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.