Lynyrd Skynyrd - Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd (1973)

Typographic jiggery pokery usually gets on my tits when it comes to music artists and their work, but Skynyrd get a pass because 1) it was the seventies, and 2) it's fuckin' Skynyrd, dude - get a grip. In the event of that having been an H.M. Bateman sound effect I just heard, and because I suppose we have to get it out of the way - no they weren't; it was the record company's idea; no it isn't; Neil Young himself admitted it had been a dick move on his part; and anything else you may feel you need to know is explained in detail on the internet, most of which is fairly easy to find.

I first discovered Lynyrd Skynyrd when I heard Free Bird on the radio back in the eighties. I'd missed the beginning of the song and the DJ didn't bother to name names once it was over, and it took me a couple of years to work out what I'd taped - because it had seemed worth taping. Initially I thought it was some lost Bowie number from the Ziggy Stardust era. The vocal didn't sound quite right but the guitar was definitely something in the vein of Mick Ronson, or so it seemed to me.

Eventually the penny dropped and I also added Sweet Home Alabama to the tally of still guilty pleasures, or at least pleasures which some bigger boys had explained were to be considered guilty; so I picked up a greatest hits CD on the cheap, half expecting it to comprise two admittedly sublime songs in amongst a whole passel of gun toting anthems to slave ownership, that being the narrative one tends to find affixed to Lynyrd Skynyrd; and being white working class guys from the south, it doesn't really matter if it's true or not because it probably is - so we're habitually told. Unfortunately, it turned out that every single track on the disc was amazing - not even merely listenable, but as unto pure spun gold plucked from the harps of a heavenly host of particularly bluesy angels; and so now, realising I've wasted most of my life by not listening to this band, I'm backtracking; and the first album seemed like a good place to start.

Anticipating a couple of admittedly sublime singles in amongst a half hour of twanging sounds of lesser substance, I'm once again surprised and even humbled to realise how great this band were at the height of their powers. This was post-sixties guitar rock drawn heavily from the blues, but drawn by dudes who lived that stuff on a daily basis and who learned it from the stoops and porches of the wrinkled old guys who came up with it because the wrinkled old guys who came up with it lived in the same neighbourhood; meaning Skynyrd were a very different affair to Clapton and those taking a cheap if expertly played holiday in someone else's tradition, because this was a continuation, part of the same heritage, and it was anything but colonisation. Not only do you listen to this music, but you feel it in all parts of your body because it communicates to heart and soul with such intensity as to amount to a direct link to whatever went into these songs, which are so fresh and clear that they could have been laid down only yesterday; and I didn't even realise this kind of music could do that, even the whiskey soaked honkytonk numbers. This also means that Lynyrd Skynyrd may be one of the most unfairly maligned groups in the history of music, at least regarding the idea that there could be even so much as a whiff of anything which people who went to better schools might declare to be racism; but as I've come to appreciate since I first arrived in Texas, some people simply don't like the south, and their disdain is such as to sustain all of the usual stereotypes without trial. Honestly, aside from the sheer pleasure of being part of the right gang, I suspect it's down to fear. No-one likes to be reminded of the underclass, particularly those who've either escaped or insulated themselves from it, and they particularly dislike that underclass trying to tell them anything.

Well, have you ever lived down in the ghetto?
Have you ever felt the cold wind blow?
Well, if you don't know what I mean,
Won't you stand up and scream?
'Cause there's things goin' on that you don't know.

Too many lives they've spent across the ocean.
Too much money been spent upon the moon.
Well, until they make it right,
I hope they never sleep at night.
They better make some changes,
And do it soon.

I was told to expect something from the depths of hillbilly hell, and against all expectations this turns out to be one of the most powerful, heartfelt, and expressive rock albums I think I've ever heard - musically, emotionally, even spiritually if you like. I just wish it hadn't taken me a whole four decades to reach this understanding.

Campbell / Mallinder / Benge - Clinker (2021)

I've been listening to a lot of Cabaret Voltaire since the death of Richard H. Kirk, and because I'm a pedant who becomes physically aroused at the mere thought of things arranged in alphabetical or chronological sequence, I started with 1974-76, working my way through, one album at a time and incorporating the singles so as to get some sort of overview of their progression. Interestingly enough - at least to me - there were a few surprises, not least being that The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord isn't anything like so great as I remember; and there were even a few revelations - patterns I wouldn't have noticed from listening to an individual record. Most blatant was how little they ever truly owed to rock music, which I state having once regarded Mix-Up as essentially a much weirder take on the Velvet Underground; and conversely how much they owed to black music, James Brown, soul and so on. The influence was never hidden, and was expressed most vividly in Cabaret Voltaire's propensity for extended beat driven jams - grooves rather than songs; but it's easy to get lost in all of the weirdy effects and treated percussion and to lose sight of this element, and of how fundamental it always was to their sound.

Clinker isn't Cabaret Voltaire, but it continues the journey through the presence of one of their number, reaffirming the vision through collaboration with parallel travellers. As with the Wrangler albums, the sound is quite dry, relatively clean compared to Mallinder's previous group, with effects used sparingly, allowing the analogue electronic sound to breath. Julie Campbell's unashamedly funky guitar serves as a perfect complement to the electronics yielding what is essentially a disco record in a reasonably traditional sense but for the absence of backing singers - and by disco I mean that warm sound with the congas and glitterballs, yet remaining awkward and left-field, and without sounding like a retread - imagine Marshall Hain's Dancing in the City stepped up a few beats and with androids as much welcome on the dance floor as anyone else.

It would be unfair to single out Mallinder as uniquely responsible for how great this record is - particularly given the presence of the other two and that the overall sound is much closer to Campbell's Lonelady than to anything of Mal's previous bunch, but for a man with a back catalogue extending into three figures, this may be one of the best things with which he's ever been involved.

Come - Rampton (1979)

I suspect the increasing ubiquity and multiplication of noise artists may have somewhat reduced the impact of the form in certain respects. My first encounter with Whitehouse, for example, was in an issue of Flowmotion fanzine contemporary with the release of Psychopathia Sexualis - so about 1982, I guess. The first thing which struck me as weird was that I'd never heard of this band and yet they seemed to have quite a following. They sounded absolutely terrifying, the music papers refused to write about them, and Rough Trade wouldn't stock their records, and so it was inevitable that I should at least wonder. Forty years later and I'm still not sure what I think about Whitehouse - or even that what I think about Whitehouse really matters - but Come seemed initially promising.

Come was William Bennett's first attempt to scare the living shit out of the public following his exit from Essential Logic, and might therefore be regarded as a formative version of Whitehouse. I thought Come Sunday 2 on the Für Ilse Koch compilation album was terrific, a vertiginously flanged swirl of understated menace reminding me very much of Gristle's live material, so I bought the 7" - effectively the first version of Come Sunday - and discovered the compilation track to be the single fed through a powerful effects pedal. Without the benefit of the aforementioned powerful effects pedal, it was kind of clean, very minimal, and just sounded a bit odd. I still probably would have given Rampton a shot, but Come Organisation vinyl was selling out within weeks of release by that point; and I didn't have much faith in the cassette versions, having originally purchased the tape of Für Ilse Koch and listened to William Bennett pissing about in one channel for the duration, presumably running off the copies on his home stereo little realising he still had one microphone plugged in - watching a bit of telly, making a cup of tea, playing guitar and so on. It was amusing but I traded it in for the vinyl.

