Laibach (1985)

 

Laibach's first album has recently been reissued in a box with all sorts of fancy extra stuff. Typically I finally found a decent quality copy that I could afford, or almost afford, about a month before anyone said anything about a reissue, but never mind. The pleasure of bagging this one is undiminished. While I can appreciate their more recent work, engaging with capitalism and consumerism using the same methods with which they once dissected totalitarian ideology (amongst other things) I still feel it steers too close to the wacky cover versions of the later Residents, at least for my tastes; and although Milan Fras growling be yourself brings me great pleasure, I remain drawn to the mystery of the earlier material from before the wall came down. I remain drawn to it because it's incredibly fucking powerful and I'm still trying to figure it out and whether or not this says anything unfortunate about me.

Thankfully, my recent reading of Alexei Monroe's Interrogation Machine has answered pretty much any question I had, additionally confirming that my questions inevitably arose as a result of not having been born in Slovenia and being largely ignorant of its history. Laibach are surprisingly straightforward once it's explained, as is their preference for ambiguity even where the ambiguity leads to disturbing conclusions such as maybe they really mean it; but this isn't a discussion which is served by reduction to soundbites or disclaimers so you'll just have to read the book if you care that much.

Laibach's initial musical campaign reveals common ground with Test Dept, 23 Skidoo and the like, founded in intense rhythms and the sort of manipulation of sound heard before anyone could afford a sampler. Rekapitulacija 1980-84, issued the same year, better represents their first formative steps, with this debut as an arguably transitional album - still with someone playing a bass guitar amid various electroacoustic sounds, but they're moving towards neoclassical bombast of the kind which inspired a thousand other marching up and down bands, few of whom managed anything more than a dubious karaoke turn. Laibach here recapitulate the sound and imagery of totalitarian power according to its own strengths, its ability to reach down to our most primal selves and grab them by the metaphorical bollocks, because this approach is arguably more effective - and less insulting to its audience - than mere parody, or Billy Bragg bravely punching a Nazi with one fist while giving us a comradely thumbs up with the other. Crucial to this is what is said, and whether this repetition of noise and light actively says anything at all, because much of the totalitarian rhetoric is stripped of its meaning, leaving no identification of scapegoats (a popular theme with ideological types), nor even anything more coherent than a nebulous hymn to some kind of progress couched in retrograde terms combining early modernism with the folk art so beloved of authoritarian regimes. Should anyone still be bothered by how any of this fits together, or unduly bothered, I'll close with an excerpt from Françoise Thom's Newspeak: The Language of Soviet Communism as quoted in the aforementioned Interrogation Machine.

Confronted by the terror of nothingness which ideology brings, man instinctively seeks refuge under the wing of some tyrant, unaware that in so doing he is handing himself over to the very thing he fears. Compared with sheer nothingness, tyranny always looks like the lesser evil.

Just keep thinking about it, if you're still not sure. I'd argue that Laibach create true art of tremendous intellectual and emotional force in summary of both the essence and the sheer scale of the problems of civilisation, and if you still get them confused with Skrewdriver or Ayn Rand or any other ideology driven shitbag, then you're almost certainly contributing to that problem. I'm not saying that this record will scare some sense into you, but it's probably a good place to start.

Sleaford Mods - The Mekon (2008)

 

I make vague efforts towards not writing the same thing week after week, and I know I covered their first one not so long ago, but Jesus this, their second album, has really got its hooks in. Everything that sounded like it was going somewhere and had probably arrived on the debut outing here comes into focus so sharp it'll have your eye out. My expectations may have been reduced by it being named after Dan Dare's cartoon enemy, but as I approach the Ozempic years, I realise I'd forgotten how the Mekon once served as the go to synonym for the absolute worst fucker you could have the misfortune to encounter. At least this was so in the West Midlands of the seventies, and I assume elsewhere. The Mekon was anyone awful beyond description - your boss, someone's shitty kid, a hated relative - and I don't remember any stronger condemnation; and this came back to me as I listened to the title track at the end of side one, a shrapnel blast of wrath over the stuff described as Liveable Shit in more recent times, weighted down with a loop of Pretty Vacant, which remains terrifying all these years later and somehow sounds even angrier here than it did back then.

We're off to a flawless start with a Rotten sample and Jason bellowing toilet over and over as we build up to Armitage Shanks, which lyrically feels like early Viz comic pushed to a harrowing extreme. Another day in the gutter, darling. Forget about it...

