Soft Cell - Cruelty Without Beauty (2002)

I was avoiding this, having only recently discovered its existence. Soft Cell were approximately my most important band in the world for the year or so spanning Non Stop Erotic Cabaret to, I suppose, The Soul Inside. They were Throbbing Gristle as pop songs, which I found incredibly exciting. I wasn't convinced by This Last Night in Sodom when it came out and although it eventually grew on me, it seemed like the split had probably been timely. Dave Ball's subsequent endeavours were sort of interesting, if hardly essential, and outside of The Boy Who Came Back, I never really warmed to Marc Almond's solo career. It seemed to try too hard, and to fixate on all that Jacques Brel stuff at the expense of fun, plus the singing lessons had apparently smoothed out all the previously wobbly charm of his voice. I probably didn't need a Grid album with Marc warbling all over it, and no-one seemed to have much of a good word to say about Cruelty Without Beauty.

Time hath yet pissed harsh upon my regard of Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris, I cried unto the wind whilst wearing a toga and clutching some stone tablets, so let us remember Soft Cell as they were.

Then, because they've just reformed to record a fifth album, somebody issued this one on vinyl and a combination of curiosity and completism got the better of me.

Initial impressions were of hi-energy techno, which at least worked better than Marc warbling all over a Grid record, but the more I listened, the more I noticed the subtleties, and the more it grew on me. Cruelty Without Beauty as an eighties revival album was never going to work, but happily they've likewise avoided the trap of sounding self-consciously contemporary - at least as of two decades ago. Musically, the album mostly keeps its feet planted in parping northern soul, as with the first three, or maybe two and a half, simply sounding like a slightly snappier, more sophisticated - or even older and wiser, if you prefer - version of the Soft Cell we knew and loved. In fact it's weird how neatly it sits behind Sodom - bringing up the rear, if you will - as the next, most logical thing, reducing the twenty year hiatus to a brief cessation of activities; and yet without simply repeating the winning formula.

Soft Cell were one of the few groups of such importance that they sort of cancelled themselves out for me, and I somehow forgot they had existed or that they were ever such a thing. Those records said far more to me about my life - and still do, weirdly - than fucking Morrissey ever did, and I played them so much that it became unnecessary with the music embedded so firmly in my head. Against odds and expectation, Cruelty Without Beauty lives up to the standard, and Dancing Alone, Perversity, All Out of Love, Caligula Syndrome and others are as wonderful as anything they ever recorded back in the eighties. Definitely looking forward to the new one now.

Eels - Beautiful Freak (1996)

Strange how this one sits in amongst the other CDs very much like the same awkward orphan exiled from Tim Burton's island of broken toys it effects to be in half of the songs. I dig it out every once in a while but it still sounds the same, sort of.

As I recall, back in 1996, I'd spent a couple of years drifting away from whatever was going on in music due to the temporary extinction of vinyl. Then my friend Eddy gave me his old CD player in the hope of getting me to shut up about it, and I found myself buying compact discs with only vague clues as to what I was buying, and from places like Woolworths. I'd heard Susan's House on the radio and wasn't convinced, but they'd been on telly playing Novocaine for the Soul and it had sounded pretty decent.

In many ways Beautiful Freak is flawless, a perfect album. It does everything it sets out to do and does it well. It's well recorded. You can hear everything, and it has an interesting dynamic balancing sampled rhythms against double bass, electric piano and so on; and I want to love the thing, but somehow it just doesn't ever quite get there. The entire enterprise feels too easy, too obvious.

It feels different in 2020 to how it did in 1996 being that I now live in Americaland and recognise the actual grinding small town poverty rather than just the general sense of misery, but nearly a quarter century later it still feels approximately like Steven Spielberg's version of Nirvana, a sonic counterpart to all those meticulously trashy urban living rooms of Close Encounters and the rest. Musically it's Americana via the Velvet Underground given the inevitable trip-hop production of the time with the shuffling percussion and everything, and lyrically it would be fine except for trying just a little too hard here and there. The title track, My Beloved Monster and Spunky may as well be a teenager trying to freak us out with drawings of scary clowns and sound like they were imagineered to be played over the closing credits of Tim Burton movies. The seemingly endless juxtaposition of cute, folksy and weird becomes exhausting after a while.

