels as though whatever the hell they were trying to do is communicated reasonably well even to me, and of course it helps to have a couple of titles in English, notably Housecleaning with Narcotics and Germans Reminded of Their Nazi Past (by Foreigners). Also of note is the creation of an entire new musical genre on this disc, specifically Mongo House, which is actually a lot like regular house music but with greater emphasis on the planet Mongo from the old Flash Gordon serials.

Having a root around on the internet, I find a number of live clips showing a band vaguely closer to my original idea of their having occupied the same cultural bandwidth as Throbbing Gristle except in Sweden, and admittedly with an element of the Bonzos thrown in there somewhere; so I guess the Father Ted version of Front 242 was probably just how they were feeling at the time of recording. This also means that there must have been a whole shitload of variant incarnations of En Halvkokt i Folie which we've been cruelly denied these last three decades. Someone really needs to get onto that because this is magnificent.

The New Harnessians - Tabla Rasa (2020)

I'm not exactly sure who's behind this one but suspect it's something to do with +DOG+, being on the same label, inhabiting adjacent sonic territory, and the vocal on Blank Slate sounds kind of familiar. Where +DOG+ have brought us harsh noise composed and contrasted with an almost musical quality, the New Harnessians take it a step further. There's noise and distortion aplenty, but it's mostly textural compared to the ear splitting cacophony heard on Die Robot and others; and while there's nothing melodic, not much you'd recognise as a conventional instrument - excepting percussive effects and an occasional guitar, the howling and grinding is not without tone, meaning all these massive slabs of concrete and metal work against one other to create a mood - a powerfully pensive sense of melancholy. Not for the first time, I'm reminded of My Bloody Valentine's first album, particularly the more ruined tracks where something of obvious beauty is still just about audible within its own distorted and destroyed remains; or, if you prefer - the big revelation for me regarding Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report when I first heard it at the age of sixteen or whatever, was how all those echoing noises, all the humming and buzzing formed itself into something quite haunting after two or three plays, despite the seemingly random nature of its composition. Tabla Rasa works in the same sort of way without sounding particularly like either Gristle or even My Bloody Valentine; so it's probably fair to say that, +DOG+ excepted, it's not quite like anything I've heard before - which is probably one hell of a claim to make in the year 2020, but there it is.

We Be Echo - Darkness is Home (2020)

You wait ages then a couple of them come along at the same time. This is my second new album from We Be Echo - who had remained pretty much silent for at least a couple of decades there - in a month. However, where Beat of the Drum excavates old material, Darkness is Home is the legitimate new new album recorded using different equipment and on a different continental landmass with a lot of water having passed under the bridge since Ceza Evi. I have to admit, I wasn't too sure what I thought about the prospect of new material from We Be Echo. There were a couple of later works on the Decades compilation, and they were decent but that was still a while back. Kevin Thorne shared a few things he'd been doing on the internet - seemingly from an album called Mood Swings which I gather either failed to achieve escape velocity or else turned into this - and they sounded all right, but they didn't sound like We Be Echo to me; or maybe I couldn't square the improved quality with those gritty but nevertheless startling tape experiments of yesteryear.

I wonder if that was just something to do with my expectations, or if it really was enough of a thing to have bothered Kevin himself, because whatever the case, Darkness is Home sounds very different to Ceza Evi and yet somehow it's immediately recognisable as a continuation of the same current. A lot has changed, notably Kevin is now vocalising rather than using cut-up tapes, and while he's hardly David Coverdale his voice works really well - a little muted and fairly low in the mix, but doing just enough to give the tracks some sense of personality. The technology is additionally an improvement on the Sharp music centre or whatever it was - proper studio quality with live sounding drums and bass pounding out driving rhythms of a kind which very much invoke Ceza Evi, but also Neu and Hawkwind - which is an aspect I've only just noticed. Oddly, more than anything, Darkness is Home makes me think of Nine Inch Nails if Trent Reznor had grown up listening to Wire rather than Kiss, particularly in some of the guitar work and the general aesthetic with all sorts of mysterious half-heard noises and scrapes shifting and settling in the digital background; and despite any of the above namechecks, it doesn't really sound like anyone else. Darkness is Home may even be the best album I've heard this year.

Purchase yonder!

Macintosh Plus - Floral Shoppe (2011)

I kept reading that this was the vapourwave album you need to hear before you die, and all of the usual shit, but every time I tried it was gone - removed from whatever platform it had turned up on due to uncleared samples. At least that was the thrust of the apology as I remember it, unlikely though it now seems given that the entire thing is nothing but samples and yet here it is again; and this time I managed to nab a copy before they all vanished.

Vapourwave seems to have been an internet phenomenon, popular amongst young people who spend way too much time playing computer games and talking about Chinese cartoons in chatrooms. I don't think it ever occupied any space formerly inhabited by the music biz as it existed in the days of physical media, so it's probably a bit odd that this vapourwave Never Mind the Bollocks should have been pressed onto vinyl. I'm not complaining because it means I can listen to it, although it seems equivalent to some ageing fifties guy rejoicing that they've taken the trouble to issue the songs of this Elvis Presley person on wax cylinder. Should anyone be grumbling about such parallels, citing the distinct absence of gangs of vapourwavers slashing cinema seats at their local picture house as evidence of it having failed to be a thing in any meaningful sense, then it's probably worth remembering that not everything is a repeat of some earlier form.

Perhaps ironically, vapourwave sort of is - or possibly was, given that I have no idea what the kids on the streets are up to these days so it may all be ancient history - constituting a repetition in so much as that it's mostly sampled eighties muzak, emphasising the slick, bland, overproduced and even corporate to the point of surrealism - swollen synth and MOR sax slowed down, cut up, processed, stripped of context and pulled back together without concessions to familiar structure or purpose; and Floral Shoppe seems to exemplify this like few other albums, so the legend would have it.

I haven't heard a lot of this stuff, although for my money, Blank Banshee do it better, further abstracting the source material before building it up into something new, weird, and shiny. Nevertheless, Floral Shoppe really is one hell of a record. The sampled material sounds almost familiar, something on the tip of one's recall which never quite gets there, heard through a codeine haze and repeating bars in rhythms which ignore the existing tempo and feel like fractal thoughts going through the mind of a console game with a hangover. The effect is weirdly hyperreal and is perfectly illustrated by the cover art. It's something bland polished up and put on a pedestal, presenting a juxtaposition of past and present so weirdly angular and shocking as to invoke J.G. Ballard - or what J.G. Ballard seems to represent to people who actually enjoy his writing, which I mostly don't.

Of course, it's supposed to be ephemeral - or that's the impression I get - but then maybe its having been immortalised on vinyl can be taken as simply another contradiction, just one of the many. Vapourwave, and particularly this album, demonstrate the impossibility of predicting the future - being absolutely alien while sounding familiar to the point of mundanity, and that's a good thing.

