Level 42 - Level Best (1989)

Having bought this, I realise that I've never knowingly met one other person who ever liked Level 42, such has been my social circle. I therefore have a possibly false impression of them as existing somewhere on the Sting-Lighthouse Family spectrum, something beige and tasteful which Alan Partridge would have in his car, and of course there was that album which came with a free pair of driving gloves…

The Wikipedia page refers to jazz funk and something called sophisti-pop, but I don't care. The hits wormed their way into my consciousness before I had time to form any of the usual objections based on the presumed existence of anything called sophisti-pop, and those selfsame tunes have stayed there ever since; and yes, weirdly there were enough of them for a greatest hits album. There are six or seven on here which I don't recognise, which still leaves more than just The Sun Goes Down and that other one.

As you may recall, it's all very smooth and sounds fairly expensive, but all that ostentatiously complicated slap bass, jazzy electric piano, and pitch perfect vocal harmony is dynamic rather than just tasteful for the sake of it, with all those extra notes working the sort of profoundly emotive melodic power you usually only get with a symphony orchestra, depending on what it's playing. In other words, at least with the likes of It's Over, Leaving Me Now, or The Sun Goes Down, the thing wrenches your heart right out of your chest before you've even had chance to admire the razor crease in its chinos or the expertise with which that cocktail was mixed. I'm not kidding. The way those notes fit together in the chorus of It's Over is genuinely fucking astonishing to me, enough to bring a tear to the eye even when you haven't actually split up with anyone, or noticed the line which appears to run:

Don't look for me around this town,
'Cause I will be so far away, you'll never find me anywhere,
And I won't take no souvenirs,
No perfume, no pictures, no brassiere…

Thankfully that isn't what he's singing.

There's some degree of cheese, I suppose - the token song about a flying saucer encounter, and of course the massively futuristic Micro Kid whom older listeners will recall as having had megathoughts, whatever those were, and Hot Water is built upon that chuggy rhythm which I assume has since been made illegal because no-one does it these days; none of which seems to matter because this lot somehow made all that shit sound amazing - not so much the Shriekback of the golf course as Kool & the Gang with a rocket up their arse.

The Grid - Electric Head (1990)

The Grid somehow passed me by, which is strange with hindsight. I loved both Soft Cell and Dave Ball's extricurricular activities, the solo album, Decoder, English Boy on the Love Ranch, and even those fake house compilations put out by Psychic TV - which were almost the Grid, give or take some small change. I sort of liked what I heard of the Grid, but was otherwise distracted that year and it felt a little like progressive house; and I suppose I like some progressive house, technically speaking, but it always made me think of certain individuals who spent the best part of the eighties pretending to be Front 242, reinventing themselves with backwards baseball caps when the rave scene happened despite previously having avoided house music like the plague. At the risk of sounding sniffy, if your club experience was mostly confusion and the dance floor given a wide, wide berth, it usually shows in whatever you were trying to pass off as your - cough cough - ravemaster megamix.

Coming clean here, the above paragraph probably contains clues as to why I missed out on a few things that I might have enjoyed had I given them a fair crack of the whip; but better thirty years late than never, I guess. First impressions of Electric Head suggested my initial prejudices had been partially justified in that it sounds sort of as I expected it to sound - like something I could have done myself; but the more I've listened, the more I've realised my judgement is based on it failing to do something it never set out to do in the first place. The Grid weren't, so far as I'm able to tell, thinking house music or techno or rave or whatever. They were just making the music they felt like making, regardless of where it sat in relation to any existing scene, or to anyone else, and the strongest connection to anything else is probably back to Jack the Tab. Are You Receiving could almost be a 242 outtake, but otherwise there's one fuck of a lot of Soft Cell DNA in these beats and basslines, and particularly in the flourishes of cornet, the soulful touches, and Norris' sparsely applied vocals occasionally threatening to do an Almond. So it's just electronic dance music, instrumental pop or whatever on its own terms, and the opening paragraph is merely evidence of my own tendency to overthink things which, on close inspection, are actually very simple.

Sometimes I really wonder what the fuck is wrong with me.

Jake the Flake (1998)

I'm not sure whether we're still whining about rap artists supposedly glorifying violence or whether that was just a nineties deal with older white men who preferred their world music socially responsible and preferably well behaved. In any case, Jake ticks one fuck of a lot of those naughty, naughty boxes because - as you may notice if you look closely - he was telling it like it is, or was but almost certainly still is. It's no good asking people what sort of problems they have in their lives if you disregard the answers you don't like.

Anyway, Jake is from Flint, Michigan and has been a member of the Dayton Family at various points during his career. I don't know much about Flint beyond what I've learned from Dayton Family records, but I gather it was a tough place to live even before anyone noticed the water was poisoned but decided it would probably be okay because it was mostly working class black people holding the shitty end of the stick. Jake the Flake's debut is mostly concerned with what you had to do to get by in Flint back in the nineties, so it's kind of brutal if you're unaccustomed to such stories, but it's also absolutely real and therefore should be heard.

The mid-west sound of the time seemed to draw from west coast influences but with a harder, electronic edge - not quite Front 242, but maybe something from the next studio along with more emphasis on gospel, soul and end-of-the-line blues, and of course the rat-a-tat delivery which seems to distinguish the region from elsewhere on the rap map. This is a hard album, and powerful, and there's not much being glorified, although neither does our man give a shit about apologising for anything; and just like the Flint water crisis, as the evening news is my witness, we still haven't learned a fucking thing nearly a quarter century later.

Megatonewelle - Mirfield Pads (2022)

This is Paul Tone, who was associated with both Smell & Quim and Swing Jugend way back in the dawn of time; and I actually had the impression that Megatonewelle was Paul in collaboration with someone else, except I can no longer find the facebook message stating the case, apparently having dreamed that part; so I've no idea, beyond that Neil Campbell contributes to Crystal Airfield, the last of the four tracks.

Well, whoever it is, it's not at all what I expected given the lad's resume. Initial impressions deposited the phrase like a cross between Tangerine Dream and Throbbing Gristle into my head, but I'm trying to get out of the habit of reviews amounting to this sounds like a cross between the Swans and Splodgenessabounds or similar because it's lazy and rarely helpful. Spacious washes of sound combined with busy sequencer invoke the sort of ethereal scale one might associate with new age efforts, but this does something slightly different, hence my subconscious having been reminded of Gristle's abrasive chug. The chug is particularly compelling on the first track, Barry N. Malzberg, named after a science-fiction author I'm not aware of having read, but who John Clute describes as powerful but gloomy, a voice in the wilderness, speaking in wisecracks, which seems to fit.

The twenty-three minute Crystal Airfield on the other hand verges on krautrock with its motorik rhythm and soaring e-bow guitar, assuming it is e-bow I'm hearing.

