Eminem - The Death of Slim Shady (2024)

I assume there has probably already been more than enough said about this album, all of which I've avoided - which has been easy given that I don't even like the internet that much. To get to the point, here's yet another Eminem album, something like his millionth despite having slowed his pace in recent years, at least in terms of how much of his music is out there. You already know what it sounds like because it sounds like an Eminem album, and I'm sure you already know whether or not you really want to hear it.

It does a lot of the same stuff that the previous records did, bending over backwards to offend more or less everyone, and arguably ramping up the aggressive insensitivity to an unprecedented level; which is probably necessary given how easy it is to cause offence now, requiring our guy to go the extra distance. The running joke here is that he's trying to get himself cancelled, but as ever there's a point as serious as a corpse underlying the slapstick. The point is stop behaving like fucking idiots, you fucking idiots, but feel free to roll your eyes from whatever you have apparently mistaken for the moral high ground.

So it's the same Eminem album yet again, but somehow moreso, and the differences soon become obvious. On the surface of it, he's sharpened his own beats to a fine point, and they've honestly never sounded better - meaning I'm probably going to have to go back to previous albums and give those Addams Family rhythms another crack of the whip. He's doing the same thing here, except it's bigger, more filmic, sounding less like something which hadn't yet decided whether or not it was going to work; and lyrically, I don't have the hyperbole for how far ahead of himself he's travelled, with internal rhyme schemes and multiple puns so complex, so rapid fire effortless that it takes a few listens even just to unpick them. It feels like the album he's been trying to make all these years, and there's no longer much point denying that he's genuinely one of the greats.

Pixies - The Night the Zombies Came (2024)

Anyone who has been listening will have noticed a certain mellowing in the last few Pixies albums. It probably shouldn't come as a huge surprise. They're not so young as they were and everyone changes over time and, lest we've forgotten, bands and musical artists have every right to record the music they want to hear and which they enjoy playing. This will perhaps sound like a preamble to a series of excuses, which it isn't. The Night the Zombies Came isn't so startling as, off the top of my head, Doolittle or Trompe le Monde, although it's startling that they've recorded something this good nearly three decades later. While I noticed the conspicuous absence of that scream or the overt use of characteristically upsetting imagery - although it's still there if you listen - I also noticed that I've been playing the thing all week without caring too much about whatever else I might listen to instead. The Pixies still sound big, still combining the mellow twang with pounding drums or a wall of guitar, and the wrench of pathos is as strong as it's ever been; and yet it's almost easy listening with a mood parallel to the more wistful corners of country music, without resembling either. You may recall that Roxy Music mellowed more dramatically over the passage of much less time, and yet still packed a punch, albeit one in a more expensive glove. If The Night the Zombies Came is older, slower, and fatter, it still sparkles and does that which you'd hope it would do, particularly the oddly chilling Johnny Good Man - probably the standout track for me; and - frankly - if you can't appreciate this one, maybe rock music just isn't for you, buttercup. If anyone tells you different, punch them in the face*.

*: This is intended as a humourous remark made for the sake of emphasis and should under no circumstances be acted upon, okay?

M - New York, London, Paris, Munich (1979)

As with many of my generation, I was completely hypnotised by Pop Muzik, albeit not enough as to have me rushing out to buy the album. I made a mental note to do so once I heard Moonlight and Muzak, the follow up single which seemed to suggest the possibility of quality. Finally getting around to ticking that box more than forty years later, I'm surprised to find that the record is weirder than I expected and doesn't exactly contain songs in the traditional sense. More surprising, at least to me, is that on the strength of this, M seemed to foreshadow both Heaven 17 and Yello, sort of. On the one hand we have what is essentially disco draped with the trappings of Motown-inspired hit factories, boogie with a suitcase, casinos and international playboys; and regardless of ostentatiously fancy song structure, Robin Scott vocalises, performs, and narrates rather than sings and is something like the disco equivalent of a hype man, which is where the Dieter Meier comparison comes in.

This adds up to something which combines the influence of pop art with a touch of Bryan Ferry, Bond movies, and Giorgio Moroder, resulting in what are mostly pieces of music with vocals rather than songs; and very expensive sounding pieces of music built with a  perfectionist drive for whatever was deemed state of the art at the time. We're building songs on melodies which border on pub rock but using sequencers and Brigit Novik's surreally flawless vocal harmonies, arriving at something so removed from the organics of its origin that it hints at a sort of Ballardian sterility; or, if you prefer, it's so squeaky clean that it's weird. Because even the occasional synthesiser pulse has been custom fit by the finest tailors, New York, London, Paris, Munich has somehow avoided dating, or at least hasn't dated as the usual retrofuturism. It's a novelty record, and entirely self-aware, which is its strength.

Frequencies - Blame Frequencies (2016)

I was at junior school with Sean, the bass player. I lived on a farm. Sean and my friend Matt lived in nearby villages. We'd spend most of the summer holidays commuting between our respective houses on bikes. Sean was the first person I knew with a record by the Sex Pistols, also Tubeway Army and Cheap Trick - which was an interesting development being as we'd spent at least one summer prior to that formative moment playing the Wombles album into a flexidisc. I mention this just so you know this is unlikely to be an impartial review.

Sean and I lost touch for a couple of decades, then hooked up again more recently, which has been nice, bringing the unexpected discovery that those early friendships have ultimately proven more enduring, and more fun, than most of those made in more recent years. Apparently the stuff you believe yourself to have in common with people isn't always what you actually have in common with them, but enough of memory lane. Let's give the disc a spin.

Sean gave the disc a spin - several spins in the end - as the three of us sat around shooting the breeze at his house, filling in a couple of decades worth of gaps, the usual stuff. I hadn't been aware of his musical inclinations when we were children, it being something which just kind of grabbed him in his twenties. There was, for me, a moment of unease - as there usually will be when your old friend gives you a blast of his band and you're scared it's going to be the worst music you've ever heard, and fuck it you're going to have to say something nice; but thankfully it never came. The music, I soon realised, sounded good. Then we played it again, there being just seven tracks on Blame Frequencies and I realised it sounded like something I would listen to out of choice - which is pretty good going. I have a fair few all-time favourites which didn't really sound like anything until I'd been playing them for at least a week.

I kept thinking of Led Zeppelin as we sat listening, not that it sounds anything like Led Zeppelin, but it has that same breezy quality they had in their gentler moments, like a spring morning captured on tape. Listening now and hence probably closer, Led Zeppelin doesn't work at all, although it retains that elusive early morning sparkle, invoking an era before rock bands channelled themselves into whichever genre got the bums on seats, before anyone was really trying to sound like anyone else, when you might hear an accordion or even bagpipes on a record despite a painting of Satan on the cover and the band logo in sheet metal lettering. The bass slaps and throbs, funky as anything. The guitar illustrates with metal chords, jazz chords, or the sort of frenetic chopping that famously got James Brown up off of that thing; and the vocals are golden, soaring up from the music with everyone else perfectly balanced in their own corner of the sound. It's beautifully put together - tight, clean, clear, and no flab. This is probably what you'd call classic rock these days, except I wouldn't because it seems a little insulting, implying a revival or preservation of something we used to enjoy, and Frequencies shouldn't be defined as such. Their myriad influences were, I would guess, never more than starting points, and none of them seem obvious;, although if it helps, Blame Frequencies also reminds me of Porcupine Tree in so much as that they too invoke what you'd probably call classic rock without sounding like revivalists, beyond which, the comparison is vague, more to do with mood than anything.