+DOG+ - The Ship of Dreams (2020)

Just when you thought you had noise all figured out (or at least I did), along came +DOG+ to demonstrate just how limited so many noise artists have been over the years - the sound of a jet engine blasting your face off, balaclava helmet, and what else have you got? Usually nothing, except in the case of +DOG+ who seem to have moved way, way beyond such basic tactics; and just when you thought you had +DOG+ all figured out, they release another album.

Some of the above will inevitably be off centre because, there's nothing wrong with the sound of a jet engine blasting your face off, and I suspect there must almost certainly be a shitload of other equally worthy noise artists whose work I simply haven't heard.

Once again, there's nothing musical in the conventional sense - excepting possibly a few drum rolls supplementing the cacophony on one of the earlier tracks - and it mostly resembles someone poking a screwdriver around inside an old transistor radio and shorting everything out, but amplified and multitracked allowing different strands of grinding texture to work against each other, and in ways which become so relentless that the whole somehow crosses over and is actually sort of relaxing, or at least hypnotic. I suppose if you happen to be on a plane and in flight when the jet engine conks out, having been previously knackered during some power electronics performance, if you're plummeting to earth from several miles up and you somehow manage to make peace with the idea of your chips being well and truly cashed, then The Ship of Dreams is possibly how that sense of serenity may sound. I expect I've said it before but I'll say it again, I find it genuinely astonishing how this lot keep coming up with something new from what you might imagine would be very much a restricted palette.

We Be Echo - Beat of the Drum (2020)

 

We Be Echo were one of a handful of groups who emerged at the beginning of the eighties in the wake of Throbbing Gristle removing themselves from the picture, specifically a handful of groups enjoying varying degrees of association with the same, even if just through members having met at some Gristle performance. Dave Henderson wrote about them in Sounds, and there's a reasonable possibility that you will have heard of at least Konstruktivists, Test Dept, Nocturnal Emissions, and Attrition. We Be Echo unfortunately never achieved quite the same level of relative infamy, releases being mostly limited to cassettes sold through the mail. By rights, some record company really should have been chucking money at Kevin Thorne, but it apparently wasn't to be.

Now - in anticipation of Darkness is Home, We Be Echo's first new album in a while - here's a reminder of what we missed, material dating from just after the Ceza Evi cassette which never really got a fair crack first time round. I've heard most, if not all, of these tracks on tapes which briefly did the rounds among friends of friends, and I've a feeling a couple of them may have been issued by the Mystery Hearsay label at some point; but Lordy, it's nice to have them cut into a big fat slab of vinyl at long last. A few of these feature a female vocalist rather than the taped voices which distinguished Ceza Evi, and so might be deemed, for want of a better description, what we all assumed Chris & Cosey would probably sound like before we actually heard Heartbeat. There's a dark edge, but nothing you could really call gothic, and the synths pump and pulse away in contrast to the moodier sort of ambient noise you may have associated with Gristle. Of all the Wild Planet bands, We Be Echo actually seemed to be the one you could just about play to friends who might otherwise shit themselves in the absence of anything recognisable as a tune. They might have seemed a fairly logical foreshadowing of Nine Inch Nails and the like, had anyone been listening; but were ultimately doomed to have become a sort of English counterpart to San Francisco's Deviation Social, among other names which should be better remembered.

Still, as Lenny Kravitz is my witness, it ain't over 'til it's over, and the new album is stunning. So here's a chance to get yourself up to speed - a pleasure which shouldn't be taken for granted given that for at least a decade it very much looked as though We Be Echo had fallen off the edge of the map.

Fad Gadget - Fireside Favourites (1980)

 

I can't help feeling that Frank Tovey never quite received his due or achieved the status he probably deserved, and I'm pretty damn certain it isn't going to be happening any time soon given that he's no longer with us. Fad Gadget didn't quite seem to fit anywhere even in their day, at least not with any degree of comfort - not quite independent in the sense of the Fall, ATV or Wire despite being on Mute, certainly not mainstream, too early and too weird for synthpop when that became a thing. Fad Gadget weren't even particularly or conveniently electronic, at least not as a way of life. I developed a bit of a fixation with them following something or other in Sounds music paper which brought the realisation that Fad Gadget seemed to be fucking everywhere, and yet I still had no idea what the hell they were supposed to be or sounded like. Then he was on the telly performing Coitus Interruptus with the help of a can of shaving foam and I became an immediate convert. I bought this one and Incontinent and played them more or less to the exclusion of everything else that summer. This was the summer during which I took up painting, left school, and first began to consider that the future might be different to the present, and that it might even be an improvement - at least for me. The possibilities seemed suddenly endless and Fad Gadget was somehow the soundtrack. I went for an interview at Maidstone College of Art half way across the country. I'm not sure I was even convinced an art degree was the right thing to do, but I turned up for the interview and was taken to the canteen which was in a bit of a state having played host to some event.

'Fad Gadget played here last night,' I was told, and that was enough for me.

Fireside Favourites still sounds incredible and like no other album, not even like any other Fad Gadget album. If synth-based artists were mostly pretending to be machines at the time, Tovey went further into weirder, more disturbing territories of the kind described by J.G. Ballard - something pervy and a bit damaged but with a pop sensibility that wasn't quite showbiz, unless we're talking the Iggy Pop end of things; something brooding and a bit reptilian - punk rock with a synth is probably as good a description as any. Fireside Favourites grinds and growls its oscillator driven hymns to consumerism, marketing and stupidity then winks to the camera like Val Doonican on the title track, paranoid, schizophrenic, claustrophobic, and yet somehow entirely human despite the sharp corners; and Arch of the Aorta may be one of the most beautifully epic pieces of instrumental music ever recorded.

World Domination Enterprises - Let's Play Domination (1988)

I hadn't thought about them in some time, then two days after I dig this out on a whim, they turn up on Bandcamp with Go Dominator, a new single, the first in a couple of decades - albeit a new single  which was recorded yonks ago but never released. It's as though the universe is trying to tell me something, something above and beyond that the time is right; because the time has always been right for World Domination. With each year that passes, these songs seem ever more relevant.

My first encounter was the phenomenal Asbestos Lead Asbestos, possibly one of the most wonderfully unpleasant songs ever committed to vinyl; although never really having had my finger on the pulse of anything, it was a couple of years old by the time I heard it and seemingly contemporary to the Acid Angels' Speed Speed Ecstacy which similarly named two substances in the title, and one of them twice, so Asbestos Lead Asbestos somehow felt like its dark toxic counterpart, at least to me.

I wasn't convinced by the album when first I heard it. I recognised the fucking horrible racket, but it seemed to lack the restraint which worked so well for Asbestos Lead Asbestos, taming the chaos just enough to suggest something in the vicinity of a funkier, noisier Public Image Limited around the time of Metal Box.

Anyway, I persisted. Initial impressions additionally suggested comparisons with the Pop Group, but where the Pop Group were overtly funky between the squalls of guitar noise, Let's Play Domination seems more like some primal rockabilly enterprise spinning horribly out of control. It's the bluesy inflections and the one foot somewhere in the Venn diagram with black music - dub, reggae, rap, disco and so on, hence covers of U-Roy, LL Cool J and Lipps Inc.'s Funkytown blasted out without any obvious trace of irony or sarcasm and so firmly distancing World Domination from fellow guitar noise merchants of the time.

