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.