Anyway, getting to the point, here's Rampton once again, nicely remastered and pressed, the cover printed rather than photocopied, and me not having to pay four hundred dollars for a copy. I wasn't massively impressed with the Come Sunday 7" but was assured of it being the weakest track on what is an otherwise decent record, and so curiosity caught up with me; and the whole is actually stranger than I expected, possibly not so much for what it does, as for what I expected it to do, which it doesn't. Lest we should have forgotten, William Bennett is a pretty decent guitarist, and Rampton is mostly angular guitar riffage with Daniel Miller playing a bass synth and someone pounding out a pseudo-tribal rhythm on a couple of floor toms. Vocals are way down in the mix and tend to be vocalisations rather than singing. The whole is surprisingly minimal and lacking in effects, excepting a light slapback echo on the vocal, and somehow - and I'm assuming here that it's on purpose - this is its power. This unsettling quality is the fledgling form of all that feedback and implied violence because, no matter how many thousands of industrial music rarities you may have accumulated over the past few centuries, the initial most logical reaction to this record is holy shit, what the fuck am I listening to?

Bennett has cited Yoko Ono's Don't Worry, Kyoko as a significant influence on Rampton, which I can definitely see although this is, frankly, a much better record. The vocals, perhaps not on purpose, are vaguely ridiculous upon close inspection, mostly the sort of lines we used to come out with in the playground when impersonating the mentally ill, and yet somehow this makes the record additionally disturbing when combined with those jagged shards of guitar - regarding which, it's easy to hear why he was asked to join Siouxsie & the Banshees as replacement for John McKay.

Rampton doesn't quite stick its fingers down your throat as did Whitehouse, but there's a powerful sense of something wrong on this record, so much so as to overcome what initially seem like limitations, and even Come Sunday sounds better in the context of the whole. The only wobble, at least for me, comes with the use of tracks from side two of the BBC's Sound Effects volume thirteen - Death & Horror, an assortment of screams seguing into heavy breathing, then more screams as Rampton comes to a close. Unfortunately, pretty much everyone I knew in the DIY tape scene of the time had at least one track featuring those same screams, and naturally I'd done it myself, so hearing that the Master of the Overviolence also went there, admittedly a year or so before the rest of us arseholes, is akin to discovering that Lemmy briefly presented Blue Peter back in the sixties.

Never mind. I'm very glad to have heard this regardless, and should Susan Lawly see fit to stick out either In Country or I'm Jack, I'm certainly curious.

Smell & Quim - Nativity Colostomy (1993)

I'm still to hear anything from Smell & Quim which isn't interesting, at the very least, and I tend to shell out for reissues of things I missed first time around without having to think about it; but even so, Nativity Colostomy has surprised the fuck out of me, not least with the realisation of there being something I regard as the classic line up, specifically Milovan Srdenovic and Paul Nonnen. They're still releasing classics all the time, but there was something monumentally special about the pungent fruits of those early years, some dynamic which suffered as the line-up expanded to incorporate more and more members, none of them Paul Nonnen.

Similarly surprising to me was that I listened to this disc immediately following a compilation of early electronic works by Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry and others, and after a while I realised that I hadn't actually noticed the switch. I've often thought of Smell & Quim as the result of a Star Trek transporter accident occurring when members of Whitehouse and the Residents beam down to the same planet, but Nativity Colostomy sounds very much like a continuation of the avant garde classical of the sixties, yet without really doing anything that would have been out of place on The Jissom Killers or The English Method. The five tracks of Nativity Colostomy are all instrumental, or at least bearing no obvious resemblance to songs, and the noise is harsh, unpredictable, not always clear and, as with the work of Schaeffer and those guys, they're working with something ugly and rudimentary which hasn't been subjected to technological prettification. It actually makes Nurse with Wound sound prissy by comparison. There's some sampling, although it could be tapes and loops - it's hard to say for sure. Jagged snatches of what might be a cello repeat on the impressively appalling Drinking a Dead Woman's Piss, but the repetition is uneven and not entirely mechanical, and so - as with the very best genuinely experimental music - we're never quite sure of what the fuck we're dealing with and usually need to play it a few more times before it begins to sink in; and this one is a pleasure to hear, over and over, albeit a pleasure akin to having a really good shit after a night on the sauce.

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stimmung (1968)

I'm not entirely sure how I'd heard of Stockhausen back in May 1982, but I assume his name may have come up in something written about Throbbing Gristle. I had a couple of their albums but had only just begun to dip toes in such waters and was still to hear what Cabaret Voltaire sounded like - for example. Anyway, I found this at my local record library and vaguely recall being disappointed that it didn't sound anything like as electronic as I'd hoped although there was nevertheless something fascinating about it. Then a couple of years later, having left school and signed up for beer studies at Maidstone College of Art, I was lucky enough to see Stimmung performed at the Barbican as part of their Stockhausen week. That was January, 1985.

Meanwhile, back in the present day, I've discovered another used record store in San Antonio, one called Crazy Rhythm which I'd passed many times, but never as it was open. When a random break in my usual routine deposited me outside Crazy Rhythm during its opening hours, I went in and immediately noticed that one of the racks was marked avant-garde classical, and I noticed this because I always look for that section in whichever used record store I happen to enter but never find it. I always look for that section because it's not quite familiar territory for me and is therefore likely to yield surprises; and accordingly the first record I encountered as I began to browse was Stimmung - same Deutsche Grammophon edition, even the same cover as the one I'd borrowed from the library in Stratford-upon-Avon nearly forty years ago. It was ten dollars and is in wonderful condition, so I also picked up Stockhausen's Gruppen and Carré while I was there. It was all I could do to keep from giving the cashier a big old Frenchie. Stimmung isn't quite where it all started for me, but it's pretty close.

It's a lengthy piece, over seventy minutes and sounding clear as a bell on this single album - somewhat calling into question recent boutique vinyl reissues expanding supposed classics to six fucking sides of a triple album in ten minute helpings. It's also entirely choral, having been scored for six vocalists, hence my being disappointed that it didn't sound more like Second Annual Report back in 1982; and at least one of those vocalists - specifically Wolfgang Fromme - is one of the people I saw on stage back in '85. Stimmung is mostly vocalisation with words, phrases and names - mostly of mythological figures - here and there for the sake of punctuation. It's scored but with some leeway for the performers to react and improvise within the whole. Perhaps what takes the most getting used to, is how much Stimmung relies on vocalisations amounting to the sort of weird noises we probably all made as children when left to our own devices, weewah and oyoyoy and that sort of thing, which aren't the sort of sounds one expects to hear on a record, being mostly too peculiar to work as anything cool or emotive in the conventional sense; so I suppose one might term it sound poetry, or at least acknowledge that Stimmung is a relative of the same. However, the harmony of Stimmung is strong, generating a semi-hypnotic drone within which the more unorthodox vocalisations become texture, weaving together so well as to distract from this even being a vocal performance; and over seventy minutes, the cumulative effect is emotionally very powerful.

Most surprising of all is how well Stimmung has lasted. If it has a strong sense of the sort of post-Dada theatrical experimentation one associates with the sixties, it nevertheless sounds fresh, like something new and unfamiliar experienced for the first time.

Stockhausen remains an approximately controversial figure. Referring to the events of September the eleventh, 2001 as the biggest work of art there has ever been probably wasn't the greatest career move, and Cornelius Cardew famously denounced him as a tool of capitalism - which might have carried more weight had the same not taken to wearing a flat cap and affecting a Lancashire accent so as to be down with the mans dem - but fuck it, on the strength of his work, Karlheinz really was a visionary and probably a genius, if that term actually means anything.

Bill Nelson - Quit Dreaming and Get on the Beam (1981)

Bill Nelson probably got me buying 7" singles. I rarely bothered with them during my teenage years because albums seemed better value and my pocket money didn't stretch that far, so I didn't get into the habit; plus my friends Pete and Graham, respectively sons of a retired colonel and a bank manager who had seemingly done better in the pocket money lottery than myself, were usually well stocked up on all the singles I would have bought, so I taped their copies. All the same, Bill Nelson's Do You Dream in Colour? seemed like the best thing I'd ever heard at the time, and still retains most of its magic, not least for featuring three killer b-side tracks. Naturally I bought the album.