You may notice I've already used both horrible and unpleasant as compliments, which is because it's hard to know what the fuck to do with that guitar sound. It's like a detuned power station throwing up, something with no equivalent in nature which has congealed in the grooves, a truly untamed beast which seems to contrast wildly with the tight but excitable rhythm and Keith Dobson's teen idol vocal, teen idol here meaning Ricky Nelson rather than Donny Osmond. The combination seems so perfect and simple that it's bewildering how no-one else thought to do it this way. There hasn't been much which has sounded quite like this album before or since, possibly because groups this violent and noisy rarely sound quite so happy about rubbing our faces in everything which is repulsive about human society right now, yet without simply adding to the shit mountain; and in Ghetto Queen, I'm not sure I've heard anything so beautiful which doesn't really communicate anything you would call a tune, just the jagged drone of electricity pylons fighting on the horizon in a world where the Cramps were actually the Swans, sort of.

New single available here.

The Beatles (1968)

I've no doubt that whole books have been written about the white album - as I'm not going to call it - but I haven't read any of them, have no plans to read any of them, and I'm not even going to do any internet homework with this one in the hope of coming to it absolutely fresh, as I suspect the lads would have wanted; and because I have a theory that this was the whole point of the album.

The Beatles were the first pop band I noticed when I was a kid, mainly because their music kept turning up on the telly and with such frequency that I began to recognise a few of the songs and asked my mum about them. The Magical Mystery Tour album turned up one Christmas in response, followed by Yellow Submarine, Sgt. Pepper and Rubber Soul all within the next six months. I planned to get the rest but I suspect the strain of saving up my pocket money month after month was getting a bit much; then I discovered punk rock, and eventually began to find everyone still banging on about the fab four two decades after the event a little exhausting. It wasn't that I'd had a change of heart so much as a change of focus, and it had become difficult to listen to the Beatles what with their music still getting heavy airplay on every radio station everywhere in the universe. You can only have so much of a good thing.

Eventually it died down so much that I no longer found myself subjected to Penny Lane on a daily basis, and I began to wonder what those other Beatles records had sounded like, and so I picked up where I'd left off as a sort of favour to my nine-year old self.

Happily, it's quite easy to apply fresh ears to the eponymous 1968 double because, of its thirty tracks, I count only three which have suffered from the same overexposure as Hey Jude and the rest. Dear Prudence I recognise mainly from the Banshees cover, and there are bits and pieces I recall as having been sampled on Jay-Z's Grey Album, but otherwise there's a lot here which I've never heard before. In case you missed the inference of that sentence, the significant detail is songs by the Beatles which I've never heard before, which seems pleasantly incredible in the second decade of the twenty-first century. More specifically, for me this means Beatles without baggage, without specific lines or riffs conjuring unwanted images of smirking regional television reporters introducing light-hearted news features about a foolish resident of a hill or a woman named Lucy who has her own jewellery business on the Isle of Skye.

What with the plain white cover and general lack of flash, I get the idea that the Beatles were trying to get away from being the Beatles, or at least from what the Beatles had become in terms of their fame - hence, I guess, the seemingly sarcastic revelations of Glass Onion which must surely have been addressed to those reading far too much into the back catalogue. To invoke what probably wasn't yet a cliché in 1968, it was just about the music, man.

Yet The Beatles is no reductionist return to basics, and is at least as progressive and experimental as the fab and swinging sixties albums which preceded it, arguably more so with the likes of Revolution 9, inspired doubtless by persons such as Pierre Schaeffer and actually much easier on the ear than its legend would suggest. Of course, they do return to basics on tracks such as the frankly still fucking incredible Back in the USSR which seemingly takes the piss out of the Beach Boys - something else I hadn't really noticed until now; but they were doing something with those basics - inventing heavy metal as some have argued, although I'm not convinced by that one - and they were doing it as the reinvestment they wanted to hear without intrusively commercial considerations. I'd say this holds true for most of the album despite that we're still talking about the Beatles rather than Arnold Schoenberg, so it pops but entirely on their terms; and as such comes across as a surprisingly intimate work compared with the more overt populism of the previous efforts. It's almost talking to itself with just one other individual in the room, that being yourself, the listener - which additionally provides, I suppose, some insight as to why Charles Manson believed the Beatles were sending secret messages specifically to him on this record.

It's become fairly easy to lose sight of why anyone ever liked this bunch, and I still refuse to believe that their legend deserves to eclipse any other legend you may care to name; and excepting Ringo, I found the solo material mostly underwhelming, but something about the combination of the four of them was genuinely wonderful and I'm impressed that an album of a full half-century vintage can still yield surprises, and so many.

Neu! (1972)

My introduction to krautrock was Glenn Wallis selling me a massive pile of albums in one huge job lot back in the nineties - forty, maybe fifty of them incuding Neu!, Kluster, Kraftwerk, Conrad Schnitzler, Faust, pretty much everything. I hadn't actually expressed any real interest in the form beyond that some of it sounded okay from what I could tell, but Glenn was converting to compact disc, needed the money and was asking just a few quid per album. I guess he'd reasoned that it was better that I should benefit than for him to get a few quid per album from some shop which would then have them all in the window for treble figures the following week. Vinyl Experience in Hanway Street had a bit of a reputation for such transactions, for example.

Really, I agreed to buy the collection more or less based on the idea that what I'd heard sounded okay and might turn out to sound amazing on closer inspection, and if so then I'd already have a ton of the stuff and wouldn't have to go through the rigmarole of tracking it all down. However, the collection was such as to stop up a sort of mental bottleneck in my listening habits, meaning I never quite got around to giving any of it the attention it probably deserved because there was so fucking much of it and anyway, maybe I was busy listening to - off the top of my head - the first Denim album that week; which is probably why it's taken me nearly thirty years to get to grips with this one.

I'm a little weary of hearing about how everything can now be traced back to krautrock and how I was listening to krautrock when none of you lot had even heard of it and so on and so forth, not least because it gets in the way of the music, and the music is - in this instance - pretty great and a lot more accessible than might be suggested by its reputation.

Neu! was formed by two members of Kraftwerk who decided they didn't want to be robots, and continues the original, somewhat more organic spirit of the same, combining the machine with the music but without negating the human component. It's possibly not actually that far removed from either Pink Floyd or similarly flared psychonauts of the musical abstract of similar vintage, but my reference points are limited to Neu! essentially being Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report five years earlier but without either the darkness or Porridge's ego getting in the way. It's very much the same sonic exploration with effects transforming music to noise, subtracting nature from the sound, and predating Neubauten's road drills by at least a decade. As a whole, it really is a sonic sculpture, and it still works because I guess it was so far ahead of the curve that it could have been recorded yesterday. Where Gristle may have invoked castration and other unmentionables, here we have - pure and unalloyed - the sheer euphoria of strange new sounds which take our thoughts to places previously unvisited.