As with the first one, we're mostly dealing with looped samples, although there's layering, some structural work here and there - so a belated hats off to Simon Claridge, whoever he may be. Thought has gone into this so it's never just a record of loops, and the aforementioned Armitage Shanks may even have borrowed a full instrumental for all I can tell. The Sex Pistols, Nas and the Who notwithstanding, I don't immediately recognise too many of the sources and nothing gets in the way of The Mekon feeling very much in the vein of a sixties beat album in its entirety, with jazzy undertones which might be smoky were they not so fucking angry. The first version of Jobseeker builds on the Yardbirds' For Your Love to great effect and I think I prefer this version, at least once I've got past reminders of all the fun I had at Tile Hill job centre. There are plenty of memories here, mostly the kind ground into the brain like the vintage gunge around a neglected overflow - pubs with red flock wallpaper and the stench of Rothmans or JPS hitting you in the face upon entrance, synthetic carpet tiles underfoot before staggering out into halogen daylight with the manic urgency of excessive booze, a violently embittered version of the swagger promised by Oasis but nowhere near so dumb or blunted. The worst of times were the best we could manage or expect.

Then we come to Trixie with another loop which somehow improves on its source, and some of the grimmest, most depressing shit ever committed to wax; and it suddenly makes sense that the Sleaford Mods have always enjoyed a certain popularity in noise circles. It's not just the element of two blokes stood on a stage with a laptop. Trixie could be Consumer Electronics but for the repeated riff from Submission. The Mekon also makes some sense of Sleaford Mods as the English Mobb Deep - grimy as fuck, cold and relentless as daily existence, and very much rooted in its own soil.

Howl in the Typewriter - Primalore (2026)

 

If you enjoy sentences like, 'Take your cunt-looking face and shove it into your dad's syphilitic arsehole,' that is a fine line between entertainment and insanity. This is but one of many statements delivered by Primalore like prison kitchen slops down those waste chutes on either side of your head. In fact it's a direct quote from track thirteen, identified on the cover as Spilling Processed Peas, although the album is just over an hour of continuous pseudo-narrative barrage without breaks, without pause for breath, and its division into individual tracks seems arbitrary. Elsewhere, Frailty Assessment Area teaches us that:

The sunset's air pollution melts ovary morning celebrations in breast wax and hot labia solvents splashing in dusty socks at cocktail parties of ass-kicking mind-wanking faith denominating a thermoviscous cooling snail in the head from the pre-fright ungulates of mutilated spastics in buried bodies seeping concrete the tourist trap entangled with incomer fashion chasers splitting the G, a coop noob move up north, even if such drink decorations exist there.

As you might imagine, it's difficult to get your head around this one, or it would be if the noise allowed you just a couple of seconds in which to ask, what the fuck was that?!? which it doesn't.

The music is a cut-up soundtrack of DIY synthpop chopped into fragments, most shorter than a second, of which some passages may repeat but I've been thus far too disorientated to tell. I think the point of the music is mainly so we can call it music because it's probably a better fit than anything else. First impressions are of a distant, more scatological cousin to Nigel Ayers' recent spoken word efforts, The Pre-War Noise Encryption Standard and Excavations in Substation. As with Ayers' narratives, Primalore almost makes sense but never quite gets there, leaving the listener forever struggling to catch up. The voice draws us into an ever-shifting unreal environment because we feel it should make sense, or should at least try walking in a straight line for longer than a minute; and yet much of the monologue may seem weirdly familiar but for the proverbial leg bone being inexplicably connected to the analgesic cyclotron bone.

However, where Ayers' hallucinogenic narrative is at least as soothing as the mad stuff that goes through your head when you're unwell and consequently delirious, this is closer to the information overload of Consumer Electronics, albeit without being quite so harrowing. Conversely, Stan Batcow's delivery is often surprisingly amiable, almost conversational, regardless of the onslaught and despite the rapid fire battery of bizarre, jarring images. It sounds conversational in places.

The text comes from Primalore Four, a magazine produced by Mark Reeve and Dr. Adolf Steg (real name - Dr. Adolf Steg), a copy of which is currently going on eBay for ₤24.50 unless you live in Americaland, as I do. Retooled as what I suppose could be termed a fulminating book, I suspect information overload is the method of delivery more than the point in itself. It's not so much that meaning is scrambled and reduced to noise as that there's too much meaning, the ultimate thrust of which perhaps leaks through during the aforementioned Frailty Assessment Area:

Everything must be perfect down the years, so destroy all art, culture and music, blow up this fucking useless planet and remove us from existence. What has the human race really achieved? We have fucked up a beautiful planet and spent billions going to a dead moon as the two percent on the bottom rung of society cause so much harm to the rest, the good people of this world.

If I've given an impression of Primalore as an unlistenable racket, which it may well be to many, that isn't my intention. Rather it's a sort of primal scream, or howl, I suppose; and whatever the hell it's saying, it's hard to keep from getting swept along in its sheer bloody-minded dedication to doing whatever it's doing, and it leaves the listener strangely energised or invigorated in a glow of recovery such as might normally be encountered after a gut-wrenching hangover or a dose of the most powerful laxatives known to man, and also some women. I don't know what it is, or even that I like it, but it impresses the living shit out of me and I don't know why.

Procure thineself a copy yonder.

In the Nursery - Twins (1986)

 

That whole thing which everyone now seems happy to clumsily label industrial music was once distinguished by an eclectic willingness to engage in experimentation while moving ever forward, as distinct from remaking the same record over and over - at least in the eighties as it sounded to my ears. Prefiguring Forrest Gump's figurative box of Milk Tray, you just never knew what you was gunna git next, and In the Nursery seem a particularly powerful example of this.

