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.

Paris - Safe Space Invader (2020)

I somehow missed the memo about Paris and have spent the last three decades looking in the other direction, which I guess is what happens when you don't listen to music radio, read music papers - or whatever they have now instead of music papers - or go to clubs. My first encounter was therefore his guest verse on ABK's Ghetto Neighbor - for which I should probably apologise but won't - and I was immediately gripped by his unique delivery, a sort of funky machine gun deal which worms its way into your subconscious even before you've noticed the uncompromising power of his testimony.

Anyway, I'm catching up now, and Safe Space Invaders is the one which has thus far made the biggest impact, which is nice because it's only a couple of years old suggesting this is a man whose powers have grown over time, contrary to the usual trajectory. If he started off with the influence of Chuck D fairly easy to spot, Paris quickly developed his own style - arguably more militant than Public Enemy, significantly more lyrical, and thus more personal, more nuanced - like it's a human being delivering the goods rather than a series of slogans, and someone with too much to say to waste time on taking contemporaries to task - as the backpackers tend to do; and the great volume of that which he has to say is possibly due to the fact that he never gave a shit about whether or not any of it makes you feel uncomfortable - as it honestly should if you're talking civil rights and the black power movement. Paris makes no concessions to being radio friendly or sparing anyone's feelings, and none of this shit is made up - no sidetracks into conspiracy theory here - which is why he's been ignored by many of those who should have helped elevate his work. Above all though, he's entertaining as fuck, because the expansion of knowledge with righteous truths should be entertaining. Baby Man Hands, in which our boy expresses his reservations regarding the Trump presidency, in particular manages to be both terrifying and funny.

Musically, Paris continues to cut his own furrow just as he does with the lyrical side of things - bringing p-funk into the twenty-first century in combination with old school touches, new school, even an African influence on Return of the Vanguard, and - again - without really sounding like anyone else.

I have a lot of catching up to do.

Blur - Modern Life is Rubbish (1993)

Forgive the fervour of a latecomer, but I've only just caught up with this one and it's been stuck to the turntable for about a month. I would have bought it at the time, being already well-disposed towards Blur and very much liking what they said about making this record, but I wasn't in the habit of listening to the radio at home, and whatever station they had on lock at work wasn't playing Blur, at least not until they were forced to when Boys and Girls sold by the shitload; so it passed me by because I had other records to buy and there's a limit to how many I'll pick up each month on the basis of band members hating the same stuff I hate. So with three decades having passed and me nearly one-hundred years old, it seemed like I might as well fill that gap between Leisure and The Great Escape...

I vaguely, and possibly erroneously, recall the English 1993 as being an interesting time, musically speaking - change very much in the air without yet having spunked away its promise on Britpop™ and Tony Blair jamming with the Gallagher brothers. The tail end of the eighties had given us, amongst other things, massive snare drums, Bros, Johnny Hates Jazz, pastel coloured triangles, Take That (unless they were a bit later, which they may well have been) and the idea that punk actually hadn't happened after all. I know there was plenty of good stuff going on elsewhere, but I'm talking about the mainstream, or at least the sort of thing I was obliged to listen to at work. Baggy had its moments, for sure, but it felt a little as though we were once again creeping back towards the alternative being lighting up a fat one and describing something as amaaaaaaazing, and I was getting a bit tired of all those sixties revivals when, as it turned out, they usually revived the bits which weren't much good. This was when I encountered Blur in some music paper, talking about punk rock and looking a little bit Sham 69, so obviously I was excited.

Modern Life is Rubbish doesn't sound how I thought it would and is actually better - probably a lot better given that it's the best album I think I've heard this year. The sixties can still be detected in Albarn's harmonies - part Ray Davies with just a trace of Lydon - and that twisty psychedelic phasing, but all delivered with a sharp edge and no fucker being so stupid as to suggest anything is amaaaaaaazing. So it sounds like something new even thirty years after the fact, and a long way from the sixties aesthetic as an affectation or impersonation - such as was delivered by that other lot. Even the title, purposefully and joyously juvenile, resists assimilation by the forces of consensus cool. It works because of the killer tunes - notably For Tomorrow, Advert, Oily Water, Villa Rosie, Resigned and fuck it the whole thing - and because, even if it isn't anything so stark as a return to year zero, neither is it about dribbling nostalgia. My guess would be that the point of the train set imagery just like when we was little is that it isn't pastel triangles or baggy dudes pretending to be stoned in a field. It's a big, bold negative which reminds us that, as Johnny once pointed out, destruction can be a positive act if it clears the way for something better.

Peter Hope & the Exploding Mind - 20 Speed Metal Death Threats (2023)

I'm generally sceptical of both downloads and CDRs because there are too many arseholes out there releasing five noise albums a week by such means and treating anyone who doesn't fall over themselves to bag the lot like some corporate tool who should probably stick to BTS*. Happily, there are exceptions to most rules, and in this case Peter Hope very much continues to be one of them. This you can tell by how much care and attention goes into these things - each short run CDR edition of the new download being lovingly put together with artwork, booklets and so on by the man himself as something which will remain a pleasing object even should all the zeroes and ones eventually turn to digital mush - which is where the download comes in handy. More significantly still, prolific though he certainly is, Peter Hope is always worth a listen. Not many can issue five or six full length albums a year to this sort of standard.

Anyway, getting to the point, here's another one, and if the back catalogue is perhaps a little too eclectic to allow for anything to be meaningfully singled out as his finest work, it might be this one. At least I've been playing it a lot. There are twelve tracks rather than twenty, and none of them constitute speed metal, but the title nevertheless makes intuitive sense if you're familiar with Hope's approach to his art where ideas and sounds are bolted together with the urgency of a Schwitter's assemblage - no obvious concessions to traditional aesthetics and yet seeming entirely faithful to the kind of blues which was played on a broken guitar under circumstances of grinding poverty. It's mostly electronic, although doesn't quite feel it, revelling as it does in its own dirt, crackle and distortion. This is nothing which would comfortably accommodate a barcode - in both the aesthetic and ideological sense - being genuine outsider music - not the cute version, but the untamed stuff which resists commodification or repackaging as a consumer accessory. This is a free-range noise which probably shouldn't exist given the focus groups and how many surveys we're bombarded with on a daily basis.

The Exploding Mind seems to represent a particular focus exemplified by Hope's work under that banner, although in practical terms also typically features collaborators. Mrs. Dink and Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists both feature on this album, despite which 20 Speed Metal Death Threats maintains its pace without sounding like the latest by various artists; and Warmonger - created with Phil Jones and stealing Requiem's malevolent synth-pulse from Killing Joke - is frankly a masterpiece.

Avail thineself of this long player yonder.

*: I had to look this up for the sake of making a contemporary reference rather than just invoking Rick Astley or someone else who is probably dead by now. If you don't know who BTS are, I honestly wouldn't worry about it.