It wasn't to last, and Dinger in particular perpetrated some truly underwhelming stuff under the same name in later years, but this remains arguably as startling and joyous within its field as did Never Mind the Bollocks in its own; and the reputation is, for once, fully deserved.

Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter (2013)

Well, as we all know, Adam was substantially unwell for a little while, as became apparent when a friend discovered him digging a tunnel in his kitchen using just a teaspoon, a tunnel proposed as a means of visiting an ex-girlfriend. I possibly have some of the details wrong but that's how I heard it, although for what it may be worth a number of my most valued friends have spent at least a little time detained at the pleasure of the psychiatric profession. To be honest, I was more bothered that the previously reliable Ant had seemingly fallen so hard with those last two albums, Manners & Physique and Wonderful. To be fair, I've only heard them in bits, but what I heard wasn't anything great, so I stand by my perhaps only vaguely informed disdain. He could be forgiven Strip, and he could be forgiven Where Did Our Love Go on the telly at the behest of a man who is alleged to have married small boys during clandestine wedding ceremonies, but somehow, somewhere it felt as though a bridge had been crossed and that it was kind of a one-way deal; and yes, I know he wrote a genuinely great autobiography, but even so…

Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter suggests a certain degree of mania as titles go, which might not bode well. I suppose one could argue that Marrying the Gunner's Daughter is actually the title of an enterprise in which Adam Ant plays a character called the Blueblack Hussar, but maybe it doesn't really matter. After all, he's done this sort of thing before - Picasso Visita el Planeta de los Simios etc. etc.

Just to get the objection out of the way, Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter is listed as alternative rock, lo-fi on Discogs which can fucking fuck the fuck off for starters. I assume most of the album was recorded in Boz Boorer's spare room on his computer despite which, it doesn't sound like a tape by Another Headache from 1992 and is no more fucking lo-fi than those early Beatles albums recorded using a Coke can and a bit of string for a microphone - or even Sgt. fucking Pepper for that matter. Lo-fi is what young men with beards listen to as they open up their Hoxton cafés ready for another day of selling overpriced breakfast cereal to tossers. Lo-fi, my arse.

Anyway, to get to the actual point, Marrying the Gunner's Daughter is the last thing I expected to hear from Adam Ant - not only a decent record, but a record that's at least as decent as most of the good ones. I get the impression it's mainly Adam with Boz Boorer, musically speaking. You could argue that it resembles an extended demo tape by virtue of the fact that they obviously liked these tracks well enough to stick them on the record rather than shell out for a fancy studio, but I'm not sure it matters. As a whole, the thing doesn't sound like a manifesto as Dirk and maybe a few of the others did, but it holds together simply as a set of fucking great songs pulled together by people who clearly had a blast writing and recording them. Cool Zombie is at least as monumental as Deutscher Girls, Miss Thing or any of the others. There are even surprisingly moving tributes to both Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren - surprisingly because I've tended to regard those two as a pair of twats, personally speaking. My expectations were fairly low, but this album really got to me through its raw honesty and emotional power. I don't know if it will be his last one - given that it came out about eight years ago and I've only just heard of it - but if so, he's ending on a much higher note than surely any of us could have predicted.

Beef Terminal - The Grey Knowledge (2002)

I don't really know anything about this guy - one M.D. Matheson trading as Beef Terminal, which I've somehow only just realised is apparently slang for a woman's area. The previous album, 20 GOTO 10, was sent into The Sound Projector for review about er… two decades ago, come to think of it, and it was chuffin' fab; and two decades have somehow passed before it's occurred to me to have a look and see if the guy did anything else.

I vaguely recall some loosely descriptive publicity material turning up with 20 GOTO 10, mostly focussing on the album having been recorded in Matheson's kitchen then musing over the mental well-being of the artist on the grounds of the album being distinctly less buoyant than, off the top of my head, Kylie Minogue's 1988 debut. Anyway, this one was similarly recorded in Matheson's kitchen and maintains the sombre mood established on the previous disc. One aspect of what drew me to the music of Beef Terminal was, perhaps oddly, the fact of it sounding as though it had been recorded on a couple of standard tape decks, one hissy backing track bounced onto the next deck with fresh instrumentation added in the absence of anything so lavish as even a portastudio. I'm admittedly overstating the rudimentary production values here, but 20 GOTO 10 had that sort of quality, and succeeded specifically because it made a virtue of its shortcomings, repurposing the hiss and rumble as atmosphere much as did, I suppose, My Bloody Valentine.

The Grey Knowledge sounds maybe a little more expensive, but Matheson has kept everything fairly simple, hence almost painfully direct in terms of raw emotional impact. Mostly it's sombre but melodic guitar almost bordering on the bitter-sweet, and I suspect a few of the pseudo-bass lines may be played on the E-string of the same. Rhythms, where provided, are either a cheap-ish drum machine or looped samples of noise, mains hum, or whatever. It's almost entirely instrumental - excepting a Eurhythmics cover, which probably makes more sense on disc than on paper - and effects are limited to a slightly boomy reverb here and there.

It's difficult to describe the nuts and bolts of what happens on The Grey Knowledge without it sounding massively underwhelming, and yet the sum of these parts is hypnotic, engulfing, and almost overpowering in its suggestion of tragedy, loss, and anything else which might reduce you to tears. If ever one should require a demonstration of the maxim about less being more, it's right here.

Residents - B*** S** (1971)

I still haven't quite got used to the idea that we now know the names written on at least two of the Residents' birth certificates, and somehow I prefer to continue to think of them as four anonymous beings who may or may not be of this planet. Similarly confusing has been my discovering the existence of this early, early album, apparently some Record Store Day thing which I presumably missed due to a general lack of enthusiasm for green vinyl reissues of Barry Manilow.

The original liner notes of Meet the Residents from 1974 muttered about the notoriety of earlier sound experiments, to which I never really gave much consideration until I noticed they had issued The Warner Brothers Album as a Record Store Day artifact, by which point I couldn't really afford the fucking thing. The Warner Brothers Album was approximately their first record, sent as a demo tape to the aforementioned label and accordingly rejected as too weird or something before being returned to the group - sent to the residents of the provided return address, which is how they came by their name; and this, discreetly abbreviated to BS for obvious reasons, was probably their second album, sort of, posthumously rescued from the can. It seems the bloke at Warner Brothers didn't think much of this one either.

The strange thing is that you really can tell it's the Residents, and yet it sort of isn't, not quite. The tendency to discordant nursery rhyming and pretending to be an alien was already very much a thing, but it sounds as though it was recorded on this planet by a bunch of hairies who may or may not have spent at least some time hanging out with Beefheart or even Zappa, guys who went about their daily business in regular clothes, and who probably had regular names written on birth certificates. The other strange thing is that BS is kind of groovy, jazzy and evocative in terms which had been thoroughly strained out of the musical gene pool by the time we got to actually meet the Residents, because they still sounded like a band of regular guys, at least around the edges of We Stole This Riff and Deepsea Diver Song. Peculiarly, after listening to this record, Meet the Residents still feels like their first album where this might be something popped through from an alternate universe or recorded during the negative time counting down to the birth of the band as we didn't actually come to know them, if you see what I mean. Typically, it seems not even the Residents themselves are unanimous in recognising BS as having been their own work. The more you know, the greater the mystery…

C-Murder - The Truest Shit I Ever Said (2005)

C-Murder has, at least on a couple of occasions, been characterised as not much more than a Tupac impersonator, which has always struck me as a little unfair. Shakur's influence is undeniable and can be heard on certain tracks, but there's more to this guy's delivery, even if they share thematic common ground for reasons which should be fucking obvious. C-Murder's monologues lack the raucous celebration heard on much of Tupac's material, sounding positively introverted by comparison - a man on the edge mumbling and agonising to himself. It's intense, almost hard to listen to, and not actually like the work of any other rap artist that I can think of, once you listen closely.

