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.