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.