Anyway, I have no idea how you would get hold of this disc should you be so inclined, and it seems the band no longer exist in quite this form, a shift of line-up having regrouped as something which will probably be called Squoove, which I may have spelled wrong; but they play live, and I'm sure there will be other discs so - I don't know - keep watching the skies, I guess.

Morrissey - Vauxhall and I (1994)

I've honestly never been convinced by Morrissey. The Smiths were interviewed in Sounds before I'd heard anything, and I mainly recall the implication that we could all breathe a sigh of relief because it was okay to listen to proper music played on guitars once more - as distinct from all the gay synthesiser tunes which had apparently been ruining everything - and the Smiths, so their singer proclaimed, only wanted handsome fans in attendance at their shows. This Charming Man turned up on Top of the Pops. I thought it was weak and still do, with a guitar line that seems to crochet a doily for your nan's sideboard. What Difference Does It Make? obliged me to reassess my initial impression, at least of the music, and I was more or less on board from thereon despite his stupid fucking fans.

'What is he like!?' they gurgle indulgently, shiny-eyed and batting a hand as though to waft away the aura of his latest keraaazy yet nevertheless inspired antics. It works if you buy into the idea of Morrissey as a genius comparable to James Joyce or whoever, but is otherwise redolent of a cult; as it always has been, even back when you too thought he was the voice of a generation, you fucking plum.

I didn't mind the solo material, although for me it's always had a certain vaguely stewed quality and mostly, if not always, lacks the breezy spontaneity of the Smiths. It probably doesn't help that he's been making the same record over and over to the point of it almost sounding like parody, so lucky that it's decent record, at least by his own standards. My girlfriend had this album in the nineties and played it a lot, and it stood out as more convincing than Viva Hate, even containing a couple of numbers I'd rate among the best he's ever recorded - Now My Heart is Full, Billy Budd, Spring-Heeled Jim and Speedway, with only the wistful three-minute sigh of The Lazy Sunbathers letting the album down. It's anyone's guess what he's singing about and I suspect that's the point - the bittersweet melancholia with an occasional suggestion of something unpleasant. It's always been music for people who feel like outsiders, a sort of sonic blank slate onto which one projects oneself, but the unease seems particularly pronounced on this album because, maybe it doesn't have anything reassuring to tell you, and maybe it doesn't want to be your friend.

All of the rumours keeping me grounded,
I never said…
I never said that they were completely unfounded.

This could be a sneaky confession bordering on a challenge in reference to what you're probably hearing if you're unable to separate the art from the artist; which is why I enjoy it, because fuck 'em. The notion of Morrissey having suddenly swung to the right in recent years because he expresses opinions with which we disagree seems comical given that he's never been afraid to let fly with the worst sort of parochial bollocks. The only difference is that the legions of the gullible once thought his brain-farts cute, like a character on Coronation Street. His songs are parochial. His entire body of work is about the shunned, the outsiders, the losers, those scared to venture beyond the end of their own street - which is why the risible Bengali in Platforms is as it is, and why the idea of The National Front Disco being some kind of dog whistle is patently ridiculous to anyone with ears and a brain.

He's one of the very last people with whom I'd happily share an elevator stuck between floors, and he talks a lot of bollocks, but if the point of art was the ethics of the artist we'd be left with empty galleries and nothing to read or listen to; and there's a tremendous power in Morrissey's poetic melancholia, to which the more ambiguous and discomfiting themes are possibly integral. It's really up to you whether that's sufficient, but it works for me, at least on this record.

Severed Heads - Ear Bitten (1980)

Here's one those reissues of something which didn't quite exist first time around, at least not in this form. Ear Bitten, the Severed Heads debut album was one side of a split release, with someone called the Rhythmyx Chymyx providing the music on the flip. The two bands shared costs, then a substantial number of those copies pressed were destroyed in a house fire further limiting the potential audience for this material. The Severed Heads also issued a cassette called Side 2 purportedly of music you would have heard on the reverse of Ear Bitten had there been no Rhythmyx Chymyx; and now the ever wonderful Dark Entries label have reissued this album, or these albums, pairing Side 2 with its notional other half for the first time and throwing in a second disc of unreleased material from the same era. It's honestly one fuck of a lot to digest in a single sitting, not least due to this being the Severed Heads at their earliest, arguably weirdest and most awkward - a good few years before the technopop. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about reissues with newly excavated material, because there's usually a fairly good reason for your not having heard those other tracks, and I've never been keen on director's cuts or remixes. Just give me whatever you think is the best version and I'll listen to that, okay?

Still, considering that I was otherwise never going to get to hear this one, I have no grounds for complaint, not least because the quality remains consistent across all four discs. Much of this music was recorded, or at least started off, on cassette recorders and the  sound is endearingly basic, so what I mean by quality is that it's all good stuff, more or less, with nothing sounding like material which should have been left in the cupboard.

Ear Bitten is mostly loops, sound collages, and distorted primitive electronics with an occasional heavily processed rhythm or melody derived from something which was probably bright pink with cartoon animals printed on the casing. Yet somehow, it's immediately recognisable as the Severed Heads in larval form; and whatever it is they did that made their music so addictive, they were already doing it here with this racket. Both the original single side of Ear Bitten and the material from Side 2 work very well as short albums in their own right, or played sequentially as halves of the same concept with each track complementing its predecessor much (or at least a tiny bit) like Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, albeit with weird fucking pictures made from torn photocopies vandalised by magic marker. In fact, all four sides work as a continuous piece if you want them to.

Having been recorded more than forty years ago, it's inevitable that I've heard many things - mostly through the weirdy music tape network - which remind me of this, even though Ear Bitten was earlier and, I would imagine, more startling at the time; but although the tape hiss and the boom of television sets recorded on a condensing microphone are familiar, the record still sounds fresh, benefiting from that elusive Severed Heads sparkle which no-one else quite managed to capture.

British Murder Boys - Active Agents and House Boys (2024)

I still don't know a whole lot about this pair. They turned up in Wesley Doyle's book about the Some Bizarre label with some frequency yet without actually having been on the label so far as I could tell, and that seemed like a recommendation. They're from Birmingham and what physical records they release tend to sell out before you're even aware of them - so I've been lucky on this occasion.

It's old school acid or possibly techno in so much as that you could slip any one of these tracks onto a compilation in between Maurice Joshua and Lidell Townsell and I doubt anyone would notice; which is because, aside from the obvious Rolandisms, this music, like that of the acid pioneers, resists the formula which eventually took over, instead building a similar intense mood - not one which immediately suggests smiley tees and glo-sticks, it has to be said. The clue is probably in the name.