For all I know, we may be experiencing a glut of this sort of thing right now, but being no longer fully cognisant with what's going down with the kids on the streets, I have to say it's been a long time since I heard anything like this, specifically anything which strikes me as being like a cross between Tangerine Dream and Throbbing Gristle, although neither does it really sound entirely like an exercise in nostalgia. Mirfield Pads is dreamlike, pensive, spacious, and moving. It also sounds a little bit expensive, which makes a pleasant change from the usual.

Run the Jewels (2013)

Here's yet another example of my most favouritest favourite thing ever for which I somehow failed to get the memo. Specifically I've still been thinking of El-P as the guy from Company Flow and was somehow unaware of the existence of Run the Jewels - now on their fourth fucking album - until a little over a year ago. It's because I'm old and I dislike the internet, music radio, streaming, kids kicking a football against my fence, and most rap magazines seem to be a complete waste of time these days, from what I can tell.

Run the Jewels came as quite a shock when I first heard them, and it's taken me a couple of days to acclimate, having finally bought myself a copy of this, their first album. The production couldn't really be the work of anyone but El-P, and yet the beats, the rhythms, the rapping border on trap music, albeit a more lyrical version; and by trap I mean the slow, low rider bass and hi-hat jittering along like some tweaker with rapid fire lines delivered over the top. It's a long, long way from El-P's roots in semi-abstract agit-prop over a chugging rhythm that always reminded me of Nocturnal Emissions; but on the other hand, he's always been eclectic, always tried new things, and I seem to recall him hanging out with Dizzee Rascal for a while. As an artist who wouldn't want to be a part of any club that would have him, I imagine he got tired of the indie ghetto, the inverted snobbery of the underground; and even with Run the Jewels being the success it has been, if the sound seems less startling on the same playlist as Lil' Yachty, the material is still thematically uncompromising, even if there's nothing quite so hard and harrowing as Patriotism, or Habeas Corpses or For My Upstairs Neighbour.

The more I listen, the more I appreciate the contrast with and contribution from Killer Mike; and the more I recognise the qualities which have rendered the work of El-P so distinctive, so essential: the grinding b-movie synth, the friction and dirt, the paradoxically epic scale invoked in combinations of broken noises, the arrestingly weird images ingeniously wrapped up in unfamiliar rhyme schemes, particularly on Sea Legs.

Trying not to walk crooked while this anchor's dropped,
But I've been out on them choppy waves,
And it's hard to say,
Where this land begins,
And that water stops.

I still don't know what any of it's about beyond that it's taking no prisoners and this time around the shout outs go to Ice Cube and Spice 1 - which is something I never thought I'd hear - and they clearly had a blast making it.

Still boldly going where no man etc. etc.

The Men with the Golden Gonads Play the Men with the Golden Gonads and Other Misses (2022)

What follows will inevitably be completely biased given my friendship with both the late Tim Webster, who formed the Men with the Golden Gonads, and Prez, who plays organ on this record. I first met Tim at the tail end of the eighties. I was unemployed and thus spent three or four hours a day in the Gruts cafe in Chatham. Tim had a guitar workshop on the opposite side of the road and employed Tim O'Leary - who took the photo of the Frankenstein monster on the cover, presumably spawn of the aforementioned workshop. Prez, formally Prasun Amin, was also a Gruts regular, as was Billy Childish who produced the album.

Anyway, we lost Tim Webster a couple of years ago, which remains upsetting, although he's thankfully well-remembered, and his legend is now fortified by this astonishing collection. He was a very busy individual back when I knew him, and seemed to be in about three or four regularly gigging bands, Johnny Gash being the main one at the time. I remember him mentioning the Men with the Golden Gonads but didn't even realise it was necessarily anything with which he was directly involved, much less that Prez had been recruited.

This is the Medway Delta sound, but distinctly the Webster variant - sharing beat music, rock 'n' roll, and rockabilly influences with the Milkshakes and others, but with all that raw punk rock energy channelled into something which, if not exactly smoother, is certainly less abrasive for the presence of a horn section. It's been called trash, probably thanks to the Cramps, but I've always felt a bit uneasy about the term, it being an often misleading label which drips with lazy irony in the wrong hands; and Tim Webster - arguably the realest motherfucker you could ever wish to meet, if you'll pardon the vernacular - was about the good stuff, not trash, and certainly nothing artistically cynical. The quota of covers on this record does not constitute a knowing wink to the camera. As with his earlier group, the Sputniks, there has always been something family friendly about Tim's music - aside from the nautical terminology, obviously - an element of the variety show but never at the expense of energy. Accordingly we get at least a couple of telly themes, notably the one from Hawaii 5-0, but delivered with a joyful fury which blows the Shadows and their like right out of the hall. Elsewhere we touch upon old school soul and even driving go-go on Ride Your Pony, yet at no point does this feel like some recreation or revival. Billy Childish has countered accusations of musical revivalism by pointing out that if it still works, then you may as well do something with it, which The Men with the Golden Gonads demonstrates to powerful effect because the sound is such that it feels as though the band are actually bashing away inside your house.

The raw power of this record is the same as you hear on anything by the Pistols or the Hamburg-era Beatles or whoever; and Tim was very good with his hands, with engines, with machinery, and seemingly able to get even the rustiest heap of scrap running again, and The Men with the Golden Gonads benefits from the same craftsmanship and attention to detail, and I doubt any tremolo twang has sounded quite this powerful, at least not since Link Wray was last open for business. Should you have somehow failed to understand the appeal of rock 'n' roll as it once was - because it's 2022 and youth culture is now a complete waste of time - this record will answer any fucking stupid questions you may still have.

Available from Spinout Nuggets unless they've all gone.

Anzahlung - What You Think is All You've Got (2022)

Let's hope that either there's more where this came from or that the pandemic lasts long enough to oblige a follow up, I wrote back in February 2021, and it seems that the secret chiefs who control the universe from behind the scenes didst heed my call, for here we are again, very much enjoying second helpings from Joe 91 and the Shend. It's the same sort of deal as before - distortion, repetition, gas-powered synths, and all recorded inside a broom cupboard (all of which should serve as a recommendation); and yet it's different, expanding on what went before, even more cinematic in places - keeping in mind that we could be talking Screen Test as much as we're talking Ben Hur or Chariots of Fire. Joe's music - assuming it's mostly him - is evolving into a sort of electronic future nostalgia, Just William on the moon or something in that direction, having moved further and further away from any of the more more obvious influences. At a similar remove from more or less everything else ever, the Shend continues to explore the depths of that same rabbit hole which provided such succour to Lewis Carroll, Thomas de Quincey and the guy who wrote all of those Tarzan books; and unlike all the chancers who habitually get it wrong, he's perfected the art of serving up riotous absurdity with an absolutely straight face, even a single tear in one eye, notably on Junkers, a song about an aeroplane which breaks your heart without it ever being entirely clear quite why.

Amazing.

+DOG+ - The Miracle Ending is Laughter (2022)

I've been listening to this for a couple of months without being quite sure what to make of it, possibly because it's a beautifully produced vinyl album rather than the customary CD, and I generally listen to each under different conditions. Previous releases having been on compact disc, +DOG+ has been something I tend to experience on headphones while I'm out and on the move with a CD Discman. Listening at home through speakers, as I'm now doing, is a surprisingly different affair, emphasising qualities I usually miss - unless this is a significant departure from previous releases.