Soundtrack music, like industrial, has become a much overused term, more often than not referring to something with weird noises drifting through oceans of reverb with no obvious interest in forming songs. In the Nursery, on the other hand, developed a sound structured closely to the classical and narrative tendencies of actual film soundtracks where moods are built then subsumed by broader themes, so it's no great surprise that they graduated to film scores - here meaning the genuine article rather than curmudgeonly noises bubbling away during some blurred super 8mm nightmare.

Twins seems to be where it began, give or take some small change, although it's a logical progression from Sonority, and I obviously need to track down a copy of Temper, also from 1985. Classical elements invoke Elgar - strings here rather than samples - combined with meticulously beaten rhythms of martial cadence maintaining a certain remove from rock origins; and each element performs according to the needs of the sound rather than traditional rock hierarchy, so vocals fill a function more in line with the operatic than with Chuck Berry as part of the whole rather than just the foreground. It's often pensive or melancholy with bursts of triumphant conclusion and even the occasional splash of sunlight - plenty of drama rather than happy because it's grown up music. Twins is akin to watching a film in emotional terms, and they were just getting warmed up at this point. The charm of this album isn't immediate but grows with each play as you acclimate to what they were doing, and as it becomes apparent that no-one else was really doing anything quite like it at the time. Once again I curse that I was always skint back in the day in combination with never once coming across a copy of Twins in a record store without already having spunked away my pocket money on something else.

Gavin Friday - Ecce Homo (2024)

 

Somewhere in an alternate reality, spurred on by the success of his contribution to In Strict Tempo, Genesis P. Orridge formed a synthpop act with Dave Ball, went on to even greater things, and none of us had to spend any more time thinking about Psychic TV. It didn't happen but Gavin Friday and Dave Ball would have been at least as good, and now we have evidence to support such a claim. It's been forty years but better later than never.

I half expected a slightly more disturbing Soft Cell album, but the tone and mood remain consistent with Friday's work with Maurice Seezer; although no-one could possibly doubt that it's Dave Ball twiddling the proverbial knobs given his invoking John Barry, Serge Gainsbourg, or even Kurt Weill (probably) with the best of them. Gavin Friday always had one of the more powerful voices to emerge from whatever the fuck it was he emerged from - gorgeous, and darkly sexy whilst equally liable to scare the living shit out of us with songs one can easily imagine crooned by Sinatra somehow without any of the obvious contradictions getting in the way.

As with others of his - or our if I'm being honest - Friday's vintage, thoughts inevitable turn to change and what the hell happened, so yielding reflection on When the World was Young - chilling and poignant because I'm not sure what the hell happened either. Rather than pointing out how everything is now fucking stupid (which it is) he instead ruminates on what we got right and on what should be remembered - even in the ominous yet nevertheless uplifting Glitterstomp of Lady Esquire - without squirting generic rainbow juice over everything, case in point being the sublime Cabarotica, a memory of Soho in the early eighties. Avoiding music press as I've tended to do, I've never formed assumptions regarding the lad's sexuality because it makes no difference to me; and I enjoy the idea that it ultimately doesn't matter because I miss those years before we had to fill in forms, wear badges, and pass tests in order that adjacent arseholes - the social equivalent of useless upper management material - should feel validated. Just as significant an indication of the man's character is The Best Boys in Dublin, a moving tribute to Friday's beloved sausage dogs, and I'm not sure how much more you really need to know.

The loss of the late, great Dave Ball is an enduring source of sorrow and this masterpiece is both a fine memorial to himself, and a testament to Gavin Friday as an artistic colossus whose powers remain undiminished.

Sleaford Mods (2007)

 

As you hopefully realise, the Sleaford Mods were Jason Williamson and various other blokes as required for a good five years before Andrew Fearne got involved, and they - or I suppose he - recorded quite a lot of material prior to Austerity Dogs bothering the hit parade. Some of this early stuff has resurfaced on compilations and bootlegs but will most likely remain obscure due to the legality of clearing all those samples, of which there are many. Anyway, someone has at last done the right thing in issuing vinyl bootlegs of the first four as originally released on CDR, so we get to hear this stuff more or less as intended in terms of artwork, running order and so on - which I personally find less confusing than assemblages such as Retweeted, I'm Not a Mod - Fuck Off and others.

...and guess what?

Contrary to any faint expectation you may have of ropy demos from before someone got their shit together, it's fucking great!