Another thing which strikes me as a little unfair is C-Murder having been a resident of the stripey hole for a period now approaching two decades, following his supposed shooting of Steve Thomas in January, 2002. I'm no lawyer, but the case looks kind of patchy from over here, and it's possibly worth remembering that the American legal system often seems to have some difficulty telling the difference between actual use of firearms in murder cases and black men who rap about the same; but who the fuck knows?

C-Murder had issued four albums prior to incarceration, five if you include Tru Dawgs - although it's sort of a compilation - but not one which ever seemed quite so great as it probably should have been. Bossalinie from 1999 came pretty close to perfect but just wasn't quite there - way too many tracks, too many creaking skits, the usual trouble. Trapped in Crime could have learned something from previous mistakes but was ultimately hamstrung by the crisis of confidence which had seemingly overwhelmed the label, resulting in beats which aspired to snatch the crown back from that other New Orleans label by approximating what Mannie Fresh had been doing, while turning away from the producers who made No Limit great in the first place. So Truest Shit was his fifth album - sixth if we're counting Tru Dawgs - vocals recorded by his lawyer during visiting hours, then presumably striped onto the tracks after the fact.

I guess the sudden introduction of porridge to the artistic equation serves as one hell of a focus, because never even mind just great in context of the C-Murder back catalogue, The Truest Shit I Ever Said is a landmark rap album - intense as fuck but as ever kept in check by C-Murder's somber, contemplative delivery, and matched to the perfect range of beats - sharp, electronic and yet powerfully soulful. Even in tearing the club up, even during seemingly unapologetic tales of gunplay*, this is an album written by a man who has had a lot of time to think about this stuff, and his testimony is as powerful as you might hope.

Of course, it turns out he's released five more since this one, all vocalised from with the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which I've somehow missed because I've had a musically confusing decade. On the other hand, I make no claims towards being a rolling news service or having a finger on any particular pulse, so please feel free to use the above information as you see fit.

*: Possibly because he doesn't actually have anything to apologise for.

2Pac - Loyal to the Game (2004)

This return visit has been inspired by Eminem. I'd picked up a copy of Eminem's Kamikaze at CD Exchange and, as with most of his albums, it's good, even great, and almost a classic but not quite; and it occurred to me that it's strange how such a genuinely phenomenal lyricist and top shelf beatmaker has never quite delivered a classic album where even Spice 1 - off the top of my head - has at least four to his name; although admittedly I haven't listened to Infinite in a while, so it's probably that one if it's any of them. With every single album, Eminem always comes so close but somehow never quite gets there, and it's taken me a long fucking time to work out why that might be, or why I think that might be. It's the combination of his delivery with his beats - inordinately complex sprinkles of finely tuned particles, single syllables picking at the line in a sort of dizzying pizzicato which demands that the listener keep up; and which is dropped to a beat which often does something very similar but in musical terms, again with the pizzicato but this time as notes plucked over what may as well be the soundtrack to a silent movie illustrating the bad guy creeping tippy-toe up those stairs with an evil pantomime grin on his face. That's how it sounds to me anyway, and to break the problem down into basic English, the music and the delivery do roughly the same thing and so lack the sort of sonic contrast needed to make the thing work, or at least to make it work as it probably should; and I base this theory on 2Pac's Loyal to the Game which posthumously assembles Shakur's lines over beats provided by Eminem, and which is generally fucking fantastic and certainly a potentially classic album.

At the risk of enraging basement dwelling representatives of the fully intact cherry community, 2Pac was never the greatest lyricist of all time. He had an amazing delivery, stuff worth saying, and certainly qualifies as a great, but he was never the greatest; and while those first few albums might justifiably be termed classic and the rest are mostly decent, his posthumous reputation seems out of all proportion, not least because those posthumous albums have been pretty damn patchy, sprawling double disc sets presumably released as such so as to make the most of what few genuinely memorable tracks emerged from the final sessions. I get the impression that 2Pac's last months may have been mostly compulsive studio work, heavy dope paranoia, and hardly any sleep because that's how those albums sound. They're worth a listen, but they can be hard work and the beats, with one or two exceptions, are fucking terrible - bland karaoke funk which may as well have been lifted from the closing credits of low budget cop shows.

Whether by accident or design, as producer, Eminem's mission statement here seems to have been to finish 2Pac's legacy on a high note, something which at least reminds us how much we loved 2Pacalypse Now and Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. So Em's plinky-plonky Addams Family themes are here contrasted with a quite different sort of vocal, 2Pac's driven yet leisurely cruise through whatever was on his mind that day; and the combination is dynamite, bringing out the best of everyone. To be fair, it's kind of a weird listen, not least for pairing 2Pac with the likes of Obie Trice, Lloyd Banks, 50 Cent and others who were probably still propping up the walls of technical colleges back when 2Pac and Alanis Morissette were talking about opening that restaurant together; and it's weirder that 2Pac calls out his posthumous collaborators by name even as their own verses refer directly to his passing. I'd heard that Eminem hired a 2Pac impersonator for those beyond the grave shout outs, or else indulged in some sort of improbable tape wizardry, but it maybe doesn't matter because the joins are invisible and the whole thing hangs together beautifully, regardless of the potential time paradox. A few of these tracks are sort of familiar, with vocals lifted from existing recordings, or variant takes thereof, but Loyal to the Game nevertheless feels like a real living, breathing album rather than something scraped off the cutting room floor. It's emotionally powerful, intelligent, inspiring, and without all the exhausting beef of those posthumous Death Row releases; and is as such probably closer to how we need to remember the guy.

We should probably also keep in mind that this is the sort of thing Eminem is capable of when he has his eye on the ball, which is pretty impressive and should definitely count for a classic album. As though to illustrate the strength of Eminem's vision here, we end with four bonus tracks from fellow producers, not least among whom would be Scott Storch; and if they range from great to more of what we had on those Death Row discs, they sound so out of place as to belong to something else.

Contrary to the protests of certain nutcases, I still say he was a very naughty boy rather than the actual messiah, but Loyal to the Game at least stands as a memorial to what was so great about the guy before the picture got distorted.