Most obvious is that The Miracle Ending is Laughter seems an almost ambient work and far less in your face, despite retaining the familiar sound of broken electrics, mains hum, and acoustic interference. Whether illusory or not, this shift in focus facilitates greater appreciation of the sonic textures involved, here abstracted from the customary assault; and Time is a Funny Thing, which additionally makes use of a drum kit borders on free jazz in terms of mood. Distortion aside, +DOG+ seem to make use of a great many sounds and effects which might ordinarily have fallen through the net as everyone else races to embrace the loudest, most piercing feedback and noise ever to burst an ear drum - electronic hum, the interference of an old condenser mic held too close to a television screen, the static pop and click of a failing transistor; although before we completely turn into Pierre Schaeffer, A Lost Season comes as a reminder of what it's like to be run over by agricultural machinery. The Miracle Ending is Laughter may superficially sound like a number of other things inhabiting the noisesphere, but even with these bare recordings rendered plein air sans echo, reverb or what have you, there's a cumulative effect, something at least as hypnotic as picking at a bandage when ill, and which is almost psychedelic or folksy by some sense - which is probably why their artwork often reminds me of bands such as Pink Floyd, an impression underscored here with the lavishly rustic gatefold cover.

One day I'll make sense of all this, but in the mean time The Miracle Ending is Laughter is beautifully confusing.

Heartbreakers - LAMF (1977)

The New York Dolls were once quite important to me, and have remained so, impressions to the contrary stemming only from my making time to listen to other things because spending your entire life obsessively listening to just one band is fucking nuts, obviously. Despite which, I never got around to properly hearing the Heartbreakers until this year, even though I liked everything I'd heard and was pretty sure they would be right up my street. I plead poverty and there once having been so many records I liked at any one time that I never could have bought them all.

Anyway, this being reissued reminded me of its having existed and so here I am. The reissue was inspired by someone having found the master tapes and given the thing a decent mix, because apparently the rest of you have been listening to the shit version all these years. That's what it says on the cover. I haven't heard the shit version, although the announcement reminds me a little of claims regarding the muddy quality of the first two Dolls albums, both of which sound fantastic to me, so who knows?

LAMF is an older, slightly wiser, less hysterical Dolls captured at about three in the morning after the weirder drugs have mostly worn off, just before everyone gets their second wind. Some bloke on the internet described it as the greatest rock 'n' roll album of all time, which seems fair, despite it not being Machine Gun Etiquette. Listening to this, it's not difficult imagining the Heartbreakers sharing a stage with the Pistols and the Damned. It's bluesier, definitely New York spawned, and pops and crackles with a breezily spiky energy that probably shouldn't be possible given how much arm candy was allegedly involved.

Honestly, every last song is pure spun gold, although the review probably could have been left at features Born to Lose because I'm not sure you even need further information, and I don't even want to think about the sort of person who would. The Heartbreakers were the opposite of ELO, and I don't know if there can be any higher recommendation.

We Be Echo - Ceza Evi (1983)

I now have three versions of this, and I've a feeling I've reviewed it as many times over the years, with excerpts of my previous reviews having been reprinted on the cover of previous reissues, albeit reissues of related We Be Echo material rather than this specific collection. I'm quoted on the cover of this one too, which is massively gratifying, although it presents the weird possibility that you may even be reading this on the cover of some future reissue. Anyway, before I disappear up my own arse…

Ceza Evi was recorded by Kevin Thorne, formerly of Third Door from the Left and fairly close associate of Throbbing Gristle. It was one of the first independent cassettes I bought, and as such set an unusually high bar for the form. It had quite an impact on me. The music - and it is music rather than some dreary bloke scratching his nuts next to a tape recorder and declaring it sound art - utilises drum machine, synth, bass guitar, electronics, and a lot of tapes to communicate a powerfully brooding atmosphere approximately parallel to the sort of thing Gristle always did so well, something bordering on the edge of the profane or unthinkable - beat driven music which really grinds its way into your subconscious. The incredible thing is that this material didn't even have the benefit of a four track portastudio. It was captured by bouncing tracks from tape to tape on a domestic double tape deck. Naturally, no-one's going to mistake Ceza Evi for a Trevor Horn production, but nor does it quite sound like anything produced by a bloke sat cross-legged on the rug in his front room. Kevin got the absolute best out of the extraordinary limited equipment available at the time, even without the significant occurrence of tape hiss, and it succeeds because the simple power of these tracks sweeps you up and carries you away to some very dark places before it even occurs that maybe it wasn't knocked out at Abbey Road.

There were two versions of Ceza Evi. The special edition came out a year or so after the first, replacing more than half of the tracks with newer, more technically sophisticated material. This double disc from Cold Spring polishes up and remasters the special edition on the first disc - or rather Martin of Attrition polishes up and remasters, and a great job he's done too. The second disc collects the tracks which were lost in the update. They're perhaps more primitive than others on the special edition, harder or even more brutal, but - fuck - I'm glad they haven't been left completely by the wayside, and it's particularly great to hear I'm A Gambler, Micro Penis, and Knechtschaft again after all this time. Listening to this lot again, it's also interesting to hear formative clues as to the current We Be Echo sound, which has evolved greatly from these beginnings, but still carries some of the same mood.

I've lived with these tracks for what is now a bewildering two thirds of my existence on this planet, and can't imagine what life would have been like without this stuff somewhere in the background.

Stephen Mallinder - Tick Tick Tick (2022)

I'm almost not sure what to say about this one. He's been at it for nearly five decades, yet continues to put out first class albums which build on what has gone before without sounding like a retread - always breaking new ground; and Tick Tick Tick substantially develops even on Um Dada from 2019. We're back with smooth electric disco, for want of a better term, but where previous efforts with Wrangler and Cabaret Voltaire have been, if not quite dark, certainly tinged with paranoia, Tick Tick Tick sounds kind of happy. Of course, the equipment used brings with it trace elements of acid, techno, handbag house, hardbag, or whatever the fuck they were calling it that year, but more than anything it puts me in mind of some of the weirder extended disco workouts from the likes of the Gap Band and others. Should it even need stating, it seems fair to say that the James Brown influence really wasn't just something with which to freak out all those conservative punk rockers and industrial music trainspotters. Hush seems to be the standout track with its haunting sample of what sounds like a wonky old tape of something orchestral, but it's very much a close run race. If all music was this good we'd be fucked because you'd never know what to listen to next; and talking of matters next, if whatever follows improves on this, I really won't know what to say and may have to resort to expressive dance.

What a time to be alive!

