Johnson Engineering Co. - Unleash (1989)

I bought this for a quid because I'd heard of them, and I liked the idea of a band named so as to suggest they had been considered a reliable manufacturer of widgets and trunions since 1946 - drum machines and sequencers were involved so Johnson Engineering Co. seemed like a pleasantly sober change from the usual melodramatic cyberpunk bollocks. I listened to the album, and then it vanished in the general direction of Record and Tape Exchange during some briefly draconian purge of my vinyl collection. It wasn't a bad record. I just hadn't been able to imagine listening to it again.

Inevitably I picked up another copy at some point, because I still really liked the idea of a band called Johnson Engineering Co. and couldn't remember what it had sounded like. It turns out it had sounded a little like Portion Control impersonating Front Line Assembly - ostentatiously digital late eighties production but with a higher than average BPM and lots of shouting, a shitload of cowbell, busy sequencers but with tunes and no suggestion of having ever wanted to be a heavy metal act back when it was growing up. To be fair, Unleash sounds like a lot of other records from the time and as such may be viewed as the EBM equivalent of Status Quo - familiar moods and riffs efficiently executed, and probably not much you won't have heard before; and yet, despite whatever elements may be working against it, Unleash is somehow a fucking great album just as Accident Prone and Down Down were cracking singles.

Back in the day, I recall some suggestion of Johnson Engineering Co. being a kind of Portion Control tribute act, sounding the same, occupying the flat which members of Portion Control once shared, and even with similar haircuts. More recent research has revealed that one of them was actually in Portion Control for a while, so I've no idea where that leaves the mythology, or whether the aforementioned flat actually was above a shop called Johnson Engineering. Well, never mind, because this unassuming, mostly overlooked and now probably forgotten artifact has endured surprisingly well given just how much cowbell is featured; and if it's typical of a certain genre, it's nevertheless lasted significantly better than many who did this sort of thing to greater acclaim. Actually, it pisses over the majority of the miserable fuckers, if truth be known.

Beautiful Pea Green Boat - Get Religion (1988)

If Third Mind Records have endured to any extent in the collective musical memory, I've an unfortunate feeling it's probably as - ugh - old school industrial pioneers, as young people who know more than the rest of us are wont to put it, thanks to the undeniably seminal Rising from the Red Sand and status as a footnote in the saga of Front Line Assembly - apparently. Having actually been there at the time - and even painted a couple of the record covers for that matter - I can confidently state that this is complete bollocks, and nothing underscores the back catalogue's resistance to silly labels quite like Beautiful Pea Green Boat.

At the time, Third Mind seemed cut from approximately similar cloth to Some Bizarre (who weren't fucking industrial either), not least because they seemed to have booked all the Wild Planet people which Some Bizarre should have bagged - Nurse With Wound, Konstruktivists, Attrition and so on; but right from the off it was obvious that Gary Levermore simply intended to release great music regardless of how industrial or otherwise it might be deemed, and there was a point at which his main focus very much seemed to be Beautiful Pea Green Boat. He sent me a stack of records for services rendered or something, amongst which was an early Front Line Assembly release that I liked, but thought it sounded like a Cabaret Voltaire knock off - mostly grunting and sequencers. Get Religion, on the other hand, was clearly the prize of the litter. With hindsight it probably sounds very eighties, but at the time it seemed like the newest thing we'd ever heard. I'd already encountered sampled orchestral stabs and the synth pulse of New York high energy disco but never quite like this, and never with the same depth of feeling as the most heart wrenching sixties soul. The key to their power seemed to be in the contrast of Ian Williams' state of the art technical overload - at least as of 1988 - with Heather Wright's sweet, almost folksy voice. I'd say imagine a combination of the Pet Shop Boys and the Cocteau Twins, but as comparisons it captures nothing of the tumult or drama of their music which, in spirit, is almost Byronic.

Third Mind was a pretty great label while it lasted with more than its fair share of classics, of which Get Religion was possibly the finest. They really should have been fucking massive.