British Murder Boys, at least on the strength of this one, are distinguished by pounding overdriven tom and the tempo wacked up just a few notches beyond what is probably healthy, creating a sort of euphoric coronary effect. It's just a bit too fast, just a little too dark and claustrophobic, and that's why it's great. Sequences buzz away behind the pounding, with half-heard howls echoing into an endless decay which seems to fulfil the promise that Cabaret Voltaire failed to deliver when they turned smooth house around the time of Hypnotised. Very tasty.

The Fall - This Nation's Saving Grace (1985)

Some journalist - don't remember who - once described the Fall as sounding like tossers rummaging around in a broom cupboard, which I love because they do - or I suppose did - and it's funny, both accurate and way off the mark at the same time; and ultimately it doesn't matter because the Fall were fucking magnificent, and insults just seem to slide off into irrelevance. I don't know if this was the best album but it's the one I like most, and the first one I caved in and bought. Years later I had a conversation with Larry Peterson during which I offered the Fall as an example of how bands can sound decent without rehearsing the life out of their material. He pointed out that, contrary to the tossers rummaging around in a broom cupboard hypothesis, the Fall were actually tight as fuck and hence extremely oiled and well rehearsed, figuratively speaking. Of course, he was right. What I'd lazily taken for a loose, almost ramshackle quality was nothing of the sort.

I'm still not exactly sure what the quality is, that thing which sounds like the Fall and only the Fall and no other band ever - apart from the Kevin Staples Band* I suppose. Possibly it's simply what music sounds like without the bullshit you don't really need, practically translating to a lack of artificial embellishment - something akin to what Steve Albini was always trying to achieve. The result is usually what tends to sound like a ruthlessly well practiced live band, so it's the sound of human beings twanging, thumping and howling away in real time, doing what it needs to do musically- according to Smith's vision - to the very best of its abilities rather than chasing virtuosity or ostentation for their own sake. The vision itself always remained faithful to the basics of rock and roll as something derived from the blues, but without feeling the need to repeat or impersonate unless there was some specific point in doing so, and experimentation was always part of it; which is why they sounded like that, I guess.

This one is particularly cinematic in places, with touches of krautrock and the usual elements which seem to wilfully work against whatever else the track is doing - the distorted or otherwise loosely detuned vocal, or the drums on the Damo Suzuki song doing their own thing; or that passage on Paintwork where we're invited to pretend the twenty-four track studio is a mono portable cassette recorder and someone has accidentally taped the sound of the telly over the rhythm section; and while none of these elements were unique to the Fall, only the Fall ended up with rock and roll songs which felt as though they could be discussed as novels alongside Burroughs, James Joyce, or whoever else you care to mention from the last century. Each track is its own self-contained world, even when the literally narrative element is so minimal as it is on LA. It's surreal, funny, grim, witty, grounded, bloody awkward, and mind-boggling all at the same time. They were truly unique.

*: Two admittedly listenable tracks on Another Thing from the Crypt (1984) on the Dead Hedgehog label sounding so much like a Stars In Their Eyes tribute to the Fall that it's hard to work out why they bothered, and apparently they didn't after that.

Busdriver - Fear of a Black Tangent (2005)

I heard somewhere that Busdriver was what the kids on the streets are listening to—excuse me, what the kids on the streets are checking for these days; and while most things associated with today's young people tend to be pure fucking garbage, I like to keep an open mind because I know it can't all be rainbow haired foetuses named after forms of anxiety medication. However, it turns out that Fear of a Black Tangent came out in 2005, meaning it probably counts as old school by now, although this may also be why it's worth a listen; so swings and roundabouts or summink…

Should I ever have given the impression, I'm not actually down on backpack rap - or underground, which is maybe a less annoying tag - just the stuff which sticks to the self-important formula while sneering at everyone else - the funky puritans who want you to expand your mind with a game of chess prior to making sweet lurve to your woman partner. Busdriver probably counts as underground, beyond which he's more or less his own genre - intelligent, and I mean real intelligence here, not just some bore aspiring to be your social worker. He's in the same ballpark as E-40 in terms of sonics and mood, also massively witty, which may not be obvious from the first few spins with that verbal firehose blasting away for an hour or more. But sense comes with familiarity, and the gags - delivered with deadpan earnest - are gutbusting once they emerge.

I replied to the wuss with a yo' mama's joke,
When he said how much he pushed the envelope.
A group of sexually ambivalent nihilst, crying from an ovarian cyst,
Picking at a vegetarian dish,
Idolising a German band who barely exist,
But me, my name's never on the full-colour flyer.
I'm just the dull Busdriver,
Thinking 'til my head is a bowl of dust fibers.

Musically, it's as distinct as it is lyrically, and I was surprised to see a full cast of producers listed, having assumed it could only be the work of himself, so beautifully formed is the vision as a whole. The sound leans towards actual instruments, as distinct from bleeps, glitches, and other elements not found in nature; but the way it's all put together is incredible - highly tuneful, and gently psychedelic in the sense of the Bonzos rather than the Legendary Pink Dots - although their name also came to mind. It would be pleasant if unremarkable but for the explosive energy somehow pinning all the notes to the beat, like it's threatening to go drum and bass without ever quite getting there, or if not drum and bass, then maybe one of the more manic Bugs Bunny cartoons run through the projector at four or five times normal speed.

...and by the point at which you believe you've figured all this out, you're now listening so fast that you can actually digest the import of Lefty's Lament, and so realise you've been listening to Public Enemy all along, or a tangent thereof; so I guess that's where the title came from.

The Very Things - Mr. Arc-Eye (Under a Cellophane Sky) (2024)

 

With hindsight it's difficult to miss that the Very Things really were the absolute pinnacle of something or other and surely deserved a  more strident crack of the whip, having very clearly defined themselves as distinct from the Cravats despite being more or less the same band. We had some great singles, two cracking albums - or one and a half depending on your mileage - then a sudden frosty silence broken only by the sound of One Little Indian shovelling every last penny into the chuffing Sugarcubes - regarding which I'm still feeling short-changed to this day. The posthumous missing album was interesting but didn't really feel like a missing album so much as some stuff that happened to be laying around. I was long resigned to that being our lot, and then this monster appears.

I'm not sure quite where Mr. Arc-Eye sits in the canon, or would have sat, and my first guess was that it followed fairly closely on the heels of Motortown in terms of recording. Recent smoke signals seem to suggest it's actually an entirely new album, which seems just as likely for, while consistent as what they did next, it also has a distinctly timeless sound. It's as sharply dressed as Let's Go Out with one meticulously glossy shoe still in the jazz dive - two in the morning by the sound of it - smoke everywhere. The horn section and driving bass invoke Motown without sounding like nostalgia, specifically the dark, dirty, raw Motown of the sixties when the label set vocal groups to the sort of instrumentation that gave the Stooges a run for their money. This may even be what Clock DVA were aiming for on Advantage, so maybe imagine a more muscular, more effortless Clock DVA if they all had jobs - down a coalmine, most likely. The most unexpected aspect of this record is how it blends the two very different strands revealed when Rob and the Shend went their separate ways - the driving soul of Hit the Roof or Vivarama with the growling motorbike beat of GrimeTime. It probably shouldn't have come together with quite such grace, but these men knew what they were doing.