Williamson rants, yells, croons, belches, cracks jokes and delivers one lyrical wedgie after another with the same relentless wit and bile with which you will be familiar. Presumably unsure as to whether anyone was even listening at this point, if anything, he seems to give even less of a shit about sparing anyone's feelings. The music is looped samples, blatantly stolen without any attempt to disguise sources, but with just enough crafting and editing to keep it from sounding like punky Philip Glass; and while we may have noticed the looping of riffs from the Jam, the Pistols, even the Who on Retweeted, the choice of wallpaper on this debut effort is such as to leave the whole feeling distinctly jazzy, albeit in a moody sense with bars lifted from Roni Size, Bernard Herrmann, Barry White and others; and there's even a sample-free acoustic guitar instrumental, just in case you think you had the thing all figured out - and it fits right in.

Should anyone have developed the wrong impression, Sleaford Mods is no shaky beginning, no finding of feet regardless of being a quite different animal to Austerity Dogs. It's a fully formed blast of inspired racket, opprobrium - and even crooning - and as vital a debut as Bollocks, Illmatic, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, or any others you care to mention.

Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction (1997)

 

I've generally given anything involving Al Jourgensen a medium to wide berth, my knee-jerk impression having been formed by his seemingly recording and releasing everything he does without any sort of filter whatsoever under a million different effortfully contentious personas, too many collaborations with famous friends, generally trying too hard to be a metal goblin and pulling scary faces at the camera while challenging us with philosophical conundrums on the level of going to church is shit RRRAAAARRRRGH!!! Life is too short for that much pantomime badassery.

Yet I have to admit that what he does well, he does very well - those Revolting Cocks singles, Acid Horse with Cabaret Voltaire, and of course Lard. I've heard a couple of Ministry albums, even owned one of them for about three days. All I recall is grunting and growling, everything jammed on eleven, and samples of evangelical types asking for money. It sounded like a parody, plus it's now 2026 and I'm bored thoroughly shitless with persons younger than myself* who really need to know whether or not this record is properly industrial so they can add it to their stupid fucking list. Well, Lard is 25% punk due to the involvement of Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys who were a punk band, and 75% industrial because of Al and the gang, so that's interesting isn't it, you fucking suckers.

I could listen to Biafra all day long. He cuts straight to the bone of the bullshit which makes our lives that much worse, and he's very, very funny, and that weird warble isn't like anything else in the pantheon; and so his involvement fills the bandwidth which, were it anything other than Lard, Al would probably have stuffed full of something annoying, or at least annoying to me. This allows me a greater opportunity to enjoy what Al and his pals actually do well. It's metal of some description, tight as fuck and paradoxically no fat, chopped into sharp edged steel blocks with swarf and grease all over the place, coming off the belt at twice any speed recommended by health and safety standards. The effect is akin to being stood on a traffic island with the constant vehicular roar forming an ocean of automotive noise for an hour, while Jello bounces around like the Mr. Rogers of hard, uncomfortable truths yodelling clues as to what you might like to think about should you ever get off the island alive.

I'm sure Al is one of the good guys but I really wish I liked a few of the others as much as I like this one.

*: Which is now admittedly nearly everyone.

Mozart Estate - Tower Block in a Jam Jar (2025)

 

If I'm in the habit of writing bollocks, what follows may be worse than usual on the grounds that Tower Block excavates and rerecords more or less an entire Go-Kart Mozart album with knobs on, namely Tearing Up the Album Charts from 2005 which, naturally, I somehow never picked up and haven't heard. Our boy felt that said album somewhat slipped under the radar and was thus deprived its due, which is obviously true in my case; so here we are again for the very first time.

Where Go-Kart Mozart was designed as a portastudio band - which makes perfect sense when you listen to the music - the Estate has a bigger budget with production values closer to Denim; so I guess the Estate is an automotive expansion rather than a feature of urban planning. You probably know what to expect here, which is what you get, and yet it's still weird and disconcerting because why would you do this?

Renovating the past for the sake of the future, is the answer given on the cover, which sort of makes sense. Tower Block in a Jam Jar isn't some beardy return to the rich songwriting traditions of Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, or Scott Walker so much as an unreconstructed defense of Micky Most and whoever wrote the lyrics to The Humphreys Are About for the Unigate television advert. It's nostalgia for all the stuff you've been trying to forget, and a reminder that while those who weren't there have come to view the seventies as David Bowie and Marc Bolan giggling as they apply glitter to each other's faces, it was mostly Barry Blue, Watney's Red Barrel, and getting your head kicked in on a Saturday night. It's nothing to do with current notions of cool. It's brown and orange with rounded corners because Chicory Tip existed whether you like it or not, which is kind of refreshing. Mozart Estate embrace and celebrate the grim, and I mean the showbiz smile so false that it hurts grim rather than the artistically grim, as most vividly embodied in the cheerfully harrowing A Lorra Laughs with Cilla. This album is weird, beautiful and horrible all at the same time, and is the opposite of everything the machine has been selling you for the past four decades.

