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.