Canibus - Can-I-Bus (1998)

I was about to muse upon how Canibus appeared to have vanished in the wake of the first two, when a moment's online research reveals that actually he released about a million albums since this debut and seems to have done well for himself, even if it turns out I've been facing the wrong direction all of this time. Anyway, I recall that this one didn't do so well as everyone had hoped, given the lad's brief tenure as the next big thing; and he spent at least some of the follow up blaming Wyclef for fucking up the production on the first, echoing what had been said in a few of the reviews, which probably contributed to my giving it a miss. Plus Canibus seemed like a bit of a dick, at least in interview, banging on about flying saucers, freemasons and other conspiracies, qualifying this obsession by proposing that sceptics were uneducated fools who enjoyed being blind to the truth of the true facts, and so on and so forth.

Also, naming yourself after the ganja…

So once again, here I am two decades after the fact thinking, how bad could it have been?

Well, Channel Zero, in which our man explains about lost civilisations, aliens and stuff, is frankly fucking stupid, although one can't help but admire the lyrical dexterity by which he attaches this particular kick me sign to his own ass; but apart from that, Can-I-Bus is not at all what I expected. I was aware of his being a pretty decent lyricist - formidable even - and his name turns up in a few of those all-time top fifty listings. On the strength of this set, I'd say he could be top ten, not least if either Tupac or Eminem made it into any of the aforementioned listings - which I'm sure they did seeing as how they usually do. He's mostly a battle rapper, and it shows on this album, which would have been a bit monothematic except you're too busy tripping over the wordplay to notice; and extra points for the massively satisfying LL Cool J takedown. As the man says:

More lines than the bible quoted from Jesus.
More lines than a African herd of zebras.

Production-wise, sorry, but Wyclef did a great job. I don't see how it sounded too commercial - as was the accusation - in 1998, and in 2022 it may as well be an underground DJ Premier mixtape recorded direct from AM radio, just one copy owned by the artist's mum. It's a clean sound for sure, but hardly conventional or pop or mainstream beyond Wyclef presumably making sure it wouldn't scare anyone off playing it on the radio. It's not the greatest rap album ever, or the greatest debut ever, but it's fucking solid for something the artist ended up disowning; and if it failed to knock Illmatic or Ready to Die or whatever from the throne, we can at least justify Can-I-Bus named in the same sentence, which isn't too shabby.

Nurse With Wound - The Ladies Home Tickler (1980)

I'm fairly sure there should be an apostrophe in the title, but who knows where Nurse With Wound are concerned? This was originally issued with the Psilotripitaka box, then later reissued in an expanded version with additional tracks from various compilation albums, and this is a double vinyl reissue of that reissue billed - at least by Norman Records - as representing the earliest Nurse With Wound recordings, despite that Chance Meeting came out in 1979. I've given up trying to work out where this material was originated because it probably doesn't matter. I like Nurse With Wound without really feeling the need to own a massive stack of albums, but the involvement of Jim Thirlwell, presumably then still in short trousers, was enough for me.

First impression, despite some of it being vaguely familiar from somewhere or other, was actually what the fuck is this shit?, which is my own fault. I was trying to concentrate on something that was turning out to be quite stressful, and the cut-up tape of Dustin Hoffman giggling away in the background was kind of annoying. Then next day I played it all the way through and remembered why I don't have much by Nurse With Wound; and the day after that, still wondering what the fuck was that shit?, I gave it one final chance and everything fell into place. Stranger still, I found myself looking forward to listening to the thing each day as I made my way home.

Oh boy! I can't wait to get back so I can listen to my new Nurse With Wound album, is not a thought I'm accustomed to having, but there it was.

Home Tickler is mostly tape edits - dialogue, familiar sounds in an unfamiliar context, Jim Thirlwell pissing about on a Wasp synth with William Bennett doing something or other as well; but because different tracks recycle sounds and sections of dialogue used on other tracks, the whole hangs together so well across four sides of vinyl as to sound like a single coherent, even orchestrated piece. This is probably an illusion born from repetition, but it nevertheless sucked me right in - compelling in anticipation of which random sonic splatter will hit the next fan, and strangely rewarding as your brain settles into this surrealist assemblage, even getting comfortable. It really hammers home the difference between Nurse With Wound and  anyone else who has ever been described as sounding a bit like Nurse With Wound.

I'm told that Mr. Stapleton no longer regards anything recorded prior to Homotopy to Marie as being proper Nurse, whatever that means, which, if true, seems a shame because this is magnificent. Typically, I now realise I need more.

Bastard Fairies - Memento Mori (2007)

Fucking Hell. I knew nothing about this lot beyond that We're All Going to Hell is a cracker, so I look them up on the web, discovering that they were briefly an internet phenomenon of some magnitude, and also that they're no more due to Yellow Thunder Woman passing away just over a year ago at the age of forty. I therefore say again, fucking hell.

We're All Going to Hell blew my knackers clean off when I first stumbled across it on One'sTube - currently at 193 thousand views and rising - and being only loosely internet savvy, it's somehow taken me nearly fifteen years to nab the album, possibly because it seemed unlikely that it could deliver on the promise of that one song; but it does. Of course, it does.

There were two of them, a bloke from England called Robin, and Yellow Thunder Woman, which was actually her name due to Native American heritage. The music reminds me a little of the Eels, or at least how the Eels should have sounded, wrapping crushingly acerbic commentary in a pill so sweet that it's dancing around with flowers in its hair - acoustic guitar, bubblegum, apple pie, pseudo-McCartneyisms, country stylings with a touch of blues, occasionally incongruous electronic touches, and what sounds like a Casio SK1 preset on the chorus of Hell, and yet lyrically it's almost X-Ray Spex at their most scathing. The Day the World Turned Bluegrass, sort of...

There's no single element which makes the whole because everything is good, and it's difficult to imagine how this combination of words and music could be improved; but special mention should probably go to Yellow Thunder Woman who sang with a voice sweet as golden sunlight and yet powerful as an industrial laser, and natural - without any of that warbling vocalisation bollocks you hear when a singer has nothing but technique; and she's brown bread, which is upsetting.

I don't know what else to say.

 

 

Nocturnal Emissions in Dub (2022)

Not entirely to be confused with the one I wrote about back in 2016, this is a fancy physical pressing of the best material from the two previous albums, neither of which were available on vinyl, all beefed up by Dougie Wardrop of the Bush Chemists, if that name means anything. If the idea of Nocturnal Emissions recording dub reggae still strikes anyone as a bit odd, it really shouldn't, and this slab of black plastic blasts away what doubts may be entertained pretty much as soon as the needle finds the groove, settling into a fairly distinctive variation on the digital rasta sound which eventually became dancehall. Like I already said, it's something in which the hand which crafted Viral Shedding is clearly heard, particularly in the bass, but which absorbed a different set of influences from its south-east London environment in a variant timeline.

Nigel has done this sort of thing before, specifically hopping from one genre to another without really being too bothered about messing up the neat progression of the unfolding discography, hence occasional forays into drum & bass, techno, world music, whatever else he felt like doing at the time; and he's one of the few artists who seems to get away with it, thus avoiding looking like Jonathan King's rap album (which hopefully doesn't exist but who fucking knows). I would guess he succeeds because those areas into which the Ayers toe is occasionally dipped seem subject to the same sort of creative considerations as inform the core Nocturnal Emissions material, namely that the pushing of boundaries is actively encouraged.

