In the Nursery - When Cherished Dreams Come True (1983)

Here's another one to which my pocket money didn't quite stretch at the time, despite how much I loved Witness, the single which came out the following year and ended up on just about every compilation I taped for anyone for at least the next five. Of all the groups to fall victim to ill-fitting characterisation, In the Nursery must surely rank among the highest, having started off as one of those Joy Division bands before evolving into one of those Laibach bands, then neo-classical, martial industrial, and so on and so forth, because someone somewhere will just have heard Elgar for the first time and decided that Sir Edward was himself a martial industrial pioneer. Cherished Dreams dates from their time as one of those Joy Division bands, although for what it's worth it reminds me of A Certain Ratio if it reminds me of anyone, or even Adrian Borland's Sound on Mystery in particular.

The confusion possibly stems from their interest in aesthetics as art in the formal sense, hailing as they do from an era where your fave bands would usually turn you on to what they'd been reading or some overlooked detail in the history of painting or film - I mean as distinct from just rocking out and so inspiring you towards the purchase of recordings by other artists who also rock out. Given their extended legacy of soundtrack work and film scores, combined with a strong visual - or at least poetic aesthetic - it should be clear that this is art, and as art it is very much its own thing in the sense of those associated with modernism being very much their own respective things; or to put it in less nebulous terms, if you can imagine Spandau Ballet with content rather than just style, then maybe that's what I'm getting at.

These six tracks are songs in the traditional sense, brought together by means of an experimental approach utilising whatever best approximates whichever theme they're going for - powerful emotive bass, military rhythms, horns, heroic crooning, funky guitar, and even what is almost certainly a Roland DR55 invoking a timeless sense of scale with surprisingly little. It sounds like the labour of love I strongly suspect it to be, meticulously sculpted rather than offered as here's some stuff we done innit; and the apparently silk-screen printed gatefold cover seems likewise true to the integrity of their aesthetic over commercial considerations.

When Cherished Dreams Come True is probably overdue a reissue but in the meantime I'll get onto tracking down their other records which I couldn't afford at the time.

The Best of New York Haunted part one (2025)

As younger readers may recall - assuming they even exist - I don't really do downloads, and if I do, I tend to burn a CDR of the thing so I can listen to it without having to buy something which may facilitate listening for about three months before breaking down because I failed to neosync the datawrap - even though no-one alive actually knows what that means. I therefore have a strong preference for physical media.

Unfortunately, almost everything released by New York Haunted seems to be fucking fantastic, which is inconvenient for me because the label is mostly, almost exclusively about the downloads, and my CDR burner is knackered. Naturally I snapped up this token material exception during the seven or eight seconds of it being available, however long it was. New York Haunted is still all about the downloads, but hopefully this represents a testing of the water.

The Best of New York Haunted is a short, snappy album produced as bespoke vinyl by some new operation called Elastic Stage who specialise in this sort of thing. If it's a lathe cut, it's the best sounding lathe cut I've heard, but I'm not sure it is given production values equivalent to something for which you would pay full price in a store. The four tracks assembled here were apparently the label's most downloaded at time of release, and given the part one suffix I'm hoping this is going to be a regular thing.

If it means anything, these four come from downloads by Club Mayz, Kuvera B x Dylab, Nachtwald, and Demented Machine, all providing variants on the dark, dirty techno for which the label is known - mixing desk thick with grease, everything in the fucking red and held together with duct tape, kick drum more like assault with a rubber mallet lacking the decency to even observe the tradition of four to the floor. It combines euphoria with anxiety in a sort of primal horror you can dance to and is the very embodiment of dystopian. I don't know. You run out of words for this sort of thing, although if it helps the music is beautifully fitted to the artwork - AI generated cyborgs crumbling and rotting, humanity reduced to trypophobia triggering consumer tech, and probably the first time I've ever seen AI used to generate art that isn't the usual pile of wank. This is what acid does these days, and I doubt anyone at the desk back in 1987 could have predicted it. I'd say grab one but it seems to have already come and gone, so just be aware.

Extra points to Nachtwald for a track named Learn From History You Idiots. 

The Game - Jesus Piece (2012)

The Game had squirted out an entire stack of great albums by this point, not one dud amongst them, but I always had the feeling they should have been better. The problem was in the whole, with only the verbiage exposing any obvious weakness, and not in the acrobatics or even the delivery. It was the obsession with making a classic album, which is fine because no-one sets out to make a stinker, but the endless references to Ready to Die, Illmatic, Reasonable Doubt and others in terms of legendary discs which might shuffle aside to make room for this one became a bit exhausting, and he only got away with it because he sounded aspirational rather than arrogant. The endless references to records by other people became off-putting, despite the initial novelty. I once sat down with the first album and started on a list of every fan-pleasing reference made to someone else's work. I seem to remember getting to fifty or sixty before the end of the first track, at which juncture the exercise struck me as a complete waste of time. If it was a lovely day, it was a lovely day like Bill Withers. If he'd bought a brand new combine harvester you just knew he'd spent the best part of a morning searching for something to rhyme with Wurzels, because that what it be like.

Jesus Piece is his fifth album, apparently a concept jobbie exploring religious themes and how they relate to this shitty world in which we find ourselves, which I'd argue runs through most of the Game's music, although here it's more direct because we don't have to wade through references to Nas, Biggie, Jay-Z and the rest; and this greater focus, denuded of all crowd pleasing waffle, reveals a  strong lyricist delivering heartbreaking home truths with an emotional investment comparable to Ghostface. I don't know if he's ever broken down in tears on stage, but he's one of the few who could probably get away with it.

Musically, it's likewise on point, with no evidence of whatever deficit may or may not have kept previous albums from quite getting there. Being 2012, there's a lot of that post-trap sound, whatever the fuck you call it - the thing that sounds like waveforms copied and pasted from track to track on a screen which will eventually emerge from someone's shitty phone - but it has an organic groove, like headachey rainbow breakfast cereal somehow cooked up without recourse to artificial ingredients; and the sound is like something vast and distant which inhabits a cathedral more than just the usual reverb wacked up too high. Even with the earthier monologues, it's sunny and soulful music for scorching weather and wide blue skies despite the pathos, the lines drenched in sorrow, regret, or the recognition of insurmountable odds. The majority of rap albums usually leave you feeling one of two or three things, while Jesus Piece delivers every available emotion all at once regardless of contradictions - and the title track in particular is a Mona Lisa moment in rap terms. It may have taken him time to build up momentum, but I'd say this one probably does rank alongside Ready to Die, Illmatic, and the rest.