Nevertheless, just like the sad puppy it aspires to be, it's somehow difficult to resent the thing. It's fucking catchy and even when it's pushing the existentialist Buffy buttons, it either doesn't realise it's doing it or is doing the best it can, having no other avenue of expression, and I definitely remember having days which felt like  Novocaine for the Soul. Steve Albini might have been able to save it from itself, but never mind.

BLUE - V-Ekpyrotic (2020)

I realise this probably means I'm now the marketing department of Love Earth Music, but they keep sending me this stuff and it's always good; and as beautifully produced physical media it's particularly appreciated as an alternative to the more usual link to a Bandcamp page with the suggestion that I check it out*.

Anyway, this BLUE are presumably nothing to do with the English boy band of the same name, the seventies Scottish band of the same name who tried to sue the English boy band, or Eiffel 65. As with the New Harnessians, there seems to be a possibility of it being related to +DOG+ by some means, but I don't know and it probably doesn't matter.

I was actually expecting something like Tangerine Dream because the cover reminds me of that of Phaedra on some admittedly tenuous level, and although there's no real resemblance to Tangerine Dream, V-Ekpyrotic sort of does something similar - surprisingly. Where the New Harnessians' Tabla Rasa seemed to represent the harsh textural noise of +DOG+ pushed to a somehow more overtly aesthetic extreme, BLUE pulls back to something more brutal, more primal and which actually reminds me of Trev Ward's Nails ov Christ, presenting three huge slabs of undifferentiated noise and distortion which become quickly hypnotic, thus additionally reminding me of Tangerine Dream - albeit obliquely - and seeming to work against themselves, which is odd; it's an oddly calming and meditative screaming cacophony. Circinus, the final track, differs in incorporating a more violent dynamic with walls of feedback which reminded me a little of early Ramleh. As with other releases from the same label, the cumulative effect suggests some kind of narrative, possibly something to do with the formation of the universe if the titles are any indication, reinforcing my own hunch that this sort of thing represents music catching up with abstract expressionist painting - although it's actually a lot more dynamic and engaging, in my view.

Love Earth Music once again prove just how much variation is to be found in this kind of music, and even that it is music.

*: Not you, Ade.

London Posse - Gangster Chronicle (1990)

This one passed me by at the time, but wasn't alone in that respect. Homegrown UK rap was still trying to work out the details of its own relationship to the mainstream, turning up on house tunes or sounding vaguely like Chuck D in the lower reaches of the charts to the amusement of a million generally clueless indie fucks on the grounds that rap music is from America innit, which was never really the most coherent of objections. London Posse weren't the first to rap without American affectations but were arguably the first to truly sound like their own thing, and thus our thing from an English perspective. Of course, they took a lot from Jamaican culture, it being their culture - dancehall, ragga, the toasting and so on - which, unlike the profound influence of Public Enemy on both Blade and Hijack - was something so firmly ingrained in the streets of London as to have wormed its way into the DNA of the city itself.

Gangster Chronicle is therefore justifiably remembered as a classic, one of the first of its kind, and yet was laid down with such raw enthusiasm for its own exploratory spirit that we still haven't reached the sell by date, and it sounds as fresh in 2020 as it did three decades before - or at least it does to me. Perhaps through finding itself needing to shout so much louder for the attention, UK rap can generally be characterised as having been executed to a higher standard than transatlantic equivalents, at least in so much as that the average UK MC usually makes the average US dude sound like a bit of an idiot; and so it was for Rodney P and Bionic, sharp as fuck, funny with it, and paying homage to no-one but themselves. Musically we're drawing from dancehall with skanking rhythms and bluebeat horns dominating the album, while doing something new and different back at the birth of sampling, something which no longer sounded like a robot and which, it might be argued, was one of the first truly successful examples of sampling woven into something distinctly organic. You can hear the intersection of all sorts of disparate musical strands meeting on this one disc, things which came from house or which would eventually turn into drum and bass - everything is here.

Being of a certain vintage, it's probably inevitable that this album conjures a certain ambience for me - specifically New Cross, London, SE14 circa. 1990, and more specifically the stretch of road between the bus garage and New Cross Gate tube station, stinking and heaving with vehicles under a hot summer sun. So I wasn't there at the time - because I was actually just down the road in Lewisham and probably listening to Front 242 - but if I had been I know it would have felt and sounded like this; and should the thrust of my three paragraph brainfart remain ambiguous, I'm trying to say that Gangster Chronicle is a powerful album which has lost none of its fire over the years.