Public Image Ltd. - That What Is Not (1992)

 

I came across an online review of 2012's This is PIL claiming it to be the best thing since 1984's This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get thankfully preventing the possibility of the PIL legacy concluding with one of those crappy nineties records. This irritated me because, aside from the possibility of Album actually being their finest moment, I happen to like those crappy nineties records despite their failure to deliver another Metal Box. That said, I wasn't actually sure about That What Is Not because I'd somehow forgotten its existence. So I dug it out, stuck it on the turn table, and there it stayed for the next couple of weeks.

It's still very much stadium PIL, perhaps even more so than the previous three with the occasional guitar solo which could have been lifted from REO Speedwagon, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it's probably more Pearl Jam than any of the seventies hairies. Above all, the strangest element is that it's almost an uptempo happy record, and Lydon is smiling on the back cover - not necessarily unusual but it's a genuinely cheery, unconditional smile rather than the one we're used to which suggests he's just seen Strummer go flying after stepping on a banana skin. It communicates the possibility that he was probably very much enjoying living in a significantly sunnier part of the world, which is something I understand very well, and - excepting the customarily caustic commentary - that's what That What Is Not sounds like.

I wonder if it would help if we thought of this as a John McGeoch album, because it's that too. I assume we haven't yet found a reason to sneer at McGeoch, although if we have I'm not really interested. That What Is Not has a massive, punchy sound, thanks in no small part to the horn section, harmonica and soulful backing vocals floating around in the mix just like on an eighties Rolling Stones record, and the bile is seasoned with a surprising quota of joie de vivre, or possibly just glee; and it would almost be a slightly more jagged Pearl Jam but for one of Lydon's greatest ever performances, at least technically. I know he mostly does just the one thing, but it's arguably at its greatest and most expressive here in voicing what may even be amongst his finest lyrics. Unfairground and Good Things are in particular face-punchingly wonderful and deserving of inclusion on whatever the next greatest hits package happens to be; and it's a shitload better than This is PIL while we're here.

So there.