Years later, I notice that I never bought the 7" of Do You Dream in Colour? which seems like a massive oversight. I have the other tracks on The Two-Fold Aspect of Everything compilation, but sometimes it's nice to have a stack of three or four singles to play when you're having a shave and getting ready to go out, and so I tracked a copy down on Discogs; then noticed that somehow I'd confused my having taped the Stranglers' Christmas EP from Graham with possessing a copy of my own, so I bought one and then took to buying up all the singles I should have picked up first time round, which is thanks to Bill Nelson. Do You Dream in Colour? really is a fucking cracking record.

I still don't fully understand why Bill Nelson wasn't massive, given some of those singles. My guess is that he didn't quite fit into new wave, having been in a band which had featured an airbrushed guitar turning into a skull on the cover - and he clearly wasn't a skinny tie guitar band from New York singing about girls and soda pop; and his music was presumably too weird for old school hairies. Of course, there was quite a head count in the Bowie-influenced cattle truck at the time, and it could be argued that Nelson ticked more boxes than most - Banal could almost have come from the Scary Monsters sessions, for example; but listen close and it sounds more like parallel evolution than influence. We have the post-glam chug and stomp of Banal or Disposable, but there's an angular, spiky edge suggesting European art cinema rather than Warhol's factory, and literary influences that are possibly more Ballard than Burroughs or whoever, perhaps with some early Roxy chucked in; somehow, despite which, I'm not sure it's possible to mistake Quit Dreaming for the work of anyone but Bill Nelson.

This is a genuinely huge album with a massive sound which artfully strikes a balance between filmic bleeps and squelches with rocking the fuck out - big, bold populist riffs and heroic vocals. Weirdly, it's not even like this was the high point prior to some overproduced tail off, it being the first of a whole string of solid albums which somehow seem to have been largely forgotten by anyone who wasn't already a fan. How the hell did that happen?


Never mind. If you didn't already get the memo, Quit Dreaming really is a masterpiece in every sense.

Cabaret Voltaire - Chance Versus Causality (1979)

The unfortunate passing of Richard H. Kirk has, somewhat predictably, resulted in my listening to quite a lot of Cabaret Voltaire of late; and this one has stood out partially because it didn't make much of an impression at first, sounding as it does somewhat basic in contrast to The Voice of America to which it was approximately contemporary, but also because it doesn't really sound like anything else from their back catalogue - although I should probably add that I haven't heard that boxed set comprising a million CDs worth of out-takes and the like.

As you possibly know, Chance Versus Causality is the soundtrack to an experimental film by Babeth Mondini, improvised live by the lads without actually seeing the film. It's very much the opposite of multilayered, often with just a single weird atonal noise occupying the stereo field for some time and very little that's conspicuously musical - snatches of heavily treated guitar being employed for effect rather than in pursuit of anything melodic which therefore may as well be a hoover or something. Edits are often abrupt and incongruous, as is the dry insertion of taped dialogue played both forwards and backwards, amounting to something which suggests the early days of experimental film without the benefit of a visual dimension - unless you're sat looking at the cover. It works through application of the unexpected, through contrast, and through what may well have been a concerted effort to avoid the conventionally musical, arguably placing it more in the realm of Pierre Schaeffer and, I suppose, maybe Stan Brakhage, than even Gristle's After Cease to Exist soundtrack which sounds positively Ennio Morricone by comparison. It's crude, effective, and still sounds surprising after all this time and the more technically sophisticated efforts we've heard since; and, despite the minimalism, it's immediately identifiable as the work of Cabaret Voltaire.

I've seen them written off as overrated in recent years, and I disagree. As a group who worked with semi-improvised grooves rather than anything more obviously structured it's inevitable that some albums were more convincing than others, and the live albums tend to fall under the category of things which probably sounded better if you were there; but even their most chugging pieces never sounded like anyone else, retaining so strong an identity as to render most tribute acts sounding so derivative as to be pointless - although both Portion Control and Bourbonese Qualk admittedly found their own respective voices by the time it came to sticking a record out; and when they got it right, which was a lot of the time, they were genuinely astonishing, and I'd argue moreso than, in particular, even Gristle, through a reluctance to rely on shock effect for its own sake. I'm still not convinced that Chance Versus Causality is the lost classic described by most of the reviews I've seen, but it's a good indication of what made them so special and why we're still listening to this stuff four decades later.

The Bone Orchestra - When Will the Blues Leave? (1987)

The Bone Orchestra involved Charlie Collins and Peter Hope, both formerly of the Box, along with a number of other Sheffield luminaries - not least being a full horn section - and existed in the gaps between musical endeavours which the rest of us are probably more likely to remember. When Will the Blues Leave? was recorded on four track - and mostly live by the sound of it - originally issued on cassette, and really should have been snapped up by some record label and flogged to the point of it being embarrassing back in 1987; which it wasn't because who fucking knows? My guess would be that quality doesn't always receive the recognition it is due.

The songs are some sort of bluesy semi-Brechtian cabaret hybrid suggestive of bars where dreams go to drink themselves into a coma, occupying a stylistic spectrum which flies off in all directions without necessarily sounding schizophrenic, or at least not in the musical sense. The percussion section borrows from either the kitchen or the junkyard, the bass prowls, Charlie Collins honks, hoots and even squeezes an accordion, and Hope channels his demons, some familiar and a few we've never met before - switching from growl to heroic croon to almost Noel Coward on Horse, for example - the one track which reminds me of the Box, for what it may be worth.

I realise it's hopelessly lazy to make comparisons with other artists, but can be difficult to avoid where a blues influence is so pronounced given the spread and extent of the form; but to get it out of the way, When Will the Blues Leave? probably inhabits a building a few blocks along from Nick Cave, Tom Waits, and the Tiger Lillies amongst others. On the other hand, Quick Money reminds me of West African pop music* of all things. In fact, the whole wouldn't have sounded out of place issued on Billy Childish's Hangman label back when he first started hammering out those monthly albums - notably the Black Hands' Capt. Calypso's Hoodoo Party. I'm not sure there's specifically a standout track given the general level of intensity maintained more or less for the duration, but it has to be said, No New Leaves is in particular fucking incredible.

*: I'm thinking of The Vodoun Effect by Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou.

Blade - The Lion Goes from Strength to Strength (1993)

Blade should require no introduction, but then we live in a far from perfect world and it's been nearly thirty years since this album, fifteen since his most recent - unless there's been one which nobody told me about. It's not that he was the first rapper with a British passport, but he was in on the ground floor and maintained enduring visibility back before anyone took UK rap seriously on any kind of scale. He achieved some mainstream success with The Unknown recorded with the late Mark B, even landing an appearance on Top of the Pops, but this was his second album, the one which apparently remains his own personal favourite; which itself reveals him to be a good judge of his own work because it really is his best, at least so far as I'm concerned.

This is a CD reissue I'm listening to, but I can still recall the moment when I lowered the needle onto the first white vinyl disc of the original double, and I recall that moment because what comes out of the speaker is as astonishing as a kick up the arse - the adrenaline rush of organised noise, musical information overload somehow tamed to a funky as fuck beat duplicating the intensity of the Bomb Squad without simply copying the moves; and while we're on the subject of Public Enemy, Blade himself betrays the influence of - guessing here - both Chuck D and Rakim, but his own personality overpowers the delivery to the point that you couldn't really mistake him for anyone else.

As with much of Blade's work, the whole thing was pulled together by the man himself - recorded, pressed, distributed, everything, and the sleeve notes describe our man picking the pockets of teenagers in arcades to finance the release of his debut, arguing that they would only have spunked the money away on nothing. Accordingly you can really feel the graft that's gone into this one, fueled by fried chicken, Lucozade, and sleepless nights sweating over the beats and rhymes - gritty as New Cross, posture free, angry and funny, and refreshingly outspoken in terms of authority and our man's refusal to jump through the usual music biz hoops. Were it not for the fried chicken, The Lion Goes from Strength to Strength is one of the few rap albums which would have made sense on the Crass label, which is no bad thing.