Intensive Studies - Perfectly (ab)Normal (2019)

I anticipated something fairly noisy given the cover and involvement of +DOG+ persons, but this is quite different, or at least an album which makes sense as being approximately descended from Expandobrain - who were amazing, for those of you who remain stubbornly unconverted. Intensive Studies are a little more informal, maybe a little more raggedy around the edges, but it's roughly the same psychological landscape. What we have are songs played, possibly even improvised on the spot by a band of guitar, bass, drums and vocals. There's an occasional bum note or missed queue and not all of the songs end at quite the same speed as when they set out, so it could almost be a rehearsal recording, although the sound quality is exceptionally clear. I'd say it reminds me of Pavement, except I haven't heard much Pavement and only have a general impression of what they sounded like. I won't say it's lo-fi because that seems kind of insulting to me. More than anything, Perfectly (ab)Normal reminds me of at least a couple of bands of which I myself was a member, so technically we're talking up to the job at hand rather than anything flashy and definitely no guitar solos. Specifically it reminds me of at least a couple of bands of which I myself was a member and which had been listening to a hell of a lot of Warsaw and early Joy Division demos, although it doesn't really sound like Joy Division beyond some vague awareness of their having existed. Lyrically it makes me think of Steve Albini, inhabiting that same twilight land of screwy, slightly upsetting folk narratives of Biblical reality and rural feuds. Without seeming like it does a whole lot, Perfectly (ab)Normal really gets under your skin.

Buy it here.

Nocturnal Emissions in Dub volume two (2020)

When the first one came out, I assumed it would be - you know - a remix of Going Under or No Sacrifice with more echo, but no, it actually did what it said on the notional tin, and actually did it without making me think of Alan Partridge. For anyone still wrestling with the idea of Nocturnal Emissions as dub reggae, all I can suggest is that you listen to the stuff because he's not fucking about. As with other stylistic bathtubs into which the Ayers toe has been submerged, the man knows what he's doing, and after a couple of plays the shock should have worn off.

With hindsight, I realise the first volume probably wasn't such a surprise after all because for all that its heart seems clearly rooted in the general vicinity of the Effra Road, the percussive sounds, the hi-hat, and the shreds of musique concrete all skitter around the bass and the melody with a rhythm - and a disregard for rhythm - which you will certainly recognise from those previous Emissions less conspicuously in thrall to King Tubby, Scientist and the like.

There seems to be less stretching of boundaries on this one, or at least less of them stretched in a particular direction off towards something distantly related to drum and bass; or to put it another way, volume two has more of a traditional sound in so much as that most of this could have come from a semi-regular band going through a sound desk. It's more organic, less about wave forms pasted to another part of the screen, at least spiritually. This isn't, by the way, to suggest musical conservatism, more like if the first volume took us up to maybe eleven in the evening, this one takes us to around four in the morning, by which point we're all seriously fucking stewed, barely even able to stand (not that we have any need to do so) as we're sucked in by the rhythm. I'm assuming that description should be familiar to at least some of you.

Volume two takes it back from the digital rasta vibe of its predecessor to something predating dancehall, something in which the hand which crafted Viral Shedding is clearly heard, particularly in the bass, but which absorbed a different set of influences from its south-east London environment in a variant timeline. This is a mighty and righteous sound, as they probably say.

Adam & the Ants - Kings of the Wild Frontier (1980)

I was probably born at exactly the right time to appreciate this one. I'd just turned fifteen and was already vaguely aware of the Ants, and if not intimately so, enough so to have anticipated this second album and got some pleasure out of it before you suddenly couldn't escape from the fucking thing. Six months earlier, I'd found the Ants disturbing yet fascinating, mainly because for me - tucked away in the Midlands and still at school - they seemed only to exist as an indie chart presence and rumours. The music press hated them, and the astonishingly thorough lack of coverage lent them the appeal of forbidden fruit. Paul Woods told me he remembered a few of their early performances, notably one in which Ant supposedly provoked audience members into beating him up and appeared to be getting off on the thrashing. This, Paul said, was quite disturbing to watch, and that's my only real clue as to why the Ants should have been so reviled in their early days, although personally I suspect it may have been more to do with the Cromwellian demand for authenticity during those early post-punk years. Adam & the Ants had art college associations and were born from a fifties revival band called Bazooka Joe and were therefore fake, unlike the Clash - something in that general direction anyway.

Of course, it's all bollocks, as was the notion of their having sold out due to thirteen-year old schoolgirls buying this album. Adam & the Ants - here meaning mainly Adam Ant so as to include everything up to Vive Le Rock - had been an essentially theatrical concern from the very beginning, hence few anthems to either the dole queue or boredom as a general condition - very much sons of Bowie, and Roxy Music in particular. It's all too easy too think of this as the third version of the Ants, following on from the fetish-punk decadence then stark European cinema phases; and this was populism, musical eclecticism, Morricone's sense of scale, and songs which specifically referred to being in a band called Adam & the Ants. I seem to remember one critic objecting that these songs were about antmusic, as distinct from actually being antmusic such as we'd heard on Dirk Wears White Sox. Looking back now, without having to filter out appearances on Jim'll Fix It or the Basil Brush Show, it's difficult to miss the continuity. Sure, they were absurd, even pantomime with Los Rancheros and Jolly Roger and a lot of what came after, but they always had been. Music hall was sort of the point, and had been from the very beginning with Young Parisians, Punk in the Supermarket, Il Duce and others. The only difference here is the camera pointing in yet another direction, new scenery, change of wardrobe, and with a shift from black and white to garish technicolor.

Having been listening to the Ants for a full four decades, I still don't fully understand why they weren't massive from the start, so their abrupt ascent to teenybop stardom with this album is hardly surprising because, aside from anything else you might take into consideration, Kings of the Wild Frontier is an unreservedly great record. If Dirk had been European cinema, this was Hollywood, maybe even the Hollywood version of Hollywood - wide-eyed optimism, noble ideas albeit in cartoon form, and Link Wray twanging away in the background establishing a sort of pop classicism. It steals from pretty much everything, blends, mixes, matches, but steals with love, and so we have spaghetti westerns sharing grooves with the b-movie horror of Ants Invasion or Killer in the Home. Mostly it's a collage, elements which shouldn't go together but which work perfectly, and as such it's a pretty fucking weird record to have occupied either a number one slot or a teenage bedroom at the tail end of the seventies.

I've never been embarrassed to admit to loving this album, or Prince Charming or any of those which came after for that matter, and I've no idea as to the general health of the Ants' legacy these days. You may not like it now but you will seemed quite prescient back in November 1980, and I'm sure there's still time if you didn't but nevertheless fancy giving it a go.

Sleaford Mods - All That Glue (2020)

I must admit to having raised an eyebrow at the release of this, having dutifully snapped up all those obscure singles as they came out, then bought at least a couple of them again when they were reissued on the Chubbed Up + compilation, and now here's the opportunity to buy Jolly Fucker and others a third time along with some unreleased stuff, including the title track, All That Glue - the first thing ever recorded by Fearne and Williamson - but only as a fucking flexidisc issued with the gold vinyl edition.

Bollocks, I said to myself and bought the compact disc in protest, and because my shelves now have space for about another fifteen vinyl albums and not much more before I'll need to schlep down to Lowes and buy a new reinforced shelving unit, possibly also a new room for the house.