Being a vinyl record, I listen to this one over speakers rather than headphones or earbuds - as I tend to use with CDs and downloads - and all its digitised sine waves and evidence of programming really come to life through the warmth of analogue reproduction. It may even be one of the best of Mr. Ayers' four plus decades in the biz.

Left Hand Right Hand - Hidden Hands (2022)

I was aware of the existence of Left Hand Right Hand back in the nineties and yet somehow they completely passed me by. I had a track by them on the fifth Impulse compilation, the excellence of which I noticed only fairly recently when digitising said tape in the hope of capturing the goodness before the oxide crumbles.

Hidden Hands gathers tracks from across the broad span of their career - some new, some old, some previously unreleased - and thus seemed almost as though it had been tailor made specifically in response to my curiosity. Its release also brings the realisation that Karl Blake has been involved, which is embarrassing because I've vaguely known Karl since we were both in bands we no longer enjoy talking about, back in the aforementioned nineties - different bands we no longer enjoy talking about, I should probably stress. Also, there's a Clock DVA association with frequent collaboration from Charlie Collins - whose work is always worthy of investigation, plus the drummer from In the Nursery back when they used to be Joy Division with cowbell.

Anyway, now that I'm finally up to speed, Left Hand Right Hand are intensely rhythmic in the sense of existing somewhere between Test Department, 23 Skidoo, Muslimgauze and records one tends to find in the World Music section. There's a lot of pounding, many polyrhythms, more than a trace of free jazz - albeit without the chaos - plenty of atmosphere and actually not very much in the way of electronics; so the disc takes the listener from crushing rhythmic force to market places in north Africa to the far east and back again. The most striking element, however, is how these tracks share a very distinctive common identity marking them as something apart from any of the names I may already have mentioned. Even when the most incongruous sounds are weaving around the massed drums, tablas, plastic tubes and what have you - distorted guitar, haunting clarinet, ambient noise - there's an epic scale as though everything heard is framed within the gilt outline of some vast nineteenth century landscape painting. I found myself reminded of Ben Hur and Egyptian masses grunting and groaning whilst hauling monolithic rocks on more than one occasion.

Better late than never, as I keep finding myself saying.

Second Layer - World of Rubber (1981)

Here's another reminder for my kicking myself at having somehow missed the Sound during that year when they were at their peak and probably would have displaced Joy Division and the usual bunch as soundtrack to my entire existence, had I actually been aware of them. Second Layer were either forerunners to the Sound or a side project, depending on which bit of internet you're looking at. I had some misgivings about this reissue of a partially unknown quantity, not least the titles hinting at the sort of thing I'd rather not discover about what my potential heroes got up to in their own time, because unless you're Soft Cell, culturally Belgian, or the version of Adam & the Ants which hadn't yet got around to recording Dirk Wears White Sox, you're probably going to sound like a twat. Thankfully, whatever that World of Rubber may have been, it doesn't seem to involve Adrian Borland breathing heavily, so far as I can tell - and lyrically he was always very direct and not prone to anything ghastly smuggled across the sexual border as a metaphor.

Second Layer were more or less the Sound stripped right down to just bass, angular guitar, and primitive drum machine fed through a bunch of pedals - something inhabiting the same sonic ballpark as Métal Urbain and the first couple of Cabaret Voltaire albums but with Borland's characteristically anthemic touch - which you might not think likely to work in such a setting, but it really does and as such sits well alongside the first couple of albums by the Sound as a slightly moodier cousin. This CD reissue ends with Skylon, a track previously unreleased from a related project of breezier disposition providing powerful contrast to the thoroughly bleak Black Flowers, the original closing number. The more Borland I hear, the more I wonder why the Sound's reputation never came anywhere close to matching the quality of their music, because surely it can't all come down to Korova Records spunking away their entire budget on Echo and the sodding Bunnymen, can it? Given Borland's tragic passing in 1999, it may be a bit late to even ask the question, but should anyone be inclined to do so, this reissue serves as further testimony to the power of his distinctive and yet overlooked voice.

Smell & Quim play Wolfgang Kindermann & Kommissar Hjuler (2021)

Having just looked on Discogs I have learned that this album is apparently called GURKE, which I refuse to acknowledge on the grounds that 1) I've been thinking of it as Smell & Quim play Wolfgang Kindermann & Kommissar Hjuler for the past few months, and 2) that I object to the misuse of upper case, and 3) after the bollocks I endured just trying to get myself a copy, I'll call it what I fucking well like.

'Do you want one of these?' the man asked. 'It's a fancy hand crafted edition and everything.'

'Cor! Yes please,' I spluttered and immediately sent him my money. Nothing happened for a couple of months, so I made the appropriate enquiries. It seems our guy had underestimated how much postage would be required to send the album to Texas which, as you will know, is actually on fucking Mars.

So I sent him a bit more to cover extra postage, rocket fuel, cost of atmospheric heat shielding and the like.

Nothing.

It turned out it still wasn't enough and he now felt embarrassed informing me of this. There followed another few months of my sending increasingly sarcastic messages, demands for my money back and so on in response to a series of promises that it would definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely be sent this week because his dole money had come through, and so on and so forth - somehow missing the point of my having already paid the fucking postage - and then suddenly, a mere eight months later, the record actually showed up on my doorstep.

Amazingly, it was worth the wait.

I have no real clue what's going on here beyond that Wolfgang Kindermann is an Austrian poet and Kommissar Hjuler is a German sound artist who was apparently a cop up until 2013. Musically, the record features one lengthy piece each side - electronic sound collages with loops, noise, the Teddy Bears' Picnic, and the usual underlying suggestion of something aromatically pornographic about to transpire. It's immediately recognisable as the work of Smell & Quim, which is an odd realisation given that Smell & Quim are nearly always immediately recognisable despite the dizzying sonic range they've covered over the years, alternately resembling bedfellows to the Grey Wolves, Gristle, Whitehouse, the Residents and Beefheart depending on which way the wind happens to have been blowing; and here's another one sounding as weirdly disgusting and screwy and yet as paradoxically fresh as their earliest material.

The fancy hand crafted edition I bought - when honestly the regular version would have been fine, except I'm not even sure there was a regular version - has someone's hard drive physically hot-glued to the cover, meaning it's likely to fuck up my copy of the Smiths' Hatful of Hollow should I attempt to file it away with my other albums, thus demanding I keep the bastard to one side as some sort of art object. So, factoring in the additional process of flying it through space in the first place, Smell & Quim play Wolfgang Kindermann & Kommissar Hjuler probably counts as the most awkward record I've ever bought, besides which, even the Nocturnal Emissions one which came wrapped in a nappy may as well be Strollin' with Max Bygraves. It's therefore a fucking good job that it delivers.

