L'Eclipse Nue - Faces from Dreams (2021)

 

Here's another name I've never heard of, as usual, but one I'll certainly remember. Internet research reveals L'Eclipse Nue to be the work of one Daniel Sine who has been at it for at least a decade and produced a million albums under that banner; but I'm too fat and old to keep my finger on so many pulses and refuse to feel embarrassed for showing up late to yet another party. Besides, I'm only just becoming accustomed to the idea that noise can do much more than just the one traditionally scary thing - which I realise is ridiculous given how many Nocturnal Emissions albums I own - and L'Eclipse Nue represents a significant further expansion of my horizons towards symphonic noise, or stadium noise, or some other fucking silly category that's probably already done the rounds while I was looking the other way. Faces from Dreams is harsh as buggery, but selectively so, and its distorted squalls of feedback are palliated by both the ultra-high definition recording of the same and the contrast of quieter, pseudo-choral passages suggesting sunrise on alien worlds, at least to me. The cover lists eight distinct tracks, although it feels like a singular piece of work, operating in much the same way as a symphony, albeit by means of mood and texture rather than notation. I'd guess there's a lot of layering here to account for the richness and breadth of what we hear, and the whole is overwhelming but in a good way. Just when you think you've pretty much got a handle on what can be done with noise, something like this comes along and demonstrates that we're only just getting started.

We Be Echo - The Misanthrope (2021)

 

It's not that I never imagined I'd still be listening to We Be Echo in 2021, but I didn't expect it to be new material; or for there to be quite so much new material - this being the second new album in about six months; or that the new material would actually eclipse those tapes from back when we were all a whole lot younger. With The Misanthrope we've gone beyond the possibility of attempts to revive former glories, which is weird because it seems like a new, unfamiliar dynamic in music biz terms, like Emotional Rescue turning out to be the definitive Stones album.

I suppose the biggest initial surprise was We Be Echo evolving into something sounding so much like a band and hence somewhat removed from the days of boxes plugged into a music center. As with Darkness is Home, this is very much a guitar orientated sound, or at least bass guitar orientated, presenting potential comparisons with Wire, Joy Division, the Talking Heads impersonating Joy Division, Neu, or even the first couple of Eno albums; but the more I listen, the more I realise this is a fairly logical progression from Third Door from the Left, Kevin Thorne's other band of times passed, and specifically from It's Not Us which seems vaguely ancestral to this material, at least in terms of mood.

For an album called The Misanthrope, this is a surprisingly uptempo set. The bass pounds and chugs with melodic intensity over driving beats and Thorne's increasingly confident vocal, and if it's slightly frosty in tone - possibly cold wave as I believe people who need to have names for things would call it - it's passionate, emotional and informed, so I would imagine, by turmoil. Love You Anyway and Need You Like Water are particularly powerful in this respect, presenting near solid walls of mood with the intensity of epic landscape painting or even something from Faith, the only decent album the Cure ever made, but without the disadvantage of being by the Cure. It's been a while since I got earwormed this hard by anything, but Love You Anyway may even be We Be Echo's New Dawn Fades.

 

 

 

Whodini - Greatest Hits (1992)

Being somewhere in the vicinity of a million years old, I've often found myself caught out and bewildered by use of the term old school when referring to rap, because these days old school means some multicoloured foetus who had a hit ringtone six months ago - you know, that thing which was just three minutes of handclap and some dude slurring meaningless gang gibberish, my balls be bigger than yo mama's 'hoooooood, or similar, over and over and 'hood pronounced with seven Os just as Tupac would have wanted it. Whodini, on the other hand, were proper old school dating back from even before they invented swearing and had to label rap music with Tipper stickers.

Once again, I'm following up a lead from about thirty years ago, one of those things I taped but apparently couldn't afford to buy whilst gaps remained to be filled in my Gary Numan collection. I had a look on Discogs but old rap CDs cost a fucking fortune now, or at least more than I'm willing to pay, leaving me with the option of either vinyl or greatest hits collections, and I've reached the point where I can't actually fit any more vinyl albums on the designated shelving. Whodini's Greatest Hits doesn't seem to contain Rap Machine, but never mind. It's close enough.

