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.