Bolt Thrower - Realm of Chaos (1989)

 

I'm not sure it's even possible for me to be any further out of my depth than with this one. I hated metal, or what was then called metal, for most of my formative years. I hated the silly logos of chrome-plated skulls embellished with either Old English or piles of twigs. I hated the pantomime scary faces pulled on stage and record covers. I hated the lyrics endlessly referencing the dullest shite known to mankind - crap horror movies, Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & fucking Dragons. I hated the guitar solos. Napalm Death always sounded like a fucking racket to me, and while I was already listening to a lot of music which revelled in being a fucking racket, it was usually an interesting fucking racket, not just Motorhead played at 750mph with the Cookie Monster barking lyrically on the subject of Cthulhu over machine gun bass pedals. Despite hailing from Coventry, a city in which I have resided at various points, Bolt Thrower naturally passed me by.

As with many things I initially dislike, I eventually came to wonder whether I really disliked Bolt Thrower, and if so what it was that I found specifically annoying. It somehow took me three decades to overcome this one, but never mind. I had a listen to summat on YouTube and it gripped me with a Hadrian's Wall of the dirtiest, thickest guitar distortion you ever heard and drums pounding at the pace of a funeral.

'Yoink,' I yelped as I leapt from my seat, 'I must own this record!' I looked in a few of the usual online places and found that this, their first album, was long out of print and therefore prohibitively expensive if you could even find a copy. Another five years passed and suddenly there was a reissue sat in the racks of Hogwild Records. I got it home and was disconcerted to discover that  it sounded quite different to whatever I'd heard on YouTube, and that I'd actually made purchase of one of those Cookie Monster records I've been avoiding for more or less the entirety of my life.

Assuming I was mistakenly remembering something by the Melvins, or Eyehategod, or one of those other admittedly listenable bands, I gave Realm of Chaos a spin anyway. I couldn't figure the fucker out, so I gave it another spin. Why would anyone record this?, I asked myself, and kept playing it because I felt I should at least make the effort to understand. Eventually, probably inevitably, if it still didn't make sense, I could at least appreciate it as a mammoth slab of black vomiting from my speakers for forty minutes or so. The bass pedal came to sound more like a synth growl, and the wall of guitar drops chords like slabs of meat onto a mortuary floor, and even if I remained fully confused, it sounded like Bolt Thrower knew exactly what the fuck they were doing - which is probably all you need; although it possibly helps that there's a track called World Eater, which is the sort of title that predisposes me to enjoy whatever the hell it is before I've heard a note. Thankfully it wasn't zydeco.

So Realm of Chaos is what the first four Black Sabbath albums sound like after they've been through a black hole, or something - so vast it's not even possible to tell how big it really is and - on close inspection - just a few steps along the evolutionary ladder from the stuff I recognise as music. Yet this also is music, just a bit darker.

Sometimes it's nice to discover just how wrong you can be.

Foetus - Halt (2025)

 

So here it is, the final Foetus record and it sounds very much like a grand finale - a culmination of forms developed over the course of the previous nine studio albums, although admittedly the mutant disco of Deaf and Ache are represented in spirit more than actual sonics. The new Foetus album - whichever one it is this time - always expands on its predecessor, taking the ideas further, albeit occasionally in a different direction; and Halt is no exception, building on the symphonic excesses of Hide and Love while marking a more concerted reinvestment in the crime jazz heard on earlier records. I'm borrowing crime jazz from some online review I saw because it's amusingly descriptive and—no kiddies, this isn't fucking industrial music. Anyway, the big band is bigger and raging harder than ever, he's growling again, and we have that seasick sound which seems more or less unique to Mr. Thirlwell, here sonically underscoring the point of The World is Broken, for one example, which staggers along on what would be swagger but for its fatal failure to develop sea legs. We have excursions into both opera and a sort of nautical folk - another new deal which nevertheless makes perfect sense - but the set is dominated by what feels like a variation on soundtrack music, the huge orchestral scores of the Biblical epic. This seems appropriate given the theme of endings - both the Foetus mission and human civilisation if the world outside the window is any indication. He's really not fucking about this time.

Did he ever fuck about? I'm not convinced. All those songs about hot times in the old town may seem the opposite of telling it like it is, as Thirlwell does on Halt, but the intensity is the same firehose of imagery and loathing and we shouldn't mistake extremes of emphasis for some guy stood on a stage pulling scary faces because that's showbiz. Serious as cancer, as the saying has it.

This one may conceivably be his crowning achievement, and certainly for something which lavishes in and so subverts familiar musical traditions, it somehow doesn't sound like anything else; and where Halt might resemble Flow or Thaw or Nail or any of its predecessors, it does so but more and better with a thousand additional shades of grey bringing terrible depth to the shadows.

This man is honestly a fucking genius.

Money 3 (2025)

 

Watching Secret Mall Apartment, the 2024 Netflix documentary about a group of artists who managed to live in a shopping mall for four years before they were discovered, it occurred to me that real art - as distinct from AI renderings of Winnie the Pooh as a Japanese ladyboy on the one hand, or a child's pram filled with actual human turds on the other - doesn't need to introduce itself by telling you that it's art because it will be self evident. Money 3 qualifies as art without having to send out memos - art in the sense of it being akin to setting up a sound installation in your listening space, wherever that may be.