Whodini still exist and don't seem to have quite fallen off the edge of the map, but it's probably safe to assume the comeback would have happened by now if it was going to happen. Nevertheless, I'd say this stuff has been overlooked more than should have been the case, which is unfortunately the nature of the rap biz.

Whodini date from an era prior to anyone giving a shit about the greatest lyricist of all time, or conforming to some other guy's version of keeping it real, or downwardly mobile credentials. They got the fuck on with it, and it doesn't matter that their old school nursery rhyme cadence has been superseded by bigger sellers because it still delivers the goods. Nothing dates so quickly as a new idea, depending on the motivation, particularly if it has nothing going for it beyond being a new idea. Whodini did it for the right reasons and consequently somehow still sound as fresh as fuck after all these decades. The beats were programmed at the height of electro back when those squeaky clean Yamaha snare samples still seemed futuristic, and where their contemporaries may now sound slightly archaic and obvious, the raw energy and enthusiasm that went into this stuff has kept it alive.

Young guns may chortle at the absence of a parental advisory warning, or these clean cut men who clearly brushed their teeth every night before bed, but Magic's Wand and Haunted House of Rock - to name but two of the fourteen mammoth cuts assembled within - still blow most of the competition out of the water. In rap terms, we really need to start moving beyond the idea that nothing much happened before Run DMC.

Joy Division - Still (1981)

I spent about six of my late teenage months so deeply immersed in Joy Division that even now, nearly forty years later, I have no idea whether they were really any good. I'm old enough to have enjoyed them when Ian Curtis was alive, when their records were still on Factory, and tend to disregard the testimony of anyone arriving at the party more recently because it will usually be pure dog shit, the usual recycling of Ian and the lads stood looking mysterious in front of the Parthenon because they've just been reading Camus. You know, they had their moments, but get a fucking grip.

Oddly, I never owned any of their albums. I had the singles, and my friends, Pete and Graham, had the other stuff, so I taped it and spent what little money I had on records I wouldn't be able to get from Pete or Graham. It was quite exciting when Graham got hold of a fourth or sixth generation tape copy of what we referred to as the Warsaw bootleg featuring all the stuff which never made it onto any of their official records, and which was at least as good, often superior despite the ropey quality. Still, which both Pete and Graham snapped up on the day it came out in that cloth bound gatefold hardback format, was almost as exciting, not least because it featured better quality recordings of certain tracks from the Warsaw bootleg.

It sounds decent in 2021, mostly, but this lot could never have lived up to their absurdly inflated reputation, forged as it was in the white hot intensity of a thousand acne-spattered bedrooms. They rocked hard back when they were called Warsaw, and Unknown Pleasures and the singles captured the magic of their better Black Sabbath impersonations, but Closer amounted to maybe half a decent album, and New Order's Movement was probably the best thing done by any combination of these people.

Still is two albums, one of them being at least as good as Unknown Pleasures, or would have been had they included something better than the ropey cover of Sister Ray. Unfortunately the other album is live. To be fair, it's about as good a Joy Division live album as you're ever likely to hear, but nevertheless suffers from the same problems as most of their other live recordings, the fluffed notes, the missed cues, and Decades, a song which carries the distinction of sounding exactly the same when you disconnect your turntable and push the record around by hand with one finger on the label. That said, it's nice to hear the Curtis version of what would become New Order's Ceremony. In fact, they probably should have slapped that on the end of the first disc instead of Sister Ray and made it a single album.

Did I mention that we have a tribute act called Joyhaus here in San Antonio? I gather it's one bloke with a drum machine and he covers songs by Joy Division and Bauhaus. Doesn't that just say it all? One day it will be possible to separate the music from their frankly fucking ridiculous legend, but sadly that day is still some way off. They had some nicely moody songs which sounded just right when you realised that some fellow teen was never going to grant you access to his or her underpants, but they really weren't the messiahs. They weren't even particularly naughty boys.