Ringo Starr - Ringo the 4th (1977)

 

While did the reviewer even listen to the record customarily serves as the feeble defense of those who wouldn't recognise good music without the application of some sort of response conditioned by electrodes and positive reinforcement, no cliché is ever entirely without some moment at which it briefly applies with thermonuclear conviction, and that's what the fuck we have here. Google searches for this album will summon the same shitty review rephrased over and over and over amounting to another hilariously terrible failure by the guy who made tea for John, Paul, and George, even more worthless than the previous album, and that was bollocks…

I don't know what people really ever expected from Ringo given that he wasn't actually John, Paul, or George disguised with sunglasses and a fake hooter, so the routine criticism of his having  yet again failed to record either Band on the Run or Mind Games seems extraordinarily redundant and even unfair. This one is alternately either a dinosaur-rock artefact or Ringo climbing aboard the booty-shaking bandwagon with all the grace of a rhinoceros mounting a swan, and I'm sure there are others out there if you can be arsed to look.

Anyway, as the title implies, it's Starr's fourth solo album, excluding two covers collections released while he was still a Beatle, and honestly a significant improvement on Ringo's Rotogravure which had followed the warmed over Beatlisms just a little too far down the trail into easy listening territory, possibly hoping guest spots from famous friends might compensate for any shortfall. Ringo the 4th, once you're able to hear past its failure to chart - which I realise doubtless spoils it for many - is accordingly more upfront and strident, borrowing from both Motown and disco, most likely because that was what was happening at clubs and parties, and our man was spending a lot of time at clubs and parties due to his being Ringo. It's not hard to understand.

Without calling in favours from McCartney, Clapton, or any of the usual suspects, the record at least doesn't feel like an ex-Beatle holding on for dear life, and if it fails to work as the greatest album ever recorded, it fails on its own terms. It's mainstream, but not really MOR, and efficiently rather than over-produced. You already know what Ringo sounds like, and that's how he sounds here, so unless you were expecting Bauhaus then there shouldn't be a problem. It rocks in the right places and features a good quota of cracking tunes; it chugs in the right places; as Ringo's disco album I'm not convinced it isn't actually better than Bowie's disco album; and there's something genuinely warm and soulful in these songs, if you can just make the effort to get the fuck over yourself.

Andy Bolus of Evil Moisture told me about visiting his friend Roro Perrot Vomir. They were listening to this record and Andy asked why Ringo had a woman sat on his shoulders on the cover.

Because he's Ringo, Roro replied. He can do what the fuck he likes. This album was Ringo doing what the fuck he likes, and whatever you hear probably says more about you than it does about himself.

Finitribe - Noise, Lust and Fun (1988)

 

Advanced apologies for the spelling but I just can't see Finitribe as two words. Anyway, having had my nuts quite literally blown off by Electrolux, which was on one of those Funky Alternatives records, I immediately ran to my local high street record retailer and made purchase of Finitribe's Grossing 10K. Apparently this was the one I should have bought, which I didn't because I had no idea that it existed until fairly recently. Therefore D'oh!

While Grossing 10K is largely great, it sounds like the Art of Noise had they not been formed by members of Cambridge University's Important Music Faculty now that I've heard its predecessor. This one is a lot more free-range and bubbles with the sound of people trying things out to see what happens rather than trying what someone else already did to see if it sounds the same. The easiest and probably laziest comparison to make is with formative Tackhead, at least rhythmically, but with pseudo-classical touches and bits of cabaret contributing to a whole which sounds more tribal than anything. Annie Anxiety is on here, along with the legendary Jess Hopkins of the Iron Brotherhood and, so I presume, Chris Connelly before all that industrial metal stuff, so it seems a potent mix of talents which proves at least as weirdly fascinating as you would hope. There's plenty of sampling, but not enough to plant toes on common ground shared with the aforementioned Art of Noise, and a lot of it works very well as soundtrack music with tribal grooves rumbling on beneath some fucking beautiful and powerfully emotive piano. Another year later and everyone would be pulling on their combat boots and pretending to be futuristic robots, but this is an insight into what you could do with this kind of tech before the usual cultural feedback loops swamped all originality and sense of adventure.

Missy Elliott - The Cookbook (2005)

 

Excepting Tinchy Stryder and those who came in sideways from either garage or hanging out with Calvin Harris, I've generally thought of rap-rave hybrids as an abomination based on Missy's reasonable but disappointing So Addictive and Puffy's rave album - which was ill-advised even by his standards. It feels like good ideas retooled for a shitty weekend in Blackpool, music for Jersey Shore-based ennatainment sponges, and so I picked this up out of a sense of loyalty more than anything because how bad could it be?

It seems I'd missed a couple of albums in the wake of So Addictive during which she apparently got her shit together with a few overdue reminders of where rap came from. So by the time we get to this one we're back in business against all my expectations, which is one hell of a relief. At first it sounds like an exercise in nostalgia with contemporary (as of twenty years ago) touches, but it spreads and grows and becomes very much its own thing. The old school affectations are upfront with guest spots from Slick Rick among other less obvious choices, borrowing Apache from the Incredible Bongo Band via Sugarhill, and backtracking the rave element to the bass music spawned by Planet Rock, saving ecstacy references from referring entirely to things other than the experience of being very, very, very happy about something; so the whole is more of an homage than doing a Showaddywaddy in rap terms. The production sparkles with feeling in keeping with the culinary metaphors for music as soul food with the usually ubiquitous Timbaland taking a back seat, leaving the left field squelch and crunk to the Neptunes and others, notably Rich Harrison who is still chucking a drum kit down a fire escape and somehow turning it into the funkiest fucking thing on Earth*; a dynamic which is powerfully echoed on Bad Man, also featuring Vybez Cartel and which feels like getting caught in the world's worst hailstorm, but with timpanis and kettle drums instead of wee lumps of ice. Even with all this technological overload, much of The Cookbook excels in its simplicity, reminding us that rap can be just a rock hard beat with lyrics and the occasional hoot of a horn section.