Jethro Tull - This Was (1968)

I'm still trying to work out how I feel about Jethro Tull. Having once been an agricultural youth, I was initially well disposed towards a  band who named their albums after shire horses and who presumably had some kind of affinity with soil, plus Stormwatch had a pleasantly ominous cover. I didn't actually encounter their music until the nineties when I chanced upon a boggle-eyed performance of Witch's Promise from that Top of the Pops repeat show, which I thought was great. My friend Carl gave me a copy of the Twenty Years of Jethro Tull triple CD thing on the grounds that he'd designed the artwork and had a spare knocking around; which was also great, or mostly great. I was in a sort of prog rock punk band at the time, albeit prog with a small p because funny time signatures definitely hadn't figured in the job description and were frankly proving a bit of a chore; but our glorious leader, somehow mistaking my polite enthusiasm for studious obsession, took it upon himself to advance my education despite that I was perfectly happy with my copy of Machine Gun Etiquette, thank you very much. Soon I was in possession of This Was, Living In the Past, Thick as a Brick, A Passion Play, Bursting Out, Stormwatch, A, Nightcap, The Jethro Tull Christmas Album and some greatest hits thing. Our glorious leader had written on the covers, giving tracks marks out of ten or adding notes about associated singles, then presumably copied those songs scoring above a certain rating of excellence onto a CDR which would take up less space in his collection and therefore be more efficient.

I've really tried with these albums but they just aren't for me. I didn't particularly enjoy playing guitar riffs which required that I count out an ostentatious thirteen beats before repeating the bar or launching into a chorus, and if I'm to listen to music as a mathematical exercise, then it really needs to do more than just showing off whilst a nice overachieving grammar school boy doth politely croon something about maidens fair; and but for the silly time signatures, Stormwatch wouldn't have sounded out of place on Radio 2 back in the days of Sing Something Simple.

And yet there's this.

This Was so named in acknowledgement of it having captured an era of Jethro Tull from which the band were moving on even as the record hit the stores. This Was dates from when they were worth listening to, when they sounded like a band rather than a series of twee equations scrawled upon a blackboard in between betwixt sips goodly swigs from a pewter tankard. What the fuck went wrong?

This Was is sixties blues rock as interpreted by educated white guys, but significantly influenced by the wilder end of jazz and with scant trace of either folky or psychedelic influence - possibly excepting certain parallels heard on the thoroughly gorgeous Move on Alone. What really differentiates this bunch from most later Tull - at least that I've heard - is the low recording budget having prevented too much pissing about, leaving us with a band so live and raw and at one with their own vibe as to foreshadow a Steve Albini production, albeit one without quite such menace. Song for Jeffrey and Love Story particularly seem to oblige the listener to crank it the fuck up and rock out, despite an otherwise relatively polite production; and I'm not suggesting Love Story sounds even remotely like anything from the first three albums by the Damned, but I can imagine what the Damned version would sound like without giving myself too much of a headache.

This Was a band who had a ton of fucking fun playing this stuff by the sound of it, as distinct from the subsequent entity which introduced live versions of its old standards with footnotes explaining how the lads had since added more twiddly bits to keep it interesting for themselves. My former musical boss presumably kept the decent albums to himself when passing on his cast offs, hence the absence of Aqualung and others in the above list; So there's doubtless much that I haven't heard and maybe should, but for the moment I prefer to remember them this way. Given that everything I like about this album seems to have been down to Mick Abrahams who left soon after, this leaves me with the peculiar realisation that I probably need to listen to Blodwyn Pig.

Hard-Fi - Stars of CCTV (2005)

Here's another one about which I've never bothered writing, having assumed I'd already done so at some point; the reason for the assumption being that I listen to it quite a lot and that it's probably one of the greatest albums of all time, at least to my ears.

At least based on what I recall hearing on the radio at work, rock music was pretty much a complete waste of time by 2005, a vast Glastonbury shaped sludgepit full of grinning NME-sponsored idiots channelling the Kinks through a fuzzbox in hope of landing a car insurance advert as Jo Whiley stood to one side pretending to be your mate. Somehow Hard-Fi couldn't fail to shine because they sounded like a real band rather than something which crops up during the closing credits of an edgy Channel 4 sitcom about teenagers smoking crack during a media studies degree.

Stars of CCTV sounds a little like it may have happened as a result of my generation having kids, kids which were then raised in houses featuring a dad who still listened to the Jam on a daily basis. It's not quite the Jam, but there's something of Down in the Tube Station at Midnight in there - the smells if not quite the sounds - a little power pop, maybe even a few old Motors records, and of course the name comes from Lee 'Scratch' Perry; so it's all those things and yet not quite any one of them, because it does something different which isn't reliant upon nostalgia.

The first time I heard Hard to Beat it seemed to suggest what the Jam would have sounded like had they formed two decades later as some filter disco act; and the rave, or possibly post-rave aspect is part of the wallpaper which nailed Stars of CCTV to the place it was coming from, and the place it was coming from wasn't much different to where I was living so I was seriously feeling this shit, as the saying goes. Stars of CCTV sounded like a genuinely working class voice in a world turned over to consumer satisfaction surveys and focus groups. I recognised the stench of south London fried chicken, hangovers, post-war housing, belches of beer past the sell by date from Weatherspoons, freezing your bollocks off outside some club in November, estuary English and bills which may or may not get paid on time. This is what it was like living in south-east London in 2005 but without the voyeuristic glamour of wobbly camcorder documentaries, and without even trying to sell the grime as an aesthetic. It's grim, and yet it's mostly a celebration with all the joy of forked fingers waved at a security camera. To be honest, it's actually similar to what many grime acts were doing at the time but for the fact that it's rock music, even mod in an absolutely literal sense. Stars of CCTV is not a happy album, but it's a long way from being a miserable one, and every last track packs a serious punch. This was what it was really like to be young.

Control (2007)

This may be a bit of a digression but I'm sure it figures given that Anton Corbijn's biopic of Ian Curtis attempts to map the still growing legend of Joy Division, roughly speaking. I read Deborah Curtis' autobiography about a million years ago so I was already approximately familiar with the territory when this turned up on Amazon Prime or one of those, meaning I finally got to watch it; and of course I was a massive fan for about six months, specifically the teenage years during which it's only right that one should fixate on the work of a specific pop group as the most important thing ever. I still remember where I was when I heard that Curtis had died. I was on a coach as part of some school trip to the Royal Show at Stoneleigh and had noticed that Love Will Tear Us Apart - which had been one of our things up until that point - kept turning up on wonderful Radio One, which seemed suspicious.

Should my tone here appear to be working its way towards the dismissive, and aside from the aforementioned six month obsession which burned bright without my actually bothering to buy the albums, I still believe their greatest material was the glacial punk of the Warsaw years, of which Unknown Pleasures seemed to represent the most refined expression; and the first New Order album which, for me, represents the best thing ever done by any combination of those people. It was more or less all over once Movement was in the bag, and, honestly, I never understood the praise heaped upon Closer - three or four decent tracks with some other stuff, albeit beautifully produced other stuff. I still see internet dwellers claiming it be the greatest, most emotionally powerful album ever recorded, and I'm happy for them but I can't understand their way of thinking. They may as well be referring to the first Splodgenessabounds album, although I could at least get my head around that as a view to which someone might reasonably subscribe. Closer sounded too much like those bloody awful live bootlegs of Joy Division bum notes, false starts, and band members failing to play the same song at the same time as epitomised by Decades, a song which, at the risk of repeating myself, is distinguished by its sounding the same when you unhook the belt from your turntable and push the record around by hand. My friend Carl saw Joy Division a couple of times as support to other, less introverted acts and has described their stage presence as wispy and underwhelming, or words to that effect. For what it may be worth, my mother saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club in the early sixties and has since described the evening as nothing special.