I'm possibly lost in the moment here, but this may even be the greatest work by any of those involved, which is quite a boast considering the back catalogue in its entirety; and certainly Mr. Arc-Eye contains some of the Shend's most powerful vocal performances. I realise there's not much point harbouring a grudge thirty years after the fact, but I really would have appreciated something like this more than the oh so fucking quiet song.

VX - Minutes to Go-Go (2024)

I'm only familiar with VX as Peter Hope's pianist - figuratively speaking, the man who tickled the ivories on the excellent Kilo Price for Dead Shapes which you may possibly remember from here. His own, mostly instrumental, material - overlooking the possible absence of sounds deriving from anything much that might count as an instrument - while similarly raw and initially abrasive, is a whole different kettle of fish. It's noise in so much as there's little common ground shared with Herman's Hermits, but while my closest point of reference is probably the work of +DOG+, Minutes to Go-Go feels intensively sculptured, even structured without quite turning into an Art of Noise record. Amongst the electronic crunches, overdriven circuits, gated slabs of feedback and the like, we find remnants of what may once have been vocals, percussion instruments, and other sound sources warped and looped into shapes which seem to emerge and gain greater prominence with each listen, until you no longer notice quite what a racket it is, instead hearing something that might almost be - I don't know - a film soundtrack perhaps. It seems different to the involuntary admiration of fire extinguishers we sometimes experience at the end of an afternoon trudging around some gallery, because I don't think there's such a pronounced random element here. These patterns are surely more than shapes perceived in the ear of the beholder. Listen enough times and you'll find yourself transported to filthy truck stops in cyberspace, the medina in Marrakech, the inside of your own head, and other alien territories. Minutes to Go-Go is one hell of a trip.

Apply within.

Flipmode Squad - The Imperial (1998)

This one took a long time. While happy to acknowledge the mighty power of Busta Rhymes' tonsils, I was never much of a fan. I'm not sure why beyond that I found him a bit demanding on the ears, where I've tended to find verbal acrobats of similar thrust mostly entertaining; although it probably didn't help that there was some laboured deeper meaning to the name Flipmode which I've mercifully forgotten - some of that motivational poster philosophising that rap tends to do when it takes itself too seriously for the wrong reasons. On the other hand, I've always held Rah Digga in high regard, and her Dirty Harriet is a fantastic record; and she's part of Busta's Flipmode Squad so it seemed I should at least give it a listen. Unfortunately, once I got home I realised the cheap copy I'd found in the racks of CD Exchange was the clean version - because I keep forgetting to check to make sure my purchases have a parental advisory sticker meaning I won't have to provide my own swearing. Given that the whole point of rap is the fucking words, even the naughty ones, the clean version will always be a complete waste of time, regardless of the album. I tried, but it sounded peculiar, and musically it wasn't quite grabbing me either.

Coming back to the thing a couple of years later, mainly because I'm replacing all the clean versions purchased by accident with the real thing as a point of principal, it begins to make more sense. I get the impression Flipmode were simply a bunch of guys whom Busta considered promising and so deserved the exposure. No-one quite lyrical enough to earn living legend status, but no weak links in the chain either. It's quite a minimal album, musically speaking, at least compared to most of the rest of what was going on in 1998, which I gather is because it's an album as an album - a simple showcase rather than some grand concept (although grand concept rap albums have mostly been averagely shitty concept), thus obliging us to focus on the microphone activity as much as we would at an open mic night full of unknowns. So there isn't even any conspicuous turntable action, just looped beats, and nothing to distract from the main event; and with this in mind - it's undeniably solid. Of course, it's street stories, grandstanding, the usual jokes and complaints woven from individual voices, but original individual voices with more kinship to what should probably be considered underground than most of what you used to read about in The Source. Busta grows on you, and Digga is great as ever, but the others also shine, notably Baby Sham who, as the youngest member - so I would guess - reminds me a little of 57th Dynasty's Lil' Monsta, particularly on the confessional cross-generational dialogue of Do For Self.

It's not a perfect album, and I could live without quite so many skits, but at heart it's a shitload stronger than first impressions may imply.

Final - I Am the Dirt Under Your Fingernails (2002)

I first encountered Final back in the eighties when we both turned up on the same compilation tape. I got into Godflesh a bit late in the day - late nineties or thereabouts - and at least another decade had passed before I made the connection, that both were the work of the same individual, namely Justin Broadrick. This made a lot of sense despite Final and Godflesh sounding very different to each other. I Am the Dirt Under Your Fingernails also sounds significantly different to what I'd heard of Final back in the eighties, but then a fair bit of time has passed and this shares the same concrete-density as much of Broadrick's other work.

I detect what may have been feedback, but otherwise it's anyone's guess where these sounds originated. Mine would be that whatever it is we have here was recorded on traditional tape then slowed to a sludge-crawl to the point where even the shrillest of screams is reduced to a bass rumble hung precipitously on the edge of hearing, even the slightest variation in tape speed stretched to tonal craters in what is very much a sonic landscape; and the occasional flicker of drop-out may even be spaghettified gaps between molecules of ferric oxide. Anal Probe, who issued the compilation where I first heard Final, had a photocopied catalogue listing destroyed music amongst the vague genres in which they specialised, and I'm fairly sure that's what we have here.

That said, whatever the first thing to hit you may be when you listen to this disc, discordant racket somehow doesn't figure. Minutes passed before I noticed I'd been listening to this thing very much as music rather than merely engaging noise. The notes we've been left with are long and mournful, evoking mist, rain, and vast spaces from which life has moved on. The best description I can come up with - and which occurred to me as I was listening - was if the first SPK album felt like listening to Elgar. There's something monolithic here, something carved in stone and so weathered as to be barely recognisable, something which has left behind a sense of loss as big as the world.

Hope + VX - Kilo Price for Dead Shapes (2024)

As my Peter Hope albums multiply to the point of requiring their own shelf, here's another which somehow manages to sound like a new direction despite delivering a blast of familiar intensity with weapons from the same sonic arsenal. The distortion is, as ever, incredible, hinting at things recorded on the condenser mics of mono portable cassette recorders blowing the transistors on an ancient fuzz box someone found in the outside toilet; and yet despite this wall of audio dirt, everything remains somehow sufficiently clear and distinct for a groove. I should probably make an effort to avoid the usual comparisons with Suicide, Chrome and the like, although it may be worth mentioning that you could probably stick it at the bluesier end of the Sleaford Mods spectrum without too many objections. It doesn't really sound like Hope's Exploding Mind, or his work with Fujiyama or David Harrow, but it inhabits the same universe.

