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.