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.