This time it's one Neil Whitehead, recording as VX, providing the contrast with, I would guess, loops of the sort of drum kit you only ever encountered in village halls when you were a teenager - all the crash and clang of the cutlery drawer - and a shitload of distorted bass guitar hogging the rest of the bandwidth, and I suspect multitracked in a few instances; so it's possibly comparable to an angrier We Be Echo - specifically the current bass heavy version - or if We Be Echo had the impact of Motorhead, it would feel something like this. The fact of there still being someone alive who would produce a record that sounds like this gives me some hope for the future of the human race.

Nurse With Wound - Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979)

My first Nurse With Wound was Insect & Individual Silenced, thanks mainly to a school coach trip down to that London and the wonderful Virgin Megastore, as was. Otherwise their work - as described by John Gill in Sounds in terms by which I knew I needed to hear it - eluded our local record shops and by extension me. We had a record shop in my tiny market town for about six months, and I recall Geoff, who ran the place, shaking his head and wondering why anyone would name an album Homotopy to Marie while my sniggering contemporaries browsed Def Leppard without actually buying anything, which is presumably why Geoff went out of business. About a decade later I had the first three on CD, including Chance Meeting, but I didn't have a CD player, didn't really plan to buy one, and ended up giving them away.

It's therefore taken me one fuck of a long time to finally hear this, and I'm sort of shocked to discover that it doesn't sound anything like I expected - although this is of course exactly what one should expect from Nurse With Wound. Steve Stapleton has said something about how he regards Homotopy to Marie as the first real Nurse recording, so this was himself pissing about with his pals, technically speaking, and was similarly distant from the insanity of Insect & Individual Silenced, for what that may be worth. The biggest surprise - although it probably shouldn't be - for me, has been how much Chance Meeting sounds like a relative of Faust and other krautrock predecessors* routinely ignored by history of industrial music podcasts put together by edgy fourteen-year olds with pierced eyebrows. Almost all of the sounds on this record are generated by actual musical instruments, albeit by unorthodox means - someone playing the piano with his arse, droning harmonium, and even a long-haired guitar solo. It's all improvised, of course, and I seem to recall reading that none of those involved had so much as picked up a musical instrument before getting this on tape.

It's a racket, as you would expect, but I've always felt Nurse With Wound made more sense as heirs to Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, and Max Ernst than to even Yoko Ono's sonic experiments; and in this context, as firmly established by both Stapleton's cover art and the title deriving from Les Chants de Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont, they work for me - at least in so much as the art of Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst works for me. As with the very best music of this admittedly general type, it established the terms by which the listener experiences it, meaning there's probably not much point comparing it to Out of the Blue by the Electric fucking Light Orchestra; and while there have been a few weirdos doing this kind of thing, with the possible exception of Richard Rupenus, no-one really seems to do it quite so well as Nurse With Wound. Alan Trench of Temple Music, amongst others, said Steve Stapleton remains one of the few people he's met whom he would describe as a genius, which I honestly think is fair.

It lives in neither the rock venue nor the art gallery as we know it today, because like the landscapes of de Chirico and the rest, this Chance Meeting takes place in some psychological realm, one which may not even have existed before the needle first encountered the groove; and, should I have failed to communicate as much, it's also a lot of fun to listen to, albeit weird, angular, confusing fun.

*: I've also been surprised by how sonically close it sits to the first Konstruktivists album - clearly a case of shared influences. Steve Stapleton and Glenn Wallis were friends, although Glenn was never particularly a fan of Nurse With Wound.
 

David Bowie - Reality (2003)

This one came out during those forty or so years when I was looking the other way, and if we're to be honest, so were most of you lot. Excepting a few inconsequential squares in polo neck sweaters working for hospital radio, people with hearing jumped ship around the time of Let's Dance - to make an admittedly massive generalisation - because why the fuck wouldn't you? Some of us came to regret the decision, while others were too busy with everything else that has happened during the last four decades; and besides, we were tired of yet another true return to form sounding like more of the approximate same, and there's not much point getting upset about it. Anyway, I eventually saw the error of my ways and so I went back, overcome by curiosity, and it was all better than I remembered, even if the ironically titled Never Let Me Down remains difficult to love; but Reality is the one which had me kicking myself, because it might even be his greatest album - if such an accolade is even meaningful.

The drums pound just as they did on Heroes, and all that excess of instrumentation weaves away in the background, almost unnoticed until you can't shift the fucker from your internal jukebox; and yes, he churned out a couple of actual good 'uns prior to Reality, but this was the one where it sounded like he meant it, and it sounded like he was enjoying himself, and it sounded particularly like he'd stopped caring about what anyone else might think. This is the one, moreso than the final two, where I suddenly remembered how exciting it used to be to come home with a new Bowie album, which was back in the days when I still had school on Monday. The new Bowie album always did a whole shitload of stuff you hadn't expected - by which I don't mean cod reggae with Tina Turner on the chorus - and it was new and exciting and you'd feel connected to something you couldn't even describe.

I still don't know what the hell this album is about, beyond the obviously insubstantial quality of modern life, and yet it affects me deeply. She'll Drive the Big Car in particular tears my heart out every time and I'm not even sure why, except that it felt like Dave understood something profound but bigger than words and difficult to squash into a song, something good, and he was doing his best to share it around.

You know that writing about music is a waste of time, right?

Bang On! - [sic] (2012)

I can't quite get used to the name having been slimmed down from Mr. Bang On, which made more sense to me, but I'm not complaining. Mr. Bang On turned up on a CD compilation given away with Hip-Hop Connection mag back in 2008 and was as such possibly the greatest thing I've ever heard on a free compact disc stuck to a magazine cover - even taking Hansel the Unicorn's magnificent Rat Face Girl into account. The music on [sic] has evolved in the four years since the freebie, but it's of the quality I anticipated, taking cues from grime, dubstep, garage, arcade game soundcards, even seventies dub reggae, then sort of going off in its own direction at ninety miles an hour. It's a noise which, if you're in your fifties like me, doesn't even sound quite like music at first - just a throb of distorted bleeps and electronic growls bolted together. Yet after a few plays it all falls into place, almost in spite of itself, with the kind of precision orchestration that warrants the description of art; and even the fucking autotune works, which isn't something you hear every day.

Mr. Bang On himself may or may not be unique, but he doesn't really sound like anyone else I've heard - not only a relentless lyrical barrage but a relentless lyrical barrage in a Liverpool accent of such strength it could strip paint, and the lyrics wield the sort of razor wit I've come to associate with the accent. Despite my mother's side of the family hailing from Liverpool, I don't have any particular investment in the city, but I'm well-disposed towards its people based on scousers I've known and a conviction of Brookside having been the only television soap that ever mattered. [sic] is grim, gritty, and all the other stuff you would expect. It smells of chips and rain and vehicular fumes, but it's funny, emotionally powerful, and free of any of the customary rap grandstanding. It doesn't sound like soul music, and yet that's exactly what it is. With twelve years having passed, I'm not sure that second album is going to happen but, to be fair, there's a lot to digest on this one.