Grumbling aside, Glue duplicates only four tracks from Chubbed Up +, but they're four good 'uns, and as something vaguely intended to serve as an introduction to the Sleaford Mods for those who might require one, it's hard to fault. Actually, Glue is hard to fault even if you already have most of the previous albums. Not only does this represent their absolute best, but the sequencing from 2012's McFlurry at the beginning through to closing with When You Come Up To Me from 2018 reveals a progression and even a sophistication you could be forgiven for having missed. It's not all Bontempi loops and Jason yelling the word bollocks even if it may sometimes seem that way. There's a much greater variety of emotion here than I realised even with anger, frustration and sarcasm as the core, and for all its apparent simplicity, even rudimentary composition, the music evokes Joy Division, Suicide - the band rather than the deed - the early Pistols, and all manner of unsung laptop weirdies without actually sounding like anyone else out there; which is to say that even familiar tracks such as Jobseeker or Tarantula Deadly Cargo seem freshly dosed with manic energy as part of this collection, spliced together with tracks which somehow slipped through the cracks, of which Blog Maggot is possibly the greatest.

So I was completely wrong. This is just as essential as the rest, just as vital, and I only wish the awkward buggers had included the track from which the title was derived on the CD, but I suppose they must have had their reasons. Having achieved something resembling fame, and enough so as to summon the threatening stench of a regular restaurant review column in the Guradian like that bloke from Franz Ferdinand, we're now approaching the point at which gentlemen of a certain vintage will inevitably announce either that they only liked the first record, or they never really liked the Sleaford Mods in the first place - contrarian bollocks at least as risible as refusing to listen to anything which fails to tickle the hit parade. All That Glue serves as a timely reminder of what makes this band great and why we listen to their records. Let's not take them for granted.

+DOG+ - Helpless (2020)

Here's another one by an assemblage of which I was in complete ignorance this time last year, more noise, and yet somehow nothing like the previous offering. I'm not really significantly wiser than I was with 2019's Die Robot, aside from having discovered that +DOG+ have been at it for two full decades, and that one of them was in Big City Orchestra. Annoyingly, this leaves me with very little to write about other than the actual music, but never mind. I'll do my best.

As I probably said, I'm sort of familiar with noise - or have been at various points of my life - but usually as something more overtly confrontational than Helpless; not that Helpless isn't harsh as fuck, but there's a lot of other stuff going on too. Die Robot seemed to carry some sort of narrative, albeit one which was probably equivalent to patterns seen while staring into a fire. This one seems to do the same sort of thing but with less to go on. Vocals are infrequent, usually distorted beyond recognition, leaving us with just titles, so whatever it communicates is effectively something beyond language. that said, the album draws you in and carries you along just the same. There's a sense of progression or at least evolution and it leaves the listener with an impression of having understood something, even if I'm not sure how to describe what that seems to be.

Yes, you may well ask, but what does the fucker sound like?

A lot of it sounds like coffee poured into rudimentary electronic circuitry as someone rummages around with a screwdriver, yet producing a much wider range of noises than you might anticipate, with different tones of distorted racket clearly divided and complementing each other in terms which seem almost musical. Occasional feedback intrudes, or what sounds like a drum kit undergoing demolition, or reversed vocals, or organ chords clipped to electronic sludge; then for the sake of contrast we get a few bars of She's So Fine, and finally Torpor in which the noise struggles to hold notes and which I suppose you might be justified in calling stadium mains hum.

These ten tracks could be unrelated pieces, but they surely fit together too well for it to be entirely accidental, forming a powerful, almost symphonic slab of raw texture which reveals more and more of itself with each listen. I am genuinely knocked out by what I'm hearing of this bunch.

Available here.

Pokey LaFarge - Rock Bottom Rhapsody (2020)

Some YouTube algorithm seemed to think I'd enjoy Pokey's Fuck Me Up, so I watched the video clip and I did. In fact, I fucking loved it - a gritty slice of the country that got left behind in the dirt when everyone else signed up for throat mics, autotune and sponsorship deals. I'd never heard of the guy. A month later I came across this album in Barnes & Noble - which is apparently his eighth - and it was the only thing in the store which seemed worth buying so here we are.

I find it all weird and disconcerting. Pokey LaFarge was born in 1983, by which point I'd left school. Rock Bottom Rhapsody, it could be argued, is the music of my father's generation - musicianship, real instruments, black and white photography with colour tint, and yet somehow it manages to avoid feeling entirely like an exercise in nostalgia. It's heavily traditional, I guess, drawing on country, blues, soul, rockabilly, ragtime, honkytonk or whatever you want to call it, and it's anything but a museum piece or an exercise. The playing is expressive without showboating, loose enough to let you know it's alive, and Pokey sings a little like David Sedaris's impersonation of Ella Fitzgerald - with maybe a touch of Ricky Nelson - but his voice is nevertheless perfect and the ease with which it all fits together and slips right into your heart and your veins is astonishing. It's music which still works, which still does its job, and is delivered with so little irony that it may as well be drum and bass when stood next to whatever autotuned vapourtrap monstrosity is ticking boxes on The Voice this week.

This is how all those authenticity twats would give their left one to sound, reminding us of why anyone ever bothered listening to music in the first place. Beyond all the phone connections and satellite links, all the bullshit, this album is what it feels like when you get back down to earth, to the human level, when you think about loved ones and people who died, and the little bit of good you've managed to scrape together for yourself. This album is about the stuff which really matters and about which you may have forgotten, and after the first couple of plays you may begin to wonder how you ever lived without Pokey LaFarge.

David Bowie - Images 1966-1967 (1973)

I had all but seven (I think) of these tracks on Decca's World of David Bowie compilation, purchased for a quid from Dean Howe at school and which was therefore among the first albums I owned; but I'd always intended to buy this double so as to get the extra tracks, and now at last I have. Life is too short to be without a recording of The Laughing Gnome in some form.

So that's another one ticked off the list, but one which has brought a weird realisation: these silly novelty records may actually have constituted Bowie's greatest work, even if it's easily forgotten once you get to spinning later, less patently ludicrous offerings.

I never quite got the idea that Bowie was attempting to bring about a marriage of pop music and theatre because it sounded like one of those meaningless juxtapositions persons such as myself suggest without actually having thought about it - imagine Splodgenessabounds covering the Swans, and so on and so forth. Additionally, it has long been my contention that theatre is mostly wank, and mime in particular - so that's a side of Bowie to which I've never really paid much attention, which is probably why I never noticed despite it having been staring me in the face all along.