Nevertheless, we have this big fucking legend to contend with, and so here it is in bold monochrome, for the sake of mood or possibly false modesty, because no-one could possibly live up to that level of hype, which tends to become cemented in place during one's teenage years. Yes, they were briefly amazing, but so were plenty of others at the time. Joy Division distinguished themselves with a genuinely troubled vocalist who wrote ponderously poetic lyrics drawing from outsider literature, tastefully removed from obvious showbiz affectations and the idea that actually this was just a pop band on stage playing their moody songs for your entertainment. Pay no attention to the glittery curtain but just look at that ominously abstract album cover with its ostentatious lack of information or fart jokes. Classy!

Each time I encounter the legend of Joy Division, I remember Jamie Reid's characteristically sarcastic acknowledgment, as reproduced in Fred and Judy Vermorel's Sex Pistols book.

The last few years have seen an increase in this cult of vampirism, of which the Viciousburger is only the latest example. Vampires are noteworthy for consuming star corpses in the form of burgers in the mistaken belief that some of the star's charisma will rub off on them; sadly, as you can see, these attempts are doomed to failure and these cultists deluded. The cult is said to have begun in the fifties with Deanburgers: these were very rare, and contained bits of Porsche wreckage and sunglasses - those cultists still alive who tasted them say they were tough but tasty. Perhaps the worst outbreak of vampirism in recent years before the Viciousburger scandal was the Presley burger scandal of 1977. The scandal was discovered when an attempt was made to steal Presley's body from the grave by occultists: the body was already stolen! It now appears that it was minced down and turned into the bizarre cult food, Presleyburgers. These are said to be very expensive ($1000 a throw) and high on fatty content, but it still didn't deter the thrill seeking showbiz crowd: Mick Jagger was said to have eaten several before his recent Wembley concert. Heavy prison sentences imposed in Canada on Keith Richards, another vampire, stopped the spread of this disgusting cult, but with the present Viciousburger scandals, it seems to be flourishing. And even now, there are unconfirmed reports of Curtisburgers, gristly burgers with hints of rope and marble.

Control attempts to tell the story of a real band - four seventies lads with some knowledge of football who liked a pint, enjoyed sexual intercourse, and went to the toilet just like the rest of us; and it attempts to tell the story in terms of the legend of the same, hence the silly black and white footage; and it attempts to balance the legend of Ian Curtis as damaged, brooding seer with the reality of his actually being a bit of a twat in certain respects - as are we all from time to time. The end result is beautiful in the sense of almost everything the similarly vacuous Ridley Scott has ever produced being beautiful, but as with Ridley Scott, we're essentially watching a Hovis advert that thinks it's Jean Cocteau's Orpheus. It pushes the obvious buttons, beyond which there isn't actually very much there because the band already said all that they had to say on the records.

This isn't to say that Control is a bad film so much as that it's more or less pointless. There are worse ways to spend two long, long hours of your life, but that's hardly a recommendation. As I sat watching this with my wife, Oreo - our free range house bunny - hopped over to the side of the cabinet upon which the flat screen telly is sat, to resume eating a handful of cilantro stems we'd given him earlier. He sat up and stared at us, nose going as always, with one green stem after another slowly disappearing upwards into his face; and somehow his bunny lunchtime seemed more profound and more honest than anything happening on the screen.

It cost six million quid to make too.

Incredible.

Nocturnal Emissions / Frag - Esoteric Sedition (2021)

Frag is the musical organ of Stephen Āh Burroughs, here in collaboration with Nocturnal Emissions with whom I'm going to presume you're all familiar. Frag seems to have been a fairly noisy affair, and is a new one on me, although Burroughs was in Head of David, which should at least indicate some of the general aesthetic to be found here in so much as that it's not massively sunny. Being reasonably familiar with the work of the Emissions, it's tempting to hear the more melodic element as Nigel's doing, sitting on a church organ and moving his bottom up and down the keyboard while Burroughs hoovers the nave, or possibly just jabs a screwdriver angrily into the innards of a transistor radio; but its probably nothing so simple. What we have are twelve relatively short pieces - not quite ambient, not quite noise - contrasting drifting notation with grinding electronic texture to surprisingly emotional effect, working by means of a sort of neoclassical melancholy without necessarily resembling anything you would expect from such a description. Nomical Index in particular reminds me of Górecki's third symphony, for example.

I have no idea how Esoteric Sedition figures within the broader span of Burroughs' other work - which seems worthy of investigation on the strength of this - and while Nigel has released a ton of discs of this general type over the years, collaborations included, this is possibly one of the very best.

We Be Echo - Isolation (2021)

Mother of God - I'm sure the previous one came out about three weeks ago, but whatever the case may be, the lad is quite clearly on a roll. Isolation continues on the trajectory begun with Darkness is Home then The Misanthrope with improvements here and there, greater confidence in the vocal department, sharper mixing or whatever. It's difficult to quite say what sets this one apart from the other two, but there's something for sure, and even as Kevin Thorne continues to work with what might seem like a restricted musical palate, he's kept it sounding fresh, very much like a new thing each time another album comes out of the gate. As before, it's mostly drums, bass, and vocals - driving songs, or maybe grooves with some distant kinship to Joy Division or maybe Suicide or Chrome - particularly Into the Eyes of the Zombie King - but not entirely like any of the above. The wall of bass - everything here is played on four strings - is such that it's taken me three albums to really notice what's going on with the percussion, and although it isn't a main feature, this material would be the poorer with just a Doctor Rhythm ticking away in the background. I assume the percussion is programmed but it somehow doesn't quite feel like it, and has an almost John Bonham sense of presence in so much as that it pounds and is doing more than just keep time. One might expect an album called Isolation to sound pretty miserable, particularly when it's the follow up to one called The Misanthrope, but it's actually quite difficult to describe how this album makes me feel - sad, sort of wistful, not actually unhappy, and yet kind of warmed by the cinematic wash of emotion. I know I probably said the previous one was the best yet, but it could actually be this one.

Jay-Z - The Blueprint III (2009)

I kept tabs on Jay-Z right up until just before this album came out, then lost the thread due to moving house, moving country, and a load of other stuff happening all at the same time, not least being marriage. Once the dust had settled, I came across this in CD Exchange. It hadn't even occurred to me that he might have kept on putting out new material in my absence, particularly given the number of times he'd already announced his retirement. My hopes weren't high given that the last two had been pretty underwhelming, but what the fuck? I thought.

It didn't make much of an impression at first, which is why I've had The Blueprint III on my shelves for a couple of years and only now have I come to play it more than twice in the same week; and yet it made some impression because I kept listening, albeit infrequently. I've had both Kingdom Come and American Gangster significantly longer and still couldn't tell you a single thing about either, except that the pillock from Coldplay is on one of them.

I always had the impression Jay-Z was on a mission to record the mythic classic rap album, solid from start to finish, the set which would hold its own alongside Illmatic and the rest. He came close more than once but I'm not convinced either The Blueprint or The Black Album ever quite got there, great though they undoubtedly were. Given how The Blueprint III follows a couple of duds and  represents the third recycling of a winning title, I had a feeling it was going to be one of those in the vein of The Dynasty which just sort of sits there between a couple of better records - not actually bad, but not something you'd necessarily bother including on your CV; but now that I've made the effort, I realise I'm wrong, and The Blueprint III may even have been his best - if not in terms of immediacy.