Stooges - Funhouse (1970)

 

I grew up with an instinctive dislike of the sixties, informed mainly by my having been told that the sixties were amazing to an at least weekly schedule; because even at the tail end of the seventies, we hadn't quite got over it, and punk rock just meant we were apparently  in need of reminders. I still feel that this instinctive dislike is partially justified by most of the stuff routinely squirted in our faces by the nostalgia machine, but I've otherwise mellowed. Clearly it wasn't all Tom Jones and the Beach Boys.

The Stooges, for example, represent a massive oversight on my part. I knew of their having existed and I liked the sound of them; the Pistols covered No Fun; my bestest pal Carl was always very much a fan; and, going back to school days, there was a copy of Metallic KO in the collection of my friend's big brother, Martin - and we all thought Martin was the most amazing person in the universe. I'd more or less duplicated Martin's record collection in its entirety by the time I was forty, such was his influence on my formative listening choices, and yet still no Stooges. It was probably the blind spot.

Anyway, a few months ago I was browsing the records in my local Barnes & Noble, mainly because it's strange and exciting to have record stores back, even blandly corporate ones full of tasteful purchases by which you tick off all the boxes on the list of one hundred vinyls you must own. Funhouse was the only record which I'd consider hearing that I didn't already have, bringing with it the realisation of how weird it was that I should be this old and only now buying my first Stooges. What the fuck is wrong with me?

Naturally, it exceeds expectations - as I kind of expected it too, if you see what I mean. The Stooges were the opposite of everything I've ever disliked about the sixties, and continue to dislike as I see the same garbage all around in the American present. It's a dirty jazz-blues noise with howling and madness and the biggest tunes ever, something which could only have been born from places you'll drive straight through without stopping. Some of these tracks just keep going forever, on and on, grinding away like they're trying to escape from themselves - and they still don't sound like jams. It isn't cool. It isn't poetry readings. It isn't members of the Velvet Underground stood around pouting, admiring the abstracts in some New York gallery and describing everything as really interesting while trying not to fall over. You know that American dream we keep hearing about? Well, this ain't it, and that's why it's wonderful. You'll never hear any of these songs smoothed out and autotuned by diva-style entertainment creatives on America's Got Marketing Strategies.

This is what music rock should sound like when it's doing what it's supposed to do, and shame on anyone who loses sight of that; and shame on me for failing to take the hint until now.

JFK - Weapon Design (2017)

I know I have a few things by JFK on ancient compilation tapes, but nothing that left so enduring an impression as to inspire my purchase of this record, which was based mainly on anything with ties to Ramleh being worth a listen and the fact that I liked the cover; and my superficiality has once again paid off, it seems.

Weapon Design gives the impression of having been recorded with synths and drum machines of a certain vintage, yet refrains from pushing the usual nostalgia buttons reminding us of how we all used to watch Doctor Who when we were little. If there's any invocation of things passed, it's the cold war and brutalist achitecture. It isn't noise - despite titles such as Secret Orders and Reality Slicer - because even if we don't quite have tune, there are notes and unconventional forms of repetition which do the job of music in the same way as angular slabs of concrete may be deemed art by virtue of grimly emotive force. Perhaps weirdly, the thing it reminds me of more than anything is Metal Urbain - not through any literal resemblance but it has the same icy singularity of purpose, to these ears. I could say it's the sound of, and reel off the usual list of dystopian horrors, but being non-vocal rather than strictly instrumental - because I'm not sure anything which produced this sound is actually an instrument - it really does approach something for which there are no words, which is possibly the point.

Formidable!

+DOG+ - X7 (2022)

Even before we get into band names incorporating mathematical symbols, +DOG+ seem unique by my reckoning. They've issued endless CDs and vinyl records, yet still find time every so often to shove out one of these CDRs in a distinctive brown wrapper with rubber stamped artwork - might be outtakes, might be experiments which didn't make it onto an album, could be something else entirely. Also, we have the contrast of extreme electronic noise which, if the titles and artwork are an indication, follow ecological, almost folksy themes. This disc contains five tracks, each named after a woodland critter. It's not so much that it's difficult to square the howling cacophony with titles such as A Chipmunk, and A Bird - and note disarming use of the indefinite article - but it's nevertheless one hell of a puzzle. My personal take is that the titles are so at odds with the sound as to oblige one to focus on what you're hearing without the linguistic prompts which even naming everything Untitled would provide.

The noise, which varies greatly from piece to piece, seems to be entirely electronic, duplicating the crackle of broken circuits and bad connections in a way which feels paradoxically organic, even earthy, presumably hence the titles. There are elements of repetition and looping, but more as something one notices over time than noises reframed in an obviously artificial setting.

So what does it sound like, you may be wondering.

It sounds like tropical thunder, or the shifting of tectonic plates, or electrons driven into the nuclei of their own atoms inside stars; and it's difficult to listen to whilst being at the same time fascinating, and the sense of release when the machine stops is incredible; and it's weirdly relaxing just as the worst thunderstorm can sometimes be strangely comforting if you're home and dry.

Portion Control - Step Forward (1984)

I can't help but feel that Portion Control have been unfairly sidelined over the years. Certainly they've had their successes, exposure, toured with big names and so on, but still the impression seems to persist of Portion Control as one of those other Wild Planet bands who never quite got where they were going. You may have heard something by them on a compilation, but nobody knows who bought the records.

Apparently it was me.

The legend of the name deriving from all three of them working in the canteen at the Houses of Parliament seems to have been a myth, but never mind. If I Staggered Mentally - as sterling a debut album as you could wish to hear - owed something to Cabaret Voltaire, Step Forward seems to have consolidated their sound into something unique, or which was at least unique for as long as it took for all those other bands to rip it off. I'm not sure there was really anything quite like Step Forward at the time, or at least I don't recall it being so. Front 242 had a more glacial edge, Depeche Mode were still in their Teletubbies phase, and Portion Control sounded like no-one else - hooligans with sequencers, and drum machines which recreated the feeling of having one's head kicked in; and the magnificent Dean Piavanni, a man who sounded like he'd just been in a fight every time he stepped up to the microphone—occasionally like he was still having one. Of course, their hard rhythmic electronics became an entire genre in another couple of years, but this seems to be where it started, and thankfully with a band who weren't scared of the occasional tune.

With hindsight, Step Forward sounds almost squeaky clean compared to the subsequently dreadlocked aggrotech cyberwarriors selling this back to us as a Mad Max soundtrack; but there's more to mood than just speed and distortion, and I'm pretty sure this lot were all reading 2000AD comic like good lads, so some of the populism rubbed off with them along with the imagery, and certainly the wit. But for the occasional invocation of cyborgs kicking the shit out of each other in some mutant wasteland, Portion Control were essentially a punk band which is why they rock. Play it loud is almost always a compensatory serving suggestion offered by those who couldn't quite get there and hope you'll mistake volume for power, whereas Portion Control were always loud, regardless of the decibels. Also, they seem to be the only band whose orchestral stabs somehow still sound startling and upsetting three decades later.