Of Love Earth Music's most recent care package, I'm surprised to find I've played this one the most - surprised because it's over three hours of whatever it is on three discs and I don't understand what the hell I'm listening to; or why I keep listening to it. There's something fascinating here.

Money 3 seems to be the name of the album as the third in a series, with Money 4 having been issued about a month ago. Aside from a label graphic and track titles - and all seven listed tracks are called Money - there's no other information and nothing to identify the creator, although I suspect it will be someone from +DOG+. The artwork is mostly images of dollar bills, so maybe they want us to think about money. Maybe it's the sound of someone rubbing a dollar bill against a microphone time stretched to three hours. I doubt it, but I wouldn't rule anything out.

What you hear is minimal and abstract with a faint suggestion of the familiar. Excepting track five, there's arguably more silence than sound on here, or if not silence, then at least space, the kind found in nature. Electrical glitches suggesting faulty leads open the first disc, crackling intermittently with some vague sine wave peep way down in the unusually quiet mix. It's rhythmic without quite having a rhythm. It repeats without looping, and there's not much evidence of digital processing or sampling. I listen to most CDs while cycling, and this one blends seamlessly with the whistle of wind, distant cop cars, traffic noise, and other sounds you hear out there. It feels as though it's born through neither human nor artificial action but rather is simply something which exists and which obeys only its own aesthetic. Only when we reach track four do we encounter anything you could call notation - possibly a piano, although it sounds only a couple of times. The next disc continues with oscillators, or something which suggests at least remote human agency, comparable to musical composition more than the rumble of traffic over an underpass invoked on the first disc, if not much more. The sound changes over time, nevertheless remaining consistent with the whole, whatever that is. It's not laptop glitch; it's not treated environmental sound so far as I'm able to tell; it's nothing to do with songs made famous by either Pink Floyd or the haircut-era Beatles, and I've a feeling it means whatever the listener brings to the equation. Maybe it's telling us that money is essentially meaningless.

I have no idea, but it's food for serious thought and it makes Nurse With Wound's Merzbild Schwet sound like the Beach Boys; and I'm glad we still have a world in which something like this can exist.

You'll find a link to Love Earth Music on the left under Some Stuff, and that's where you can buy copies of this one.

Public Image Ltd - What the World Needs Now (2015)

 

Yes, I know there was the butter advert and the Sex Pistols were a boy band who weren't actually the Clash, and Mr. Lydon has recently been overheard praising Trump and Farage, and there's probably some other stuff that's been revealed since I stopped caring. I don't know the man so I wouldn't presume to understand what's been going on in his head, but given his history of bending over backwards to annoy self-righteous wankers who really deserve to be annoyed I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Feel free to read no further if this strikes you as a glowing endorsement of wrongthink.

Of course, there's also the whole spent force deal about how we never liked the man anyway, which is up to the individual but is arguably your loss. If This is PIL took some getting used to - and I'd say it's worth the effort - this one is a more immediate, more convincing jobbie, suggesting the band have really come together. This should count for something given the presence of both Lu Edmonds and Bruce Smith, the latter whom you will recall from the Pop Group, the Slits and the New Age Steppers, Edmonds from Shriekback, 3 Mustaphas 3, the Damned, Spizz, and pretty much every other band ever. As a group, it's the closest they've come to sounding like the Wobble version while remaining entirely its own animal.

Lydon is on form, assuming we can agree he ever had form, switching from genuinely touching sincerity and even pathos to just not giving a fuck from one track to the next. The anthemic current of the McGeoch years continues here and there, and Double Trouble sounds as though the lads were channelling the Sleaford Mods without simply doing an impersonation. That What is Not is definitely an old man album, world-weary and full of regrets but still kicking up a stink and raging at the dying of the proverbial light, all tempered with a defiant optimism which seems to have come to the fore in this line-up of the band.

If you're still wondering why he should have bothered coming back to this lot rather than sign up for yet another Pistols reunion, this record answers most of your stupid questions.

Soz.

Sleaford Mods - The Demise of Planet X (2026)

 

Apparently we're all sick of them now although I didn't get the memo and I'm not sure who counts as we. The Sleafords recent on stage failure to demand freedom for Palestine with due enthusiasm - more likely a reluctance to engage with online nutters - prompted yet another Twitter pile-on wherein persons who've never been within ten miles of a football match denounced the boys as melts and Clash loyalists cleverly pointed out that they're not even mods. My favourite was the opera loving Rupert - as his Twitter bio proclaimed - dismissing our boys as Temu Cockney wankers due to his presumably never having met a working class person who wasn't minicabbing him to the opera house or serving a delicious avocado wrap therein. I suspect this sort of behaviour may be the subject of the title track, The Demise of Planet X, although as usual the Mods tackle the bullshit from an unfamiliar angle, in this case leaving us to puzzle over why the track extrapolates the Magic Roundabout theme. And as usual, it's not quite business as usual and we've moved some way on from the previous album.