The standout tracks, What We Talkin' About, Empire State of Mind, and Real As It Gets are easily amongst the lad's greatest for my money, perfecting what I suppose we might as well call stadium trap - cinematic whilst somehow invoking Aaron Copland through the thoroughly contemporary orchestration - at least as of 2009 - of vaguely epic squiggles copied and pasted to different bits of a screen; and it probably helps that the rest of the record does its own thing rather than attempt to capitalise on this winning formula. No ID, Timbaland, the Neptunes and others - notably Kanye West before we all got sick of hearing about the fucker - chop up something extrapolated from that New York sound rooted in DJ Premier and the like, soulful with a lot of kick in the lower end but without necessarily covering old ground. Only Swizz Beatz lets the side down, phoning in another one of those things which sounds as though it came from the soundtrack of Jersey Shore and should rightfully be backing a loop of Deena saying something fucking stupid about how much she likes to party; but never mind. Everybody is allowed at least one clunker when the rest is good.

Lyrically speaking, Jay-Z does what he usually does, namely bigging himself up for an hour or so with a reasonable degree of wit. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, and on this occasion it works really well. Swizz Beatz aside, all the elements here add up to something greater than the sum of their parts, resulting in album of such fresh and breezy composition that it has the feeling of a debut - not bad going for a guy who had just reached the end of his second decade in the biz.

Girl Guided Missiles (2021)

You can probably be forgiven for having missed the Girl Guided Missiles first time around. They released one single - now worth a fortune if you can find a copy - and made enough of a rumpus on the local live circuit for a guy I hadn't seen since school to remember having seen them in some pub roughly forty years ago. I only know them because I've known Martin de Sey since the eighties, Martin being the Girl Guided Missiles' guitarist, occasional vocalist, and apparently the only member to have troubled his local barber shop while they were together as a group. Knowing Martin as I do, this is unlikely to be the most impartial review you'll ever read but you're free to stop reading at no additional charge.

The Girl Guided Missiles may be one of the few bands who ever formed due to musical differences, as the cover notes report, which actually makes a lot more sense than you might expect once you listen to the disc. In essence they seem to have comprised one ex-Cravat turned sharp suited mod and three denim clad hairies, and the sounds they made were a similarly incongruent musical Frankenstein monster which somehow pulled together and worked through the raw enthusiasm of the enterprise. I'd hesitate to guess at potential influences but I can hear traces of T-Rex, Buddy Holly, the Pistols, Status Quo, Suzy Quatro, and possibly even Kiss - or at least there are comparisons to be made with Paul Stanley's pseudo-operatic falsetto; and yet a couple of the tracks made me think of a biker version of the Moody Blues, while Games's Up and Trendy Wendy don't fall far short of channelling the Undertones. I should probably also mention that Further Education is an absolutely classic punk single (or should have been) of the kind which might have seen the light of day through the Step Forward label in an alternate universe; so I've described what probably sounds like a compilation album even without mentioning the cowpunk of Josalea, despite which, it's all quite clearly the work of one band with a very clear idea of what they were doing.

Having known one of the lads since we were kittens, I'm familiar with about half of the songs here, which qualifies me to add that I'm impressed by how great they still sound; also that I'm genuinely surprised to recognise the noodley middle eight - or whatever you call it - from Drinker with such a powerful hit of memory sherbert. Had you played it to me in isolation I would have assumed it to be some half remembered passage from something by Steppenwolf or Led Zeppelin. The other songs are new to me, but it already feels as though they're old favourites.

The Girl Guided Missiles were one of those rare bands which shouldn't have worked but somehow managed to sound effortlessly great despite the odds and so briefly carved their own unique furrow, at least in my tape collection, as well as at a succession of drinking establishments in the vicinity of Studley. This posthumous collection beautifully rescues their studio recordings from the tape hiss to which I've become accustomed, and should probably be snapped up by one of those punky boutique labels of which there seem to be so many at the moment.

Kurupt - Kuruption! (1998)

Albums pretending to be the front page of a newspaper are always a massive pile of wank, except for this one which seems to have been somewhat slept on. Released in the wake of all that commotion about whether the east coast had a bigger one than the west coast, Kuruption! seems to have been an attempted exercise in bridge building, and one which fell on mostly deaf ears given that the rap media had already declared its own east coast heritage the bestest. While there was talk of the west having fallen off, fifty posthumous barrel scraping albums of Tupac promising to shag some New York rival's misses didn't do much to change anyone's mind. The media always needs an angle, some kind of narrative to shift units, and so the bicoastal rivalry divided neatly into west coast rap artists vainly seeking to relive that year when we bought their CDs on the one hand, and New York guy sneezes into a microphone - quick, sign the talented fucker! on the other.

Meanwhile, having arguably been right at the centre of a lot of the hostilities, Kurupt of the Dogg Pound leaves Death Row and records a bicoastal debut album, a double disc with one homegrown disc dedicated to the west coast, the other to the east and so featuring eastern guests, producers, and collaborators. If the message lacks subtlety, it's nevertheless preferable to everyone taking pot shots at one another and it's coming from a good place; and it works because it's a cracking set, possibly one of the best things in which Kurupt was ever involved. The western disc builds on the g-funk of previous years with bars spit over smooth R&B with just enough of a salty undercurrent to keep you on your toes - plenty of jazzy electric piano, beats from Dre, Battlecat, Soopafly, and Daz, amongst others; and pretty much without a dud to be heard. It would have made a great album in its own right.

The east coast disc brings in guests I mostly hadn't heard of - excepting Buckshot, Noreaga and Mr. Short Khop - presumably because they were all pals with chemistry rather than proven selling famous names. It works because the smooth west coast sound had spread east by this point, joining up as something more like film soundtrack but for the occasional stutter of Shaolin style discord - and No Feelings is particularly a belter, by the way. The two discs are different, but feel very much part of the same enterprise, at least in terms of mood - the usual blend of threats, boasting and general impatience somehow managing to come across as oddly amiable. Really, it's almost a classic soul album but for the obvious care one must take to avoid spilling its drink or look at it in a funny way; and Kurupt was twenty-five when he recorded this - twenty-fucking-five. If the man doesn't yet have a statue and you haven't been out campaigning for the same, at least have the decency to give this a listen in appreciation of a major talent.

Severed Heads - Haul Ass (1998)

I bought one just before it got deleted, the better tracks creamed off for a wilderness years retrospective named Focus. Neither Cuisine, Gigapus, Haul Ass nor Under Gail Succubus were shifting units on Bandcamp and were therefore deleted and reprocessed lest their antinumismatic energies irradiate other releases with a spirit of failure. I only discovered its existence as a download album when receiving news of its impending deletion. I didn't even know there was a Severed Heads page on Bandcamp prior to my purchase of the Clifford 2000 compilation from Medical Records, and I've considered myself very much a fan of the Severed Heads for at least the last three decades. Tom Ellard seems to have become the weirdy music Van Morrison in terms of online grumbling about stupid fans and lack of support; and yes, I could have googled Severed Heads at some point to see if he was still alive, but dude, I have a life to live, and wonderful though most of your music certainly is, it's probably best not to assume it will be central to the existence of everyone who hears it and thus subject to pilgrimage.

Cuisine was pumped and dumped by our Canadian label over a few months in 1991.

I started work again, now meeting rejection after rejection. We were out of style.

In 1993 I tried flying to Canada to talk face to face about Gigapus. Old friends were now too busy to meet. The A/R guy suggested a bass player and a female singer. Soon after that label was nothing but female singers.