Devo - Art Devo (2024)

Between Hardcore, Recombo DNA, Pioneers Who Got Scalped and the rest, it's difficult to believe there was still any unheard primal Devo left at the bottom of that much scraped barrel, and I'd begun to get the feeling of someone in an energy dome squeezing my monetary udders with just a bit more relish than seemed polite; so it was lucky I bothered to look at the track list of this one. Not only is Art Devo yet more previously unheard material from the celebrated fountain of filth, but it isn't even more of the same, this time focussing on raw demos and recordings which somehow make the Hardcore tracks sound like the studio work; and yet again, near half of these are entirely new to me. I don't have the time to sit down and tally up how many tracks appear on which studio albums, but I'm fairly certain we've now reached the point where the previously unheard outnumbers the officially released.

The emphasis steers more towards the twangy mutant blues of Devo's early seventies incarnation than the homemade synth era, although it's still pretty fucking weird for the most part - and either well recorded or beautifully restored. Some of it sounds like ZZ Top after an accident at the power plant, while other tracks were patently performed at some poetry event, cheekily augmented with guitar, effects, and that drum kit they made by attaching guitar pickups to household objects. Thematically, they were squelchier than ever back when this material was recorded - massively uncomfortable listening, gleeful perversion as consumer ritual disappearing backwards - both literally and figuratively - up its own ass with a big grin and a creepy thumbs up. Looking out the window in 2024, it's terrifying how far ahead of their time they were, and amazing how many hitherto unrevealed revelations are to be found in this huboon stomp each time we return. Given Devo's stated mission to travel their own career path in reverse, this must surely be their first and hence last album, but I wouldn't put money on it.

Eminem - Revival (2017)

Without bothering to do my research, I gather this was Eminem's comeback album - or possibly one of them - and was as such subject to major slagging from whatever it is that we now have which tells us whether a record is good or bad. This is what I take from listening to Kamikaze and Music to Be Murdered By, the albums which followed Revival. Of course, given Eminem's tendency to wax bitterly about how everyone hated the previous record but can nevertheless suck his dick, I don't know how much reality supports the impression I've formed because I have only the music itself to go on - which is maybe as it should be.

I have a lot of time for Eminem and have been dutifully buying each one more or less as it comes out. That said, I honestly don't believe he's the greatest MC of all time, and while he's never put out a substandard record, I'm not sure he's ever quite unleashed an all-time classic in the sense of Ready to Die, Illmatic, or Revenge of the Barracuda - although admittedly that last one may well be according to just me and WC's mum.

To take these proposals in turn, the idea of there being a single greatest MC of all time strikes me as ridiculous* given that it would entail comparisons between rappers with very little stylistic common ground beyond residence in the same unusually broad arena; and because it would mean you'd have to ask fucking stupid questions such as whether Eminem is better than Ghostface or Jadakiss, for just two of many examples. The most we can say, surely, is simply that some lyricists are great, some are less great, and some are not conspicuously great. Our man patently belongs in the upper reaches of the first bunch.

Secondly, while he has a string of great albums to his name, I don't think there's one which didn't have at least a little room for improvement in some respect. Mostly it's been a certain homogeneity across the seventy minutes of each album - or however long they are - because even genius can get a bit repetitive when it's doing the same thing for more than an hour. As I believe is fairly well established by this point, Eminem has a stylistic leaning towards the confessional and unusually personal, hence all those cuts about how you were wrong about the previous album, you cloth-eared dumbfuck, and hence his entire familial life and the drama it has entailed narrated for our consideration, blow by blow, over the last couple of decades. I've sometimes felt the confessional focus has bordered on indulgent - like all those fucking autobiographical nineties indie comics about what it's like to write and draw an indie comic - but it's what Eminem does, and honestly he does it well, so there doesn't seem to be much point in grousing about it. Either you like it or you don't. To my ears, it's mostly been his own production which has been the problem - often great tracks in isolation, but a full hour of those plinky-plonky Addams Family beats can get on your nerves after a while.

Anyway, whatever it was, Revival gets everything right leaving no room for doubt. The beats have moved on from the Slim Shady sound, not quite throwing Em's lot in with the trap crowd, but close enough as to at least sound involved in the present state of the art, at least as of 2017; and it probably helps that Rick Rubin was involved. He's still fucking with that stadium rap thing where choruses tend to invoke a skyful of lighters, and suddenly it makes more sense than it did on previous albums. The jokes are still funny or horrible - depending on your mileage - and the familiar confessional is seasoned with pointed rage over the previous year's election and all which has since spilled forth from its bright orange diaper; so Revival does more than just one thing for an entire hour, and where it does anything familiar, it does it better than the last time we heard it. I genuinely believe this one might be up there with Illmatic and the rest.

*: Even including Rakim here, regardless of the views of elderly white men who haven't listened to rap since 1991 and yet who feel somehow qualified to opine on the same in statements habitually suffixed with in my humble opinion, despite that it never is.

Bollock Brothers - The Lydons and the O'Donnells Family Album (1986)

It wasn't that I was avoiding the Bollock Brothers, but they had about them a sense of desperation which kept me from feeling like I needed to rush out and buy anything. It was only when I heard their version of the first Pistols album - covered track to track in its entirety with sarcastic Mike Oldfield samples and vocals from the bloke who shimmied up the royal drainpipe to the Queen's bedroom - that I realised, here was something too stupid to be ignored. It also helps that, as I've come to realise, musically speaking they were more or less Public Image Ltd as formed by a bunch of pissheads from the pub instead of Jah Wobble and Keith Levene. So the Bollock Brothers were often quite listenable. This one, so credited as to place the usual emphasis on once having stood next to Johnny Rotten at the urinal, turns out to be a collection of singles you didn't buy because it was obviously the Bollock Brothers under yet another fucking stupid name; also a couple of allegedly live things which don't sound significantly more haphazard than the studio material.

I said, also a couple of allegedly live things which—

Wait! Come back! We have guest stars!

It may well be Killing Joke's Geordie impersonating Steve Jones on the Ivor Biggun-esque R.U. Dirty, and the bass playing is good enough to be Youth, but I'm fucked if I can hear Bananarama's alleged backing vocals; and as for Tony James, Billy Idol and Johnny Rotten's dad, we may never know for sure.

But none of this really matters because, all novelty concerns aside, this is a pretty great record even if it gets a bit fucking stupid in places. You can tell they had a whale of a time recording this stuff, and they may not actually have intended to do quite so good a job as they did because it certainly goes beyond Public Image Ltd as formed by a bunch of pissheads from the pub, even to the point of sounding like its own thing. Had the Bollock Brothers never been signed, had they never conned anyone into releasing their records, had they been some band who'd put out a couple of C60s with crappily scrawled photocopied covers and then vanished, we'd now be paying hundreds of pounds for those tapes and there would be a Vinyl on Demand boxed set costing more than your house. Also, according to the press cuttings on the cover, the NME hated them, which is about as high a recommendation as can be had.

Blancmange - Irene & Mavis (1980)

By the time I was aware of this one having existed, I could no longer afford a copy so thankfully it's been reissued. I liked Blancmange a lot, although they seemed to work better as a singles band than at album length; and naturally I've always wondered about this formative obscurity reputedly recorded using pots and pans for percussion.

