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.