I didn't have a CD player when either of those came out, and I didn't have an internet connection until 2007, which is probably why I didn't get around to buying a copy of that later Severed Heads album which was issued in an edition of three CDR copies in a fucking suitcase, like the lightweight fairweather fan that I am. While we're here, Cuisine and Gigapus still sound like transitional albums, a little too digital for their own good and driven by a slightly more downtempo version of the bassline that kept Stock, Aitken & Waterman at the top of the hit parade for a couple of years - which is probably why the A/R guy suggested a female singer, sort of like Lisa Maxwell who sang the chorus on Heart of the Party; and while we're still here, I'm pretty sure World Serpent - the international label and distributor with which I was dimly associated for most of the nineties through Konstruktivists - would have bust a nut to get Severed Heads on the books, given some of the losers they did sign thanks to tenuous association with David Tibet's milkman or whoever.

Never mind. Sometimes one has to disassociate the art from the miserable bugger who didst gift it to us, his unworthy, ungrateful so-called fucking fans; and the irony is that now that circumstances have aligned in such a way as to allow me to finally listen to Haul Ass without having to jump through all sorts of silly hoops, it is - I would argue - revealed as what happened at the other side of the transitional phase represented by the previous two, and easily the best, most convincing thing he'd recorded since Big Bigot or Rotund for Success - neither of which should ever have been considered acts easily followed. My only criticisms would be that it's CD length and therefore probably a little longer than it needed to be, and that Ellard's voice is often what makes his albums so I probably could have stood to hear more of it than on just three tracks - or however many it is.

Haul Ass is mostly techno, or techno drifting off into other realms, but techno of the pure, heavily layered Severed Heads variant and hence unlike anything over which one would ever expect to hear Kylie Minogue squeaking away - a sort of sombre optimism with brief interludes of euphoria. More than anything, the album packs the kind of powerful emotional punch which got me buying their records in the first place - not just the heartbreaking watercolour melodies you might expect, but even those screwy, kitschy sound collages such as Dreamsong and All That Matters is You. Anyone can plug a synth into an effects box, but there was never really anyone who sounded quite like Severed Heads or who did the same thing. They should have been huge but weren't, and that's unfortunately all there is to it; and you can't even buy this one any more. I would have bought the fucker twenty years ago had it been a realistic option.

Here's where you can't buy it from.

Gambit of Shame - No Bounds (2021)

I first encountered Gambit of Shame on 1983's A Sudden Surge of Power cassette compilation which famously featured material from Chris & Cosey, Attrition, Test Dept and others. Massively impressed, I bought the single pairing the title track of this retrospective with 18 Out of 20 and waited for the legend to grow, which sadly never happened. The Gambit turned into Skin Side Out who issued a further couple of characteristically wonderful singles, following which it all went quiet until now.

No Bounds assembles the single, the compilation tracks, and other material recorded at the time, amounting to twenty-one blistering songs which seriously beg the question of why it never came to pass for them. There's a touch of the sixties spy movie soundtrack, certainly Josef K - or at least whoever influenced Josef K - like a slightly punkier, snappier version of early Roxy Music amounting to a wild, swirling sound which prefigured Franz Ferdinand more directly than any more obvious source of inspiration; and strangest of all, at least to me, my favourite tracks turn out to be not those I've had rattling around my head for the last three decades, but Maisonette Fairlawns and Ideas in London, neither of which I'd heard until a couple of weeks ago. That said, the single tracks still sound great, and it's nice to hear the eponymous Gambit of Shame from Sudden Surge without all that tape hiss for the first time ever. This lot were better than most of whatever else I was listening to back then and should have been fucking enormous.

Peter Hope & the Exploding Mind - Love is for Others (2021)

Peter Hope records under many names depending on the general thrust of the material, and this latest expression of the Exploding Mind seems to represent a convergence of all the different strands, bolting the gonzo electronics of No Scene, or even the Hot Crow on the Wrong Hand Side album, to the dirty acid of pH2. Obviously this won't make any fucking sense whatsoever unless you're already familiar with a few of these names, so let's start at the beginning.

Older boys and girls may recall Hope as vocalist for the Box and therefore part of that whole Sheffield scene. He's worked with Richard H. Kirk. In fact he seems to have worked with pretty much everyone at some point, and now he lives and records in a seemingly wild corner of New Zealand, at least judging by the photographs. The photographs in question often seem to feature himself building things out of massive rocks with his own bare hands, walls and possibly even his actual house; or this could simply be an impression I've picked up from the music, because it doesn't sound like the work of someone who fears either wilderness or the sort of tough, gut-busting labour necessary for carving out an existence therein. Love is for Others, wherein Hope collaborates with Toby Barrow, is mostly electronic - excepting, I suppose, the heavily treated vocals - but it somehow doesn't feel it, or at least it doesn't feel like anything politely composed on a screen. The rhythms, if clearly originated from some box or other, resemble a cargo cult version of techno formed from rocks, wood, and bits of metal smashed together - programmed with dirt under the fingernails. Everything is overdriven or distorted without turning into either death metal or power electronics, somehow retaining enough of an identity to reveal distant roots in acid house - and so much so as to allow for contributions from the characteristically excellent Mrs. Dink without anything sticking out, if you'll pardon the expression.

If it's still unclear what I'm talking about, I suppose we could call it modern blues via Suicide, or maybe even Chrome, nailed to a rough as fuck acid beat and probably recorded far too loud, which is why it works so well. There's nothing clean here, and it's sort of the opposite of vapourwave in that respect, but better than I've probably made that sound. I've always thought the traditional inducement to play it loud, as often featured on the gramophone recordings of my increasingly distant youth seemed something of an overcompensation, but it would be justified with this one which is nothing if not a proper window rattler, and should be appreciated as such.

Black Lesbian Fishermen - Ectopic Apiary (2015)

Such are the wonders of our friend, the download, that I apparently managed to lose this on my computer, following which it stayed lost and all but forgotten for about five years, shared amongst a plurality of folders on my external hard drive named after anything but the actual fucking artist or album. Thank you, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or whichever one of you twats has taken it upon yourself to improve the quality of my life by making my computer worse.

Anyway, recovered during a cyberspring clean, I've been listening to Ectopic Apiary all week and am jolly glad to have remade its acquaintance. Black Lesbian Fisherman are described on the internet as an international ambient drone collective, which probably sells them a little short. At least three of them live in Greece, one being Alan Trench, formerly of Temple Music, Orchis and technically my old gaffer from the World Serpent days; another being Rebecca Loftiss whom you may recall from Language of Light, possibly. Before you ask, I have no idea about the name and I'm not really bothered because it probably doesn't matter.

I'm not sure it's really either ambient or a drone, although it's definitely neither neofolk nor industrial - should anybody have been squinting suspiciously at any of those names - but its fingers are to be found in innumerable pies and it's possibly worth mentioning that Ectopic Apiary isn't scared of committing the occasional meandering guitar solo. My notes on the near fifteen minutes of Ragged Ritual summarise it as medieval Pink Floyd, which is, by the way, definitely a recommendation. Aside from the dreamy psych-out thing we have going on, pseudo-Arabic rhythms and thematically philosophical vocals render this a highly distinctive set which eludes the usual pigeonholes. Certain points remind me of the Cocteau Twins or Muslimgauze or maybe how I wished Current 93 had sounded, and the deep, deep base of Ice invokes Public Image Limited, or possibly Splintered channeling Public Image Limited; although I'm probably clutching at straws, such comparisons being vague approximations. If the history of painting is any good to you, then the sound of this album is on the scale and grandeur of one of Claude Lorrain's seaports, albeit with something strange and unfamiliar rubbing up against the more traditional details.

Mighty fine anyway.

+DOG+ - Ad Infinitum (2021)

 

Once again, I'm overwhelmed by the artistic vision of this bunch whilst being left bewildered as to how the hell I could even begin to describe it in anything other than purely subjective terms. This time it's a lavishly forged double disc set which divides into thirty tracks including Record Collector Scum, Scumbag Pile of Shit, Impact Geology, Broken Astral Projector, Jazz Snobs, and The Greatest Gift of All is Love. However, I've been listening to the thing as a single piece, by which terms it seems to work particularly well, so individual titles may be not much more than a distraction.