Monica - The Boy is Mine (1998)

I took something of a funny turn around halfway through the nineties, one effect of which was that I spent about a year listening to very little which wasn't R&B performed by young black women with a penchant for that fucking annoying shaky shoulders dance that everyone was doing for a while. This was partially informed by a desire to hear music performed by persons other than white blokes in shitty trainers with guitars, and while it meant that I ended up listening to a certain quota of things that really weren't very good at all, it wasn't all bad.

Monica is probably best remembered for the single after which this album was named, a duet with Brandy who was also in the biz at the time. The two of them fell out over who got to name their album after the duet, apparently getting into an actual fist fight on live television during a show which had brought the two together for the sake of quashing the rumours of animosity - which I repeat here mainly because it's amusing. Anyway, the upshot was that Monica won.

The problem with this kind of album was usually the space taken up by the stereotypical balladeering R&B sludge. You know the sort of thing - slow as buggery, piano tinkling away, endlessly warbling vocal exercises, sounds as though it was lifted from the soundtrack of a Disney musical and was probably written by Diane fucking Warren as almost all of those drearily epic unit shifting love songs seem to be. Here we get five of the wailing fuckers, thus rendering approximately 38.5% of this thirteen track album effectively unlistenable, although it could be argued that the cover of Eddy Arnold's Misty Blue is borderline.

However, if you ignore these tracks you have something about the same length as a traditional vinyl album which is otherwise pretty great. Most of the production comes from Dallas Austin, a couple from Rodney Jerkins, and even a decent offering from the customarily annoying Jermaine Dupri. It's almost traditional soul music with a heavy, heavy, heavy emphasis on the blues, seeing as Monica is from Georgia, retooled as a series of weird staccato beats and samples because it was 1998; except done with the sort of heart and dedication to what seems like a fairly expensive production as you might expect from persons who don't sound like they'd ever bother with autotune, and would probably be insulted if you asked. Monica's voice has a certain vulnerable quality, and you might even say it's thin in comparison to some, but her strength is that she sounds like a human being rather than a series of ostentatious vocal exercises.

So no, that shaky shoulders music didn't all sound the same in the event of anyone wondering, and occasionally there was an album which made you wonder why the others bothered; and if this one is played by robots, they're robots with real soul in their chips and circuits. Just be sure to skip tracks eight, ten, twelve, and thirteen - also five if you're having a bad day.

Telefís - a hAon (2022)

Of all the celebrity deaths to occur in recent times, that of Cathal Coughlan particularly hurts, not least for coming within just weeks of release of the first Telefís album, itself revealing the discovery of a hitherto untapped seam of joyous bile. It additionally hurts because I honestly believe he was one of our absolute greatest vocalists combining a larynx equal to those of Sinatra or Tom Jones with an unparalleled acerbic yet lyrical wit of a hue so dark as to make J.G. Thirlwell seem positively breezy.

Jacknife Lee only now shows up on my radar, leaving a much bigger blip than I would have expected of someone whose claims to fame include producing Snow Patrol and the Killers; but his music is a perfect match for that voice and those words, and uncannily so. As a whole, the album suggests the compositional techniques of techno and hip-hop somehow amounting to what feels like late seventies television theme tunes, specifically late seventies regional television theme tunes with no obvious shame in overdoing either the vocoder or string synth. It carries a sense of doomed nostalgia for something which we all know was actually pretty miserable at the time, and which yet still somehow raises an admittedly conditional smile.

I could just have pulled that out of my ass, or it could be something implied by Coughlan's testimony which, as ever, does loads of different things at the same time - shoving something horrible in your face with a joke and a bitter smile that opens up a near bottomless pit of melancholy or regret, or summink.

It's nearly three in the morning,
and Danny won't come off stage.
The Stepney boys are offended.
He's forfeited his wealth,
with one catty tirade.

The lyrics are, as ever, like short bitter science-fiction novels in themselves - science-fiction in the sense of New Worlds magazine or Amphetamine Sulphate publishing - surreal, inscrutable, revelling in the truly appalling, and yet sad enough to bring more than just a single tear to the eye. It might be argued that Coughlan's doing the same thing he's always done, but it seems a redundant objection when it's done to such a standard; and so it seems doubly unfair that we should have lost the guy now that the real world has come to so closely resemble the absurdist horror described in his songs.

Stylic - Preacher EP (2022)

 

I don't know why I took a chance on this one over other doubtless wonderful sets squirted forth from New York Haunted's virtual spigot on a seemingly weekly basis - because they're always great - and I suppose it was just the cover image which caught my attention by putting me in mind of Craggy Island's finest.

That's how superficial I am.

Well, superficial or not, other factors must account for why I've ended up playing the thing so much, namely that it bangs and is proper peng and fire and that, as we teenagers say. Preacher is techno or dance or summink, but with what I presume to be that distinctive New York Haunted sensibility in that it sits at a bit of a distance from everything else I've heard and is at least as much concerned with sonic power as getting your back up off the wall. Stylic's brand of techno has an undercurrent of the sort of EDM I recall from the nineties, particularly Nitzer Ebb before they turned into Led Zeppelin, without really sounding like anything from a previous decade. I assume this to be the samples, that specific snare and so on, rather than what it does on the floor; although the mood may also be a factor - a sort of euphoric stomp with added 303 squelch stood at the bar waiting for its turn. The second track, Led, is in particular a work of crazy genius, welding Robert Plant's orgasm noises from the aforementioned Zeppelin's Lemon Song* to Front 242 driving disco trucks across an international checkpoint. Why no-one has syncopated Plant's cum-face before is revealed as a complete fucking mystery as the track sweeps you off your feet, or your chair in my case.

Everything else holds up too, for what it may be worth - three tracks plus three remixes, although not of Led probably because it simply couldn't be made any more amazing than it already is; and we even get one of those remixes in which the label seems to specialise which veers towards Throbbing Gristle effects overload. Someone needs to vinylise this monster ASAP.

 

*: I'm pretty sure it's the Lemon Song but I can't be arsed to check right now. It's the one where it sounds like he's shooting his muck anyway.

Soft Cell - *Happiness Not Included (2022)

I feel I could justifiably just write fucking hell and leave the review at that. I generally experience a certain degree of scepticism regarding any comeback that wasn't Elvis, but I'm not sure it applies here. There's a difference between a group recording their first new material in twenty years and the reanimated corpses of formerly beloved entertainers giving the loyal fanbase udder one last desperate squeeze which - funnily enough, Soft Cell obliquely address on Nostalgia Machine, which almost counts as the grandson of Memorabilia if you squint a bit.

Anyway, I inevitably approached this one with caution because you never know, and even Elvis kind of blew it at the end. Thankfully, it sounded pretty good, and continued to sound pretty good, and then one morning I woke with I'm Not a Friend of God stuck in my head, something which probably hasn't happened since I woke with Little Rough Rhinestone lodged in my head back in whichever century that was. After Cruelty Without Beauty, I knew this would be worth a listen, but I'm not sure I imagined it would be this good.