We open with The Good Life, which tells us:

I'm not punching down, lads,

I'm gonna style it out,

I'm gonna make out I'm not doing it,

but in reality...

... I am!

I mention this mainly because the sardonic smirk you can actually feel in the ...I am! has enough charge to kickstart a stalled engine and is in itself massively entertaining. I'd even go so far as to say that it is in itself more enjoyable than the entire back catalogues of most other bands, so this probably won't be a conspicuously impartial review.

If we haven't quite moved on from the laptop Suicide variation, we've stepped sideways quite a bit, and the mood isn't quite the familiar raw ambience of piss-chasing a fag end along the full length of the urinal, although there's still a strong element of that. The biggest surprise of all is a quota of uptempo numbers you might even call breezy. The music seems a little more layered, at least closer to something a full band with instruments might come up with, and tracks such as Double Diamond and Don Draper hint at the bluesier end of R&B - talking Groundhogs rather than R. Kelly; Elitist GOAT almost suggests pastel hued Hanna-Barbera teens hopping in the dune buggy and heading out for a day at the beach, even if we all know it's going to be Southend-on-fucking-Sea and will end in rain and bruises; and, to end my admittedly vague comparisons, Bad Santa with its pensive flute and brooding pace is one of the most emotionally powerful things they've done, amounting to the unease of regrets nursed as the hangover clears the next day. It tears your fucking heart out, even with the vocal aggro; maybe because of the vocal aggro.

Listening to Austerity Dogs back in—Jesus Christ, thirteen years ago, it was difficult to imagine these two doing more than a couple of admittedly great albums without turning into something else. It didn't seem there would be much mileage in a band sounding like an argument with a nutcase at a bus-stop with half of the stage presence coming from a bloke who pushes a button then drinks beer for three minutes; but this may be the best thing they've done, at least so far. What doesn't kill them apparently makes them stronger.

Nine Inch Nails - Tron: Ares (2025)

 

I wasn't going to bother given that this is the soundtrack to a Disney movie, and while I can't deny that the Trentster has proven himself a dab hand at movie soundtracks, they've rarely been the sort of thing I would listen to over and over. I never saw the first Tron movie because it sounded like a huge pile of wank, as does this one, plus it apparently stars the impressively unwatchable Jared Leto and to paraphrase Garry Bushell without even the slightest trace of irony, cyberpunk generally holds about as much interest for me as that Yoko Ono film about arses.

But it was there in the store, and the sheer novelty of buying a brand new CD by a band I like in a place of retail with a till and a cashier and all the trimmings proved overwhelming.

To be fair, my experience of Reznor's soundtrack work is limited to bits and pieces on early bootlegs. It's mostly approximately ambient and all very nice, and I know I enjoyed The Social Network without remembering anything about its soundtrack; but this is either something different, or at least if you squint it feels like a proper Nine Inch Nails album, or possibly one of the better remix jobbies - even though I'm not unreservedly wild about those either. It's full CD length and features just four tracks which count as songs and are thus part of the canon; then an indeterminate number of instrumentals, some stripped down from parts of the four songs, others seemingly autonomous but all serving to reiterate specific musical themes just as you would find in a movie soundtrack by John Barry, Akira Ifukube, or one of those guys; and the instrumentals more or less feel like songs but for the absence of vocals, pasted together from the same grinding sequencers, pensive rhythms, and wailing electronic threnodies.

Crucially it's tense as fuck while retaining a certain ruined beauty, like the very best of Nine Inch Nails - a sort of wrist-slashing orgasm combined with a punch in the face over and over and over until it sounds like the only music in the world; which is pleasing.

Still not going to bother with sodding Tron though. Nice try, Disney but nein danke.

Cosey Fanni Tutti - 2t2 (2025)

 

Here's another Cosey solo, not radically different to Tutti but representing further goodness mined from the same seam; although it brings new realisations, namely that on reflection I think I prefer her solo work to anything recorded with him indoors, or even with that other group. I'm not even sure why this should be, for clearly it's a relative. Another realisation is that both 2t2 and its predecessor seem sonically closer to the very first Chris & Cosey outings than to the later, which may be to do with either a reinvestment in gritty analogue sounds or the renewed spirit of adventure which comes with endeavours beyond a familiar configuration of people. A lot of it chugs along at some halfway point between Gristle and Moroder, as much a bubbling bass as a rhythm. With Wrangler and countless others, the last decade or so has seen a revival in what I'd hesitate to call sounds of the seventies, harking back to those early experiments with plug-in synths grinding away, and so it is with Cosey's work. In most cases, and certainly this one, it doesn't strike me as an exercise in nostalgia so much as a reflection of changing music technology thankfully losing its fixation with the new, instead favouring variety and malleability in terms of sound design.