Most of these tracks are novelty records, which isn't in itself a bad thing, but which I've tended to regard as Dave desperately trying to squeeze out a crowd pleaser and secure fame and fortune prior to taking himself more seriously with Space Oddity and all which came after; but the form is no more opportunist than anything he did later, despite sounding like it wouldn't have been out of place on the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang soundtrack. That's the theatrical quality he was talking about, I guess - songs as short stories, but stories told by multiple characters in ludicrous situations as distinct from, She loves you yeah yeah yeah, or even the more prosaic storytelling of country music which tends towards the autobiographical or is at least less likely to wear an orange wig whilst pretending to be from outer space. I suppose you could argue that Sgt. Pepper's inhabits roughly the same territory, but this phase of Bowie's career owes more to variety, even sixties lounge music than to rock and roll, which is in turn reduced to just one of a number of costumes worn when the narrative requires; and yes, I have indeed heard of Anthony Newley, obviously.

That which distinguishes this music from pure novelty is the sheer range. Beyond the chocolate box psychedelia of Come and Buy My Toys or She's Got Medals - none of which are to be sniffed at, I might add - we have the likes of London Boys - which just plain tears your fucking heart out - We Are Hungry Men - which somehow tackles eugenics and population with such incongruous and chilling effect that I'm sort of surprised Von Thronstahl haven't covered it, and which presumably foreshadows The Supermen, Bewlay Brothers and others of its thematic type - the Pinteresque Tony Day, and of course The Laughing Gnome, which is just fucking brilliant and I don't care what anyone says. Yet everything here superficially sounds like something which should feature a bowler hatted sixties cat winking and grinning at the camera with that lush big band production, all sweeping strings and pizzicato for emphasis.

We forget this material was as good as it is because we often forget, in our rush to be all grown up, that great art can be cheery, populist and silly without subtracting from whatever the hell it's trying to say; and so these songs have spent most of their collective existence as the pissing about from before the good stuff with no-one quite sure whether it was an album or a stack of singles or a compilation or a greatest hits without any actual hits and a photo of some completely different glam rock bloke on the cover. This is a shame because, as I say, I've a feeling this may actually have been his greatest work. Listen to the opening bars of She's Got Medals and tell me different.

Paranoise - Ishq (2001)

This was originally submitted to Ed Pinsent's Sound Projector for review, but I get the impression Ed found it a bit fishy and so passed it onto me for target practice, along with pages of off-putting photocopied press material explaining just how amazing the band were. Sure enough, it looked like something in need of a good clip around the ear - world music earnestly sampled over prog rock, guitar solos, Terrance fucking McKenna, and five white guys cradling cute ethnic instruments on the back cover doing that face which Sting sometimes does to let you know that he's in touch with the ancient rhythm of the spheres and just recently met this really amazing old guy halfway up a mountain in Baja California…

Oh - and the full name given on the cover is the Ancient Ecstatic Brotherhood of Π, with the Π presumably being mystic shorthand for Paranoise. Anyway, that was a whole two decades ago and Ishq gets a second go because, against the most dour expectations I've possibly ever harboured, it still sounds fucking amazing. I doubt there has ever been such a gap between what I anticipated and what I actually experienced. Musically Paranoise are competent as fuck and fairly proggy with all sorts of funny time signatures, but with killer songs, really beautiful stuff which, just as the press release claimed, invoke Led Zeppelin's Kashmir amongst other things. In fact a lot of Ishq reminds me of that era of Led Zeppelin, back when heavy rock really was heavy rock rather than metal, but there's an occasional hint of something jazzier, maybe the more new-agey end of the Killing Joke back catalogue, even fucking Styx on the particularly monumental I Own; and what differentiates these songs from anything else to which that description may loosely apply, is the use of samples. Ethnic wails selotaped to a beat are nothing new, as the Severed Heads, Moby and a thousand others are my witness, and as with others who've been down the same road, I have to wonder about this sort of thing which, at worst, seems like cultural tourism with traditional vocals sourced from Kenya, Bulgaria, Morocco, Afghanistan and elsewhere, united seemingly by their lack of electricity and plumbing. I believe othering is the term, but I'll refrain because it's a neologism favoured mainly by complete wankers, and because Paranoise at least credit those they've sampled as co-writers, and because the blend of pounding mathematically weird rock and native voice is frankly fucking dynamite. If you're going to do this sort of thing, you really have to get it right, and Paranoise absolutely nailed it on this record.

Of course, the message of Ishq is ecological, anti-corporate and aspires to revolution, so the use of indigenous voices - those most trampled upon by the guys we're singing about - is appropriate, even bringing a balance to the narrative it might not have had were it just five white dudes from Connecticut singing about how they don't like Nestlé. Additionally, great use is made of spoken pieces by Noam Chomsky and environmental activist Vandana Shiva, with only Terrence McKenna's drippy Woody Allen impersonation letting the side down - not that what he says is without value, but as usual he seasons his testimony with psychobabble. Still, a minute of rolling eyes and pulling faces is easily overlooked in context of something which rocks this hard for a full hour, which states its case with such conviction and confidence, and which doesn't really sound quite like any other record I can think of. I somehow imagined one of the more self-important of Sting's solo works, but got a more worldly Physical Grafitti without the kiddy fiddling.

A Cold Smell (2020)

Here's another various artists compilation from Sweden's AUT issued as, from what I can gather, an edition of sixty-one cassettes, so any recommendation I might make about you rushing out and buying one will be redundant by the time you read this. I've already seen one going for twenty-five bucks over on Discogs. We're therefore in the territory of I've heard this one but you haven't, so apologies in advance.

The shame of it is that A Cold Smell may even be their best release yet, at least of those I've heard. Contributors include the mighty Lars Larsson, Dom Goda Djuren, the Woodpeckerz, BJ Nilsen (who some may recall from collaborations with Z'ev and Chris Watson), and a whole host of persons unknown to me. Additional confusion has arisen from my inability to say for sure quite who is responsible for which track. There seem to be more tracks on the first side than are credited on the cover, and, for example, I thought I was enjoying Kroppen's Delvis Definitivt when it mumbled something about a Marlboro Man, which is actually the title of the one which follows and which is by Facit & Felicia Lindgren, so who knows?

Well, maybe it doesn't matter because the whole thing is good from start to finish, and the tracks are sequenced in such a way as to make for a thoroughly satisfying whole. There's a lot of variety here, although there's a sort of logic following one track leading into the next which, for some reason, actually reminds me of listening to Gristle's Second Annual Report for the first time. It's not that you would be necessarily justified in calling this an old school industrial compilation, but there's a shared aesthetic here and at least a few bits of technology taken from roughly the same shelf. Assuming Maskin's Att Ge Bort Blommor is the thing I'm thinking of as the first track, we open with a wonderfully pensive bit of lo-fi for primitive drum machine and brooding bass, possibly actually two basses, which makes me think of Suicide for a much colder climate. This segues into something completely different which nevertheless makes perfect sense as the next track, and so on and so forth with contributions alternating between hypnotic post-krautrock, noise, neoDada sound collage, and all sorts. The whole adds up to something greater than just disparate bits of music jammed together, something like the soundtrack for an imagined film, and very musical but not always by means you might expect.

...and good luck finding a copy. Sorry. If nothing else comes from this review, all I can say is that it might be wise to keep one's eye peeled on what's been coming from this label so as to avoid disappointment next time.

Not sure, but you could probably do worse than keep an eye on their Soundcloud page.