It works because there's no self-conscious effort to repeat former glories beyond simply doing what Soft Cell always did best. We're not trying to pretend it's still the eighties like in Stranger Things, and we're not trying to pretend that anything is fun or cool because that's never anything that Soft Cell were about - in case you somehow failed to notice. Musically, we're mixing technopop with traces of soul of the kind Dave Ball always did so well, along with a few less obvious elements, and Ball's John Barry homages seem to have evolved into a relative of Aaron Copland - which is odd but sounds perfectly natural - and Tranquiliser has about it a trace of Nashville in certain respects; and yet Purple Zone, recorded with the involvement of the Pet Shop Boys and very much sounding it, is nevertheless perfectly at home.

Almond's lyrics remain as beautifully acerbic and well observed as ever, not least because no-one is trying to pretend we're still eighteen, and this stuff speaks to me just as it did when we were all a bit younger, randier, skinnier, and possibly more perverted. In fact it moves me right now in 2022 just as it did in 1981, and the title track is in particular an air-punchingly joyous fuck off to certain representatives of the generation which believes it invented many of the feelings expressed on this record but really didn't. I vividly recall once sitting in a school art room listening to a couple of hairies dismissing the teenybop benders who dared soil a Jimi Hendrix masterpiece, and I knew then that I was on the right side of history - to make an overused contemporary reference. This album lets me know that I still am, which is nice. Never mind the comeback, *Happiness Not Included may even be the best thing they've ever recorded.

Temple Music - Soon You Will All Die and Your Lives Will Have Been as Nothing (2009)

Temple Music was formed by Alan Trench and a couple of pals back in 1995 as an outgrowth of other, loosely related things. I saw them live in 2011 - I think it was - and assumed they had ceased to be soon after, reforming as the Howling Larsons and therefore leaving this behind as a coda of sorts. However, it seems I'm mistaken and there have been a number of subsequent releases, two of which I've actually owned all this time, so I guess this may be a reissue.

Some may recall Alan as a patron of World Serpent distribution, the label which brought us Der Blutharsch. Der Blutharsch recorded aesthetically extreme music of pseudo-martial composition which, as such, was often lumped in with others of the stiff right arm brigade - possibly due to the titles, occasional allusions to the Hitler Youth, and appropriation of artwork by Werner Peiner whom you may remember from world wars such as the second one. I had the pleasure of at least one evening on the razz in south-east London with Albin Julius of Der Blutharsch. He was an oddball in black clothes with an upsetting haircut, but otherwise seemed like a decent guy; and having spent an unfortunate plurality of evenings on the razz in south-east London with actual Nazis, I feel reasonably certain that he wasn't one.

Anyway, it probably doesn't matter given that he's no longer with us, and Soon You Will All Die and Your Lives Will Have Been as Nothing was issued, or possibly re-issued in memoriam, which seems fitting. Temple Music had a very much Mediterranean sound, one which seems to foreshadow the more recent music of its crew. It's loss, rocks, sorrow, wine, bleached animal skulls, and whatever token Charon may require for passage across the great river this month, all beneath a killing sun with crickets in the background. The dark ambient tag has inevitably attached itself, but the drones and the jangle of bells in the wind seem to come from something older, and something which has endured despite everything. I've listened to this CD and thought about Albin and wondered just what the hell was going on with that guy, although I doubt I'll ever have an answer. All that remains is the sound of waves lapping against the side of a boat.

Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002)

I kept hearing this amazing song on the radio at work, but I could somehow never catch what it was or who it was by; and it took me about a year to work out that it was actually Coldplay. This came as something of a surprise because although admittedly it sort of sounded like Coldplay in slightly more pensive mood, it sounded better than Coldplay.

I never developed any particular loathing for Coldplay, but never saw any particular mystery in the idea that anyone might have done so. They sounded like an absurdly formulaic version of something which might have been more listenable under other circumstances, music for estate agents and automotive commercials, music for photogenic home insurance couples who'd listen to U2 but would rather not have to think about those kids in Africa with flies on their faces - corporate angst; and that's even before we get to Gwyneth's fanny candles.

Nevertheless, God Put a Smile Upon Your Face really wormed its way into my head - a song which sounds like the moment before a thunderstorm stretched out to three minutes, a depressive, doom-laden crescendo running away from itself. I would have bought the 7" but I'm not sure it existed, and CD singles always seemed like a bit of a waste of time, so here I am with an entire album - eleven fucking tracks. Strangely, tracks two to five were all singles, preserved here as a big chunk of hits at the beginning of the album and serving as a lesson in why it's taken me two decades to buy a cheap second-hand copy. It's not that In My Place, Clocks, or The Scientist are poor songs so much as that they're the same fucking song, and hearing it every thirteen minutes or so on whatever turdy indie station we kept it locked to at work used to get pretty fucking painful some weeks. Hearing them again after twenty years without the additional gurgling testimony of Jono Coleman or Christian O'Connell or some other dreadful fucking twat is less painful than I expected, and the more I listen, the more obvious it becomes that it's the context rather than the songs. This may also tally with the fact that God Put a Smile Upon Your Face didn't do anything like so well as the other three singles and never quite got to the point of outstaying its welcome at East Dulwich SDO.

Starting again at the beginning, allowing Coldplay a fair crack at the whip and ignoring both the terrible name and unfortunate association with Gwyneth's fanny candles, this isn't a bad album. In fact I find it unusually listenable. It isn't really that the good stuff amounts to the tracks which weren't singles, although there's a subtle difference in mood which probably accounts for In My Place, Clocks and The Scientist having been picked out; but the material you may not already have heard a million times somehow sounds more like a real band, and certainly less formulaic in pushing all those emo buttons with wistful verses building up to the same crescendo every time. Wikipedia gives their influences as bog standard hyper-mainstream shite but to me they sound like a post-psychedelic band, essentially Codeine with bigger production and Beatley chord changes; and this album is a lot more depressive than you might expect. I realise that this record should be shite but isn't probably doesn't fully qualify as praise, but I'm still slightly stunned to find myself listening to Coldplay and enjoying it. Had we never heard of them, had we not had to endure so many years of having them shoved down our throats over and over and over, it might be easier to listen past the bullshit and appreciate what they do.

No Limit Reunion - HEB Center, Cedar Park, Texas (21st May 2022)

I've never been a massive fan of live music - although admittedly it's mainly the venues, other people, and the considerable inconvenience of getting home after which usually bothers me; and No Limit being a rap label, I was aware it probably wouldn't even be live music, technically speaking, thus expanding my customary reservations to encompass the possibility of my watching what amounts to a karaoke performance; but it was the No Limit Reunion, meaning even if the whole thing turned out to be a massive pile of shite, it seemed like a once in a lifetime deal and I would be forever kicking myself should I do the usual thing by staying at home. I've been listening to No Limit since about 1996, picking up more or less everything I could find. If it was on the racks and it was a No Limit release, then it was usually worth hearing. Some of it was labelled gangsta rap, but it was always much more than just that; and if No Limit artists were regarded as low rent and lacking class by those who make it their business to provide such distinctions, they sold a fucking truckload of records and put out a lot of music which didn't really sound like anyone else. Of course, it couldn't last, and No Limit had a nervous breakdown around the turn of the century. Fiend and Mystikal jumped ship - as did the in-house production team, Beats by the Pound - C-Murder was incarcerated and Mia X's career seemed to have stalled. Harsh words were exchanged both on and off the microphone. Master P spent at least some of the 504 Boyz second album congratulating himself on having gotten rid of all those losers, many of whom had turned up on the Most Wanted label's Off the Tank compilation to remind us why they had jumped rather than wait to be pushed. Even from afar, it looked messy and absolutely final.