Anyway, while solo Cosey makes great use of rhythm, it's a different emphasis to that favoured by hubby and is more exploratory, hence the continued delight in things which make a noise for their own sake - the cornet and even a harmonica on this album. I gather these pieces were composed for some kind of installation, which I can see given that they have the quality of soundtrack, a certain cinematic scale wherein even the atonal elements gain musicality by contrast with adjacent sounds. It suggests improvisation and random juxtaposition but for the fact that everything works and complements the whole, so maybe there's an element of selection. Whatever the case may be, it's at least as powerful as weather in its emotional impact - an album in which to lose yourself.

Shameful Ca$hin (2025)

 

Shameful Ca$hin began life as a conflation of the Girl Guided Missiles  - whom you may recall from here - and some former Cravats, specifically the formative line up of the same - although one of the four has strummed and bellowed in both groups. They got together for fun and for the joy of playing pubs. They didn't have a name and so for a while it was Cravats 2 or '77 Cravats for the sake of flyers, and because their repertoire incorporated Precinct, Shut Up, Pressure Sellers, Crash Barrier Dancer and others forged by that very first line up - alongside a few newies. The  Cravats hadn't existed as the Cravats for a couple of decades by that point so it didn't seem conspicuously cheeky until a reformed version coalesced with new material and someone from their label denounced the undertaking as a shameful cash in in the comments box of a live performance posted on YouTube. Legitimately peeved, the lads decided, We're having that! and thus was Shameful Ca$hin born.

Inevitably, the new numbers began to crowd out the resurrected material until there was enough for an album - a proper album on two sides of vinyl like nature intended, just as it was in the good old days, or at least the marginally less fucking stupid days. I've known Martin, guitarist and vocalist, for many years. He played me this album at his flat when I dropped by back in 2024. I was blown away. It was melodic, powerfully muscular, distinctly shirty without getting so angry as to lose the plot. It felt like hearing the Stranglers or Sham 69 for the first time and I was excited to learn they were planning a vinyl release.

Nothing seemed to happen for a while and then it appeared on Bandcamp. I downloaded and listened once but couldn't quite square what I heard sat at my PC with what I'd heard at Martin's place; but now that the vinyl has appeared I realise this may be something to do with either MP3 files or just the superior sound of music blasting from proper speakers. In keeping with the Girl Guided Missiles having been one of the few bands to form due to musical differences, as the legend has it, Shameful Ca$hin are musically all over the place, and yet so tight and so confident that it takes a while for the ears to register abrupt segues into tangential detours such as country and western. It's because this is what bands used to do rather than simply churning out a dozen versions of the same song, lest we've somehow forgotten Led Zeppelin's brief dalliance with reggae. The thing you notice, the first thing that hits you is the sheer driven power of the music - a motorbike beat even if that isn't exactly what they're playing. There are touches of the Who, the Clash, the Dolls, the Stones, others you may not even recognise, and Nowhere Fast could have been the greatest song Eddie & the Hot Rods never got around to recording, hitting you in the chest with the same apocalyptic pathos as Beginning of the End; but the album is nevertheless very much its own thing, distinguished more by its differences than whatever comparisons might be made. This is particularly true lyrically because, let's not deny it, none of us are getting any younger, and Shameful Ca$hin speak to me as a person of equivalent vintage in addressing that which troubles them without giving too much of a shit about appealing to anyone but themselves, which is as it should be. Thus they skewer pretty much everything that's wrong with the world right now, not least that it didn't used to be quite so fucking ridiculous back when we were all in short trousers; and they do it with wit, cracking tunes, and air-punching hooks.

Just when you think it's all over, this comes along. I'm not claiming that the Shameful Ca$hin album rocks more than anything has rocked before, but it's certainly in the running.

Get it here before they're all gone.

The LOX - Filthy America… It's Beautiful (2016)

 

I've been waiting twenty-five years for a follow up to We Are The Streets so it was kind of embarrassing to discover that there was one and it came out nearly a decade ago. This sort of thing becomes unfortunately bewildering once you're past fifty.

Anyway, it's not like there's been a shortage of LOX material given all three of them having churned out a succession of mostly incredible solo albums, each one invariably featuring the other two, notably After Taxes and A Gangster and a Gentleman which are both up there with Streets to my ears; but there's a certain grisly magic you only get in full with the three of them on an equal footing - the only three-man group where all of 'em is the strongest, as it says on here. Fifteen years after the previous group effort, the favoured sound hasn't really changed so much as expanded with the times. We still have the familiar glacial New York beats, and the inevitably sterling contribution of DJ Premier, but there are a couple which border on trap, notably Secure the Bag featuring Gucci Mane, without quite going the full sweaty distance to sound like they turned up on the album by accident. Mostly the beats stay minimal, grooves more than tunes but expertly tooled so even the moody minimalism sounds cinematic on What Else You Need to Know and others; and the beats stay minimal because that's really all you need. Few rap groups have even one guy who can weave a saga with the level of detail you get on this album, and the LOX have three. You could strip it all down to acapella and it might lose some of the force but it would still kick your ass. This is one of those that taps right into the core of rap, and what rap has always been. It's not always pretty and yet it remains both majestic and magnificent from start to finish. It was worth the wait.