Typically for such a shining example of the is it supposed to sound like that? genre, it came in the mail just as the needle of my turntable picked up a lump of ominous gunk which somehow remained invisible to the naked eye, making the record sound as though my stylus might be fucked; and I played it at 45RPM, which is the wrong speed, although most of the vocals have been slowed down on the original portastudio recording, so everything except the voice had me wondering whether it was supposed to sound like that? Then, having cleaned the needle and bothered to look at the cover - which recommends 33RPM more or less as a serving suggestion - I got to hear the thing as intended, roughly speaking, and it seems it is supposed to sound like that.

It's an understatement to say Irene & Mavis is a far cry from the shiny synth pop to come being as it sounds like something from the median point between the Residents and Nurse with Wound. Those pots and pans were just for starters. Percussion could be anything from the aforementioned to someone thumping a wardrobe, the vocals are all recorded at double speed, and there's some apparent pleasure taken in tape distortion, wow and flutter and the like, which I'm fairly sure was deliberate. Even so, we nevertheless have plaintive tunes which quite clearly foreshadow Sad Day and I've Seen the Word drifting here and there, additionally evoking the melancholia of Eno's earlier ambient jobbies and inventing vapourwave on Holiday Camp even as those eventually sampled by Vektroid and her pals were still in short trousers.

I could stand to hear a lot more of this version of Blancmange.

Nitewreckage - Take Your Money and Run (2011)

Here's another pie in which Dave Ball had a number of fingers, and one which seems to have slipped under the radar, or at least under my radar. This is a shame because pretty much everything Dave Ball has had a hand in has been at least great, and usually essential listening. English Boy on the Love Ranch was another one and yet they too sank without trace, which I mention mainly so as to illustrate that there's been more Dave Ball out there than you may realise.

Nitewreckage were thematically and sonically closer to Soft Cell than the Grid - the other one we've all heard of - and distinctive for showcasing the vision of vocalist and cabaret performer Celine Hispiche who chats, sings, screeches, howls and croons her way through a series of terrifying stories of domestic abuse, sordid hook-ups, and emotional blackmail bearing only superficial resemblance to Marc Almond's stint on the same microphone, but delivered with equivalent visceral passion. The whole album feels like a night on the town in Soho - and a rainy night at that - which you're definitely going to regret, but with Hispiche putting on a screw face and doing whatever the fuck it takes to get through - as distinct from Almond's bruised innocence. Even with all those synths grinding away, there's an element of X-Ray Spex to this one.

Sorry - that's about as close as I can get to a working description, and I'm slightly puzzled that we haven't heard more of Celine Hispiche on the strength of this bunch. If it turns out that she simply exploded shortly after they finished the album, it really wouldn't be that difficult to believe. Take Your Money and Run is as good as anything Soft Cell ever recorded without it even being obvious that we have the same guy banging away on the piano. Also, their version of Bowie's Repetition makes the one on Lodger sound like the cover.

Ice Cube - Everythangs Corrupt (2018)

I've a feeling there should be an apostrophe in the title but I'm not going to be the one to tell him. I also seem to recall some internet mutterings about Cube having become persona non grata in recent times, which would at least explain why he hasn't been a regular guest on Sesame Street for a while - if they're even still making it, which they probably aren't. Maybe he stood behind Dave Chapelle at the supermarket or something. If it bothers you, maybe you could ask him. You could bring up that missing apostrophe while you're at it. I'm sure he'd be more than happy to address whatever concerns you may have.

I completely missed this one when it came out, his first in something like eight years possibly because he doesn't need to make rap albums to get by any more - which would suggest he only hits the booth when he feels it necessary to do so. This seems to be reflected in at least the last three being among the best of his entire career, so it works out well for all of us, I'd say. Unsurprisingly, our man had one fuck of a lot to say in 2018 with Trump in office and the rise of the Proud Boys and their like; and that which he had to say involves a lot of rude words and the sort of righteous fury which takes the paint off the walls, additionally suggesting those mumbling away on the internet probably weren't down with the Cubester in the first place, so fuck 'em.

Amazingly - because this being a great album really shouldn't be that much of a surprise - Cube does what he does best without it sounding like nineties nostalgia, spitting over Soundcloud-trap production as though it's the most natural thing in the world while still keeping the barrage of industrial strength stress as intense as it was on those early solo albums. Again, we shouldn't be surprised because I Am the West was great for exactly the same reasons. Even when we revisit classic west coast beats in That New Funkadelic it keeps swinging with the same natural confidence and no hint of marketing strategies. No-one combines outright menace with sheer joy quite like this guy, and lyrically he still makes the rest sound like wankers. If you haven't yet quite figured out what's wrong with the world today, it's all here and it's funky as fuck.

Swans - Feel Good Now (1987)

Here's another recent purchase inspired mainly by the fact of it having been reissued. I didn't pick it up at the time because it seemed to be Children of God live and I hadn't yet warmed to Children of God when it came out. Children of God sounded to me like they'd run out of steam, or at least that there was something missing. I returned to the fold a couple of years later with Love of Life, which was fantastic and seemed to represent a few stops down the line on the journey for which Children of God had been the first step, roughly speaking; but then going back to Children it still sounded long and underwhelming - a poor second to even the b-sides of its own singles.

I don't usually bother with live albums, preferring the stuff I already enjoy by whoever it happens to be without feeling the need to complete sets for the sake of it; but there are always exceptions, and this ended up being one of them. I failed to pick up Public Castration is a Good Idea at the time because I simply couldn't afford it, then bought the reissue in response to some vague feeling of having missed out, and I was shocked at how much better Greed sounded in a live setting; so I was sort of hoping Feel Good Now might be a better representation of what they were getting at with Children of God, and holy fucking shit…

I see it now. Where the Swans' - because referring to them without the definite article feels like an affectation - previous work was a sort of post-Whitehouse emotional extreme directed inwards, Children continued the theme into religious, or specifically Christian pastures as neither an endorsement nor a refutation of the same, but rather a summation of the absolute negation of self in a religious context, or that's how it now sounds to me. At the time I assumed they had just gone the way of Bob Dylan or Bon Jovi.

I don't know why these songs, if we're going to call them songs, work so much better on a stage, and work even transferred to a medium lacking the spectacle of the live performance, even with a sound of inevitably muddier quality than the studio versions, but the difference is fucking incredible. You can feel the sheer volume in the recording, the raw power of the dirge, and the intensity it communicates is not even merely Biblical, but positively Old Testament in its uncompromising invocation of terrible power and submission to the same. Sex God Sex, formerly a silly title for something that went on too long, could easily score one of those Biblical epics of the thirties or forties. It's music for the construction of great pyramids or the parting of the red sea and is, as such, absolutely crushing - the culmination of the Swans first five years. I've since gone back to Children of God, and if it sounds improved, it still doesn't quite transcend having served as a warm-up exercise for Feel Good Now.