The Cookbook is more or less a perfect album, one of those that feels like it does you good as you listen; and being as she hasn't released much since, maybe Missy thought so too, possibly realising she'd never be able to top this; also meaning I get to be down with the yoots dem by writing about the latest album from, even though it came out two decades ago. Missy always had a fantastic voice and things to be said, should that need stating, and here's where she said them best.

*: I say still because I've only just heard this album, although to be fair Rich Harrison spent much of 2005 chucking a drum kit down a fire escape and somehow turning it into the funkiest fucking thing on Earth.

Jethro Tull - Benefit (1970)

Having already grimaced at length on the subject of my tenuous relationship with Jethro Tull back in 2021, I'll add only that my current working theory is that you're probably safe with anything recorded prior to 1973, beyond which it begins to feel like school at the weekend. Benefit, picked up cheap out of curiosity mainly because it was there, seems to support this theory. It arguably lacks the manic energy of This Was, and those Open University maths modules were beginning to make themselves felt in the composition, but it hasn't yet turned into something with which to beat listeners over the head. They had spent a lot of time on tour in the US with Led Zeppelin and the like, and the influence of this excursion is felt in songs turning out extra-English. We still have something of the influence of jazz, blues, folk and the rest, with everything blended so finely as to have become its own flavour with occasional Renaissance frills taking us outside the usual 4/4 expectations and a mix that serves to remind that it wasn't always about sheer volume. It's an unmistakably English sound with few traces of Chuck Berry, and not just English, but specifically the rural English of haystacks, birdsong, hedgerows, woolly jumpers in the pissing rain, and pubs which have been in business at least since the crusades. Even if it gets a mention, there's not much trace of London Town to be found, and it leaves me feeling weirdly nostalgic for my childhood which felt very much like this album in some respects.

Everything you hear on this record would be developed further into ever more ornate conventions until the element of soul had been reduced to an equation which only worked because Ian was right there in front of the microphone telling you how important it was and so insisting you shut up and pay attention; but on Benefit it's still fresh, sparkling in both sun and rain, reviving the spirit and reminding us of what matters in this life.

Remember Englishness? Having moved to the US some fifteen years ago, it's not anything to which I give much thought, but fuck - it's wonderful to experience music so honest, so free of artifice, with such a good heart, that reminds me of how England felt without needing to push down on anyone, without any weird parochial agenda, without some fat skinhead twat from Surrey (off the top of my head) fog-horning on about this week's scapegoat.

Given previously stated reservations about this lot, it's lovely to discover I was wrong.

Pete Hope - Wrong Blues (2025)

 

It's rare that I get an album first time I hear it, and usually it takes three or four plays to make sense, often more. I'm still trying to connect with that final Shellac album, for example. Wrong Blues however is one of those rare exceptions, sounding reasonably incredible the very first time it travelled up the old school wires and into my brain. I'm not even sure exactly why. The sound is minimal and arguably rough as fuck with mains hum, hiss, and mild distortion contributing to the ambience as much as any of the instruments - if they are instruments. Some tracks are just a voice, but here and there we get what might be a guitar or might just as easily be broken strings stretched across an old tin bath, and there's a kick drum which sounds like a hobnail boot against a box of rusty tools. There are electronics of the screwdriver in the radio variety and sparing use of rudimentary effects, in case anyone is worried, but mostly it could have been recorded - possibly on a mono portable tape recorder with a condenser mic - at more or less any point since 1960. None of this is an affectation, so far as I can tell. It's why the music works, and I'm reminded of Billy Childish insisting that all you really need is a microphone plugged into something that records sound, and if what you're doing is any good, then you'll need nothing more.

With such a basic sound, the emotive force here is carried by the voice, no stranger to booze, ciggies or grinding hardship I would guess, with even incidental half-heard sounds of metal objects rattling around delivering the soul punch you'd expect of a well rehearsed horn section. It's the sound of those old blues musicians before anyone coaxed them into fancy studios, and - at the other extreme - if you can handle Einstürzende Neubauten or SPK back when they were an atrocious fucking noise, Wrong Blues doesn't sound like either, but the mood is of equivalent density and you'll probably enjoy this too. Should anyone have forgotten, the blues isn't pharmaceutical television advertising featuring smiling eldsters jamming in the park, it's what comes out when life hits you right in the fucking face over and over and over, and it's captured right here should any bright young things need a reminder.

My personal favourites are Toxic Blues, Hope in Hell, Hello My Little Maniac and Flask Blues, most of which benefit from a supporting din that stands in for whatever more traditional sound you might have anticipated, but Wrong Blues really needs to be heard in its entirety for the full benefit, not least for the red raw vocal litany. This is what music sounded like before it was repackaged and sold back to us as product.

Outstanding.

Get it here straight from the source.

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.