Ad Infinitum seems recognisably the work of +DOG+ as characterised by focus on the sounds which traditional musicians try to keep at bay - mains hum, rattle, circuit buzz, hiss, distortion, speaker deterioration driven to ear-splitting volume or, at other times, settling to a more ambient level; alternating with the occasional incongruous intrusion of a piano or even xylophone played for tonal effect rather than notes; and the whole - all two hours or however long it is - feels almost as though it's telling a story, albeit the sort of thing which doesn't translate into words or even images. It's trippy and sort of immersive, even kind of meditative yet without a single element that you could possibly describe as relaxing.

Available from Love Earth Music, link top left of webpage.

Bigg Jus - Poor People's Day (2005)

As regular viewers will probably have worked out, most of what you read here turns up because I feel like writing about it rather than through a desire to keep anyone's finger on a pulse of any description. The only reason it's taken me this long to get around to Poor People's Day is because I had assumed I'd already written something about it, but apparently not. The reason I had assumed that I'd already written something about it is because it's an honestly fucking amazing album.

You may recall Bigg Jus as having been one third of Company Flow, which will at least give you some idea of where Poor People's Day is coming from. Musically, it's not entirely unlike what El-P has been doing since Company Flow imploded - that same kind of post-industrial extrapolation of hip-hop fundamentals first drawn up on a couple of decks plugged into a light pole in the park. There's a science-fiction element, maybe a psychedelic tinge to the treatment of some of the samples and a bit more of a melody, but it's that same angry insurrectionary lurch albeit with a reduced sense of claustrophobia.

Lyrically, it further underscores that Company Flow were never just El-P with two other guys, and even titles such as Energy Harvester hint at similar dystopian obsessions; as does the subject matter. Bigg Jus is one of those guys who simply can't be pigeon holed and probably shouldn't be, given how fucking angry he is regarding the state of the world, society, and the machine which has made its business to shit directly upon us to an hourly schedule; and his politics are delivered without any of the conspiracy bullshit which blunts the testimony of many of his contemporaries. Poor People's Day is what we used to refer to as righteous truths, although it eludes even the conscious rap tag through having better things to do than waste half its playing time whining about other rappers letting the side down, which makes for a nice change.

Poor People's Day is one of those rare efforts that transcends its genre through not quite sounding like anyone else out there. It's truth is raw and of such emotional power as to reduce the best of us to tears simply through telling it like it is, for which soul music is as good a term as any. This one is right up there with Funcrusher Plus and I'll Sleep When You're Dead.

Cornershop - When I Was Born for the 7th Time (1997)

 

I've tried with this one, but I've tried by means of a Discman while out riding the range on my horse. Now listening to the thing at home, I realise it benefits somewhat from being played over speakers like background music. This is annoying because I'd already built up a significant head of ambivalence and had worked out what I wanted to write; but fuck it, I'll just say what I was going to say and you can assume that it's probably better.

I first heard of this lot back when Morrissey recorded that album of Skrewdriver covers or whatever it was that he did, and Cornershop wrote him a letter to explain how disappointed they were - much to the delight of the music press. It was something along those lines anyway. If the sentiment was worthy, I remained unimpressed on the grounds that Morrissey had spent his entire career eulogising the good old sixties, Granny Grove on black and white telly, penny chews, and how everything used to be much better than it was in the nineties. He'd never struck me as an ambassador for multicultural Britain, and it seemed bizarre that anyone should be surprised after Bengali in Platforms.

Anyway, I saw Cornershop live at least once, possibly twice, but don't remember much about the experience. I had, and still have, a few of their first records. I dig Hold On It Hurts out roughly every five or six years to give it another chance, but beyond that Born Disco, Died Heavy Metal is fairly amusing, it still sounds like a fucking racket, and not even an interesting racket; then I encountered this for a single dollar in the usual place.

It's not terrible, and you could get a fairly respectable 10" out of this bunch by excising all the pissing about, the tracks which don't really count as songs. Sleep on the Left Side and Brimful of Asha are both reasonably wonderful as vaguely summery John Denver impersonations with maybe a bit of Velvet Underground chucked in, and there are perhaps four or five others; beyond which we have a lot of that stuff which always washed ashore every time one of the music papers published yet another krautrock retrospective - three minutes of drumming, someone pissing about with a digital delay, strum strum strum about halfway through then someone pushing an easy listening record around by hand and pretending that it's scratching. It's all very well, and God knows that could serve to describe half of the bands with which I've ever been involved; but it was long in the tooth even before I got hold of it, never mind this bunch. The best you can say of these examples is that they probably worked well as linking music for that Simon Pegg and Nick Frost sitcom, the one without any actual jokes. To me, tracks of this general type make it sound like you don't actually know what you're doing but - hey - look, we're nearly up to an hour now, the album is finished! Just because you were there doesn't mean it's interesting, and no, calling it improvisation really doesn't make any difference whatsoever.

That being said, When I Was Born for the 7th Time sounds much better on speakers, blending into the background as something not unlike elevator music; which was maybe the whole point.

If you read through the above a couple of times, I'm sure you'll eventually find something useful.

Mystikal - Unpredictable (1997)

While I always enjoyed Mystikal turning up on other people's tracks, I never took the plunge with a whole album. The sheer intensity of his delivery seemed like something which would make for tough listening over an hour or more; but I found this in the racks like someone half remembered from school and it seemed like it would be stupid to just pass it by - rude even - and so once again here I am learning the error of my ways, nearly a quarter of a century behind the curve as per fucking usual.

Taxonomically speaking, Mystikal is to be found occupying roughly the same branch of the rap family tree as Fiend, Full Blooded, Ludachris, and possibly Busta Rhymes - gruffly voiced dudes who sound like they're about to explode most of the time. If the mighty Fiend can be considered the alpha male bullfrog of rap, then Mystikal is probably the Tasmanian devil - both the critter and the guy from the Bugs Bunny cartoons. My guess would be that the influence of James Brown looms large, although possibly not so large as the hellfire Baptists Mystikal almost certainly encountered growing up in New Orleans. His delivery is pretty shocking first time you hear it, the sort of thing that has you holding the speaker upside down to see whether it's broken. He yells, he whoops, he growls, he howls like his eyes are about to pop right out of his head with the sheer force of testimony, and he changes gear from rumbling tornado warning to five-hundred miles an hour with unpredictable ferocity - hence the title, I guess. All that booty-bounce My Little Pony rap which the yoots dem are so keen on these days began with either Mystikal or members of his platoon; so it's perhaps his fault, although to be fair, he did it a million times better and it's not like he's been sending out invitations to rip him off. The difference, I suppose, is that Mystikal's delivery remains clear no matter how close he gets to the point of lyrical meltdown, and he delivers shit that's worth hearing, which makes for incredible listening.

So, an entire album of this bloke pebbledashing one's lugholes actually works and isn't at all like listening to extreme metal, as I assumed it would be - although it could be argued that the growled chorus of Oh Shit! Motherfucker! Goddamit! on U Can't Handle This works a lot like some metal riff. It probably helps that Beats by the Pound, the No Limit label's in house production team really gave this album its own sound, one which could mostly be transposed to a live band as distinct from some of the weirder techno stutter with which they graced sets by C-Murder and the rest. So it's almost jazzy, or at least has jazzy overtones, bolted to hard as fuck beats blended in with chiming guitar funk, piano and so on; all of which keeps Unpredictable nicely grounded as our boy raps his face off - literally by the sound of it. It also helps that Unpredictable is good to the last drop with not a single skip button special in evidence. He keeps it moving and he keeps it startling, and I need to track down those other albums while I can still afford the fuckers. Unpredictable was one of No Limit's best beyond any shadow of doubt.