Mrs. Dink - Death by Misadventure (2019)

 

This is my third helping of Mrs. Dink, and one which would seem at least as resistant to description as the previous two - or at least resistant to description which isn't me either repeating myself or talking bollocks. Death by Misadventure is techno, or possibly dubstep, or possibly some other variant I've never heard of, but an interpretation which doesn't quite repeat anything else I recognise - not lacking a formula but definitely fucking around with the established recipe.

Leaving aside whatever may be suggested by either the cover or titles such as Batshit Crazy and This is Gunna B Lit, beyond the pounding beats and trippy squiggles of electronica, I found this album had me thinking about landscape the more I listened, and specifically Islamic landscape, places with mosques and a lot of sand. I gather Mrs. Dink either served or serves in the US forces, which immediately makes me think of Afghanistan for possibly unfortunate reasons, so I'm tempted to wonder if she might have soaked up some of the ambient noise of civilisations beyond our own bubble; and if it isn't the case, that's at least how this music sounds to me. We have the familiar pulse, and throb, and of course the hi-hat doing something approximately familiar, but the rest seems to come from some non-western setting, melodies which weave a backdrop rather than pick out a tune; and while you could certainly dance to it, that's not all it does. At times it makes me think of Muslimgauze - although its nothing like so insular or obsessive - or Konstruktivists' Black December album.

Of course, this may all be just me and the sounds on this album just happen to be what came out of a black box on such and such a day, so I don't suppose it makes a lot of difference. Whatever the case may be, it's a lovely bit of work.

Anzahlung - I've Lost My Footing On the World (2020)

 

As a medium to severe Cravats devotee for at least four decades now, I've spent quite a lot of that time tantalised by the prospect of the Shend's solo material, which has been unfortunately sporadic; and unfortunately because what little there is to be had seems to afford glimpses of something genuinely magnificent. I'm referring here to a couple of tracks which appeared on obscure compilations, Piston Smash & the Morning Dobermen who were listed as one of those DCL groups in a fanzine back in the eighties - and I knew someone who apparently had a tape of the same but can't even remember who it was - and, of course, the Singing Man.

Anzahlung additionally features Joe 91 of the Cravats - here in his postmortem incarnation as Dead Joe - and thus hardly qualifies as Shend solo material, yet of all which has sprung forth from the Cravats over the years, it seems thematically and sonically closest to Pixie Denial and what other Shendish fragments I've encountered, and is therefore fab.

There have been rumours of I've Lost My Footing On the World being some sort of pandemic lockdown album which, if true, at least proves that it's an ill wind which blows no good. It's sort of minimal and home-produced, but is of such composition as to dispel thoughts that it might have been casually squeezed out for the sake of killing time. Initial impressions suggest Suicide had they been an outgrowth of the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band, maybe a faint suggestion of the Sleaford Mods at least informing the possibility of an album recorded by means of little black boxes, but as it builds emotional presence with each consecutive spin of the vinyl which you probably should have bought a couple of months back, it goes through a sort of biker version of Severed Heads phase before blooming into its own absolutely weird and entirely stunning thing.

The best tracks might be Standing Still and Busy Always Ends in Why? but it's a close run race. Let's hope that either there's more where this came from or that the pandemic lasts long enough to oblige a follow up.

Severed Heads - Clifford 2000 (2020)

Severed Heads were more or less my favourite thing ever for a long, long time, but I lost track when everything switched to compact disc and 1991's Cuisine came out in that format alone. I couldn't really afford a CD player at the time, and I wasn't convinced by the new medium or the fervour with which friends seem to be replacing entire record collections. Cuisine and Male, the live Foetus thing, were the first albums I really wanted but which I wouldn't be able to play. Of course, I eventually caught up, only to find that Cuisine had a bit of a going through the motions feel, like an album made while trying to get to grips with some new piece of equipment - which may have been the case for all I know. 1994's Gigapus was a significant improvement, but still it felt a little as though it might otherwise all be over. Even the high points were beginning to sound a little closer to Stock, Aitken and Waterman than I usually liked.

Of course it wasn't the end, because Severed Heads carried on releasing albums on CDR, ordered by fax, and which didn't make much difference to me because I wasn't online until about 2007; and CDR has been about the worst, least reliable medium we've had, so I've always felt somewhat reluctant to pay money for one. I have forty year-old cassette tapes which still play fine - in fact most of them still play fine. Of all the CDRs I've ever burned or been given, I have a handful which remain good.

Never mind, because Clifford 2000 is a potted history of what Mr. Ellard got up to in the years following Gigapus, now preserved on four sides of durable vinyl guaranteed not to turn into Merzbow just before your record player refuses to acknowledge its existence; and it's sort of heartbreaking to discover how good this stuff was - Severed Heads at their very best, the dissonance combined with heartbreaking melodies and a certain je ne sais quoi of the bed-wettingly peculiar, unashamedly populist and yet put together upside down and always with something bolted onto the rhythm where you least expect it, so it sounds like pop without actually resembling anything you've heard before. Clifford 2000 might even be the greatest collected Heads since Come Visit the Big Bigot and is as such absolutely essential; and while we're here, I'm sure I have room on the shelves for a few more in this general spirit, should anyone feel inclined to issue more enduring versions of the Op discs or any of the others from which this material is harvested.

The Abstracts - h.E.l.P. (1980)

 
Excepting Barbara Dixon whom my parents took me to see when I was a kid - presumably because they couldn't find a babysitter - the Abstracts were probably the first band I saw playing live, and they made a huge impression on me. It was some kind of school disco, the sort of thing I would ordinarily have avoided like the plague but my best friend's big brother played bass in the Abstracts. I'd heard the demo tape, recorded at Woodbine in Leamington Spa, and thought it was great, so I couldn't really not go the thing at the school.

I remember that the PE teacher wasn't keen on them. I also remember imaginatively calling out play some Joy Division - Martin, my friend's big brother pulled a face at me, played the opening bar of Transmission, then continued to ignore me for the rest of our respective lives. I remember that they were fucking great - like the real world had finally come to our shitty, hairy, backwater school to show that there could be life beyond Judas fucking Priest and bumfluff-moustache twats pulling wheelies on a Yamaha FS1; and that's about all I remember because, annoyingly, I never managed to get a copy of the demo and I don't think they lasted much longer. I was very briefly in a band with Paul, the drummer, and also, the Abstracts were featured in the final issue of Martin Bowes' Alternative Sounds, which was therefore the first fanzine I ever bought and which opened up another can of worms for me.

Otherwise, I've spent the last forty years with just Contrast stuck in my head and not much else to go on, and it's probably significant that I can't actually have heard the song more than two or three times, and yet it stayed with me. Now, after all these years, that demo has been released as a download and limited seven inch and, let's face it, the chances of it living up to the legend which has been fermenting in my memory during the intervening years were pretty slender; but guess what?

This stuff is actually better than I remember it being, leaving me now more mystified than ever as to how they never quite achieved escape velocity - as I was absolutely convinced they would. Contrast has a killer bassline while Mark Gibbons seems to be playing a different song on the guitar, all angular jazzy chords - somehow both spiky and west coast mellow at the same time - and while Jez Randall's voice may not immediately leap out at you as likely to launch a thousand ships, it's difficult to imagine anyone better suited. Oddly, his vocal proposes the Abstracts as occurring halfway between A Certain Ratio and a moderately more punky Dentists, or something along those lines; which as convoluted comparisons go, should probably be taken as an indication that they didn't really sound quite like anyone else. How something this good, and this full of life, and so gloriously original can have remained hidden away for so many decades is astonishing.

Buy it here.