So in 2019, I almost quacked my pants at the prospect of Fiend and the rest back together on the same stage. It didn't seem like something that could really happen; and then it didn't because of the coronavirus; and now here we are in 2022 cashing in on tickets issued at the end of the previous decade.

I didn't know what to expect, and the opening act - some local Austin thing - were underwhelming. This was probably because I'd put in my ear plugs, being an old, old man and all, which reduced the sound level to something more manageable, unfortunately also allowing me to tell the difference between live vocals and the backing track; and it was almost all backing track, not even karaoke, just four blokes jumping about on stage to one they had recorded earlier, serving as hype men for their own record. JayQ the Legend was next, and not only from New Orleans - the home of No Limit - but a lot more watchable. His music, incorporating rap but keeping it open, had elements of R&B, dancehall, bounce, trap, and doubtless many others I've never heard of, and if there was more autotune than I usually like, he made up for it with dynamic stage presence and a passion which didn't feel like career moves.

Fiend hit the stage like a bomb going off, growling his way through hits from his No Limit albums and - big surprise - Get the Fuck Out My Face from his post-No Limit Headbussaz set; and even if it was just a man rapping along to a sound file, it worked because the sound was immense with the sort of bass that tickles your arsehole, the high end all clear, no distortion and - at the risk of committing hyperbole - one of the greatest rappers of all time right there, just fifteen foot away, giving it his grimiest best in the flesh. I nearly lost my shit when he unleashed the Headbussaz track; and yes, unleashed really was the word here.

Mia X was next, and was formidable, amazing, and all of the other adjectives - as I'd sort of hoped she would be. She was always amongst the more lyrical of the No Limit stable, and but for the lack of a New York zip code would probably enjoy a somewhat more legendary status than is presently the case. Time dictated that tonight would be a run through of hits, but she probably could have got away with all three albums in their entirety without anyone looking at their watch. Again, I was aware of witnessing one of the all-time greats in action. Following Mia, Mystikal took the baton, delivering a characteristically twitchy, yelping performance which really brought home the James Brown influence more so than is apparent from the records.

 

Next was Silk the Shocker, who was mostly great but probably should have been first on the bill; then followed by Master P himself, the guy who started it all. He was never the greatest rapper or the most lyrical, and tonight was mainly hooks and slogans as he sort of jogged back and forth across the stage; but his records work on a combination of balls-out self-belief, not really giving a shit, and raw honesty, and so it was tonight because, even if the man has never been scared to rhyme a word with itself, his charisma radiates from the stage like he's some cartoon superhero.

The mood that had been building all night came to a head with Master P's performance, and as the others came back to drop bars for the posse cuts; and if it wasn't quite religious, there was certainly a gospel element. This was a celebration in every sense, not least that we've all come through - as we're reminded during the slideshow of those lost, Big Ed, Magic, Soulja Slim and too many others; and it really is a we because tonight made it very clear that No Limit is, was, and has always been a family. That's really how it felt at the end of the night, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Method Man - Tical (1994)

I had half a mind to write something about Tical 2000: Judgement Day because it's pretty fucking great, then noticed that, magnificent though it certainly is, the first one is unbeatable; so here we are.

As it happens, that first clutch of solo albums in the wake of Enter the Wu-Tang can't really be faulted with RZA at the wheel and the other fifty-six members hanging around in the studio for most of them; but this might be the greatest of the bunch even if it's a close run race. Method Man was never my favourite member of the team, although listening now I'm not sure why and have revised my opinion accordingly. The slurping noises used to put me off but I guess you can get used to anything, and he packs more raw personality into a couple of lines than the majority of microphone botherers manage in a lifetime. Being who I am, I assumed the title was a pseudo-mystical reference to Tikal, the Mayan ruins in Guatemala, but of course Meth being Meth, it's yet another term for a certain quantity of those marijuanas you always hear about*. I've personally never been a fan of the space fags, while Meth clearly loves his weed more than almost anyone else in the universe, despite which this somehow speaks to me, regardless. You've got to admire a man who really knows what he likes this much.

It isn't just the seemingly effortless, often genuinely surreal stream of warped consciousness, but rather it's the marriage of the same to the beats which may even have been RZA's greatest assemblage on a single disc. Sonically speaking, these are moods rather than songs in the traditional sense, radically breaking away from the turntable roots into what may as well be organised noise facilitated by sampler. Aside from a few dusty horn sections or shoplifted vocal hooks, there isn't much here which sounds composed in conventional terms - more like loop the fuck out of whatever's laying around and wait until it sounds like music. So there's that relentless beat, dirty as the underside of a used car with bits of piano bolted to the chassis, or snippets of sound, elements which only become musical with repetition; and a three note bass which sounds like vehicle transmission interfering with your stereo, just a deep boom as though there's something wrong down in the foundations. For something which couldn't have existed without the technology, Tical sounds organic and granular to the point of resembling musique concrète. I'm not sure anything has sounded quite like this record since, even though Tical 2000 took a good shot at it.

*: A man on the internet reckons it's an acronym for taking into consideration all lives, but I'm not convinced.
 

Zeke Manyika - Mastercrime (1989)

I assume my finger must have been well and truly off the musical pulse by the end of the eighties, which - admittedly - I recall as being mostly about who was drawing the X-Men comics at the time. I wasn't actually aware of this ever having existed until about a year ago, and it's only during the last hour that I've discovered it wasn't even his first. Obviously I remember Zeke from Orange Juice, The The, and some sort of vague association with Foetus, and Mastercrime reveals him to be very much a musical force in his own right, or at least it did thirty years ago back when I was busily agonising over whether the refugee X-Men would ever return to their School for Gifted Youngsters in Westchester County.

First impression, which I suppose I may as well go with because why not, is that you can hear how he was such a good fit for The The, and particularly Soul Mining, although I may actually be hearing Manyika's aural footprint on Johnson's record, for what it's worth. The gospel element is more pronounced with an added afropop sensibility which reminds me of Young Fathers, most likely due to my extensive ignorance of the form, and it inhabits the same cinematic Savannah of the soul as The The - if you'll pardon the sheer ballsache of such a cliched description, which in all fairness you probably shouldn't. I knew what I was doing.

I have a vague idea that Some Bizarre had taken a lower profile by this point - unless it really was the case that I missed everything - but it seems a great shame that Mastercrime should seemingly represent some kind of half forgotten afterthought given that it's at least as good as any of the label's other top tier releases.

I probably need to track down a copy of that first album now.