Residents - B*** S** (1971)

I still haven't quite got used to the idea that we now know the names written on at least two of the Residents' birth certificates, and somehow I prefer to continue to think of them as four anonymous beings who may or may not be of this planet. Similarly confusing has been my discovering the existence of this early, early album, apparently some Record Store Day thing which I presumably missed due to a general lack of enthusiasm for green vinyl reissues of Barry Manilow.

The original liner notes of Meet the Residents from 1974 muttered about the notoriety of earlier sound experiments, to which I never really gave much consideration until I noticed they had issued The Warner Brothers Album as a Record Store Day artifact, by which point I couldn't really afford the fucking thing. The Warner Brothers Album was approximately their first record, sent as a demo tape to the aforementioned label and accordingly rejected as too weird or something before being returned to the group - sent to the residents of the provided return address, which is how they came by their name; and this, discreetly abbreviated to BS for obvious reasons, was probably their second album, sort of, posthumously rescued from the can. It seems the bloke at Warner Brothers didn't think much of this one either.

The strange thing is that you really can tell it's the Residents, and yet it sort of isn't, not quite. The tendency to discordant nursery rhyming and pretending to be an alien was already very much a thing, but it sounds as though it was recorded on this planet by a bunch of hairies who may or may not have spent at least some time hanging out with Beefheart or even Zappa, guys who went about their daily business in regular clothes, and who probably had regular names written on birth certificates. The other strange thing is that BS is kind of groovy, jazzy and evocative in terms which had been thoroughly strained out of the musical gene pool by the time we got to actually meet the Residents, because they still sounded like a band of regular guys, at least around the edges of We Stole This Riff and Deepsea Diver Song. Peculiarly, after listening to this record, Meet the Residents still feels like their first album where this might be something popped through from an alternate universe or recorded during the negative time counting down to the birth of the band as we didn't actually come to know them, if you see what I mean. Typically, it seems not even the Residents themselves are unanimous in recognising BS as having been their own work. The more you know, the greater the mystery…

Tad - Quick and Dirty (2018)

Record Store Day fills me with cynicism. I've always listened to record albums because that's my preferred medium, so I don't need a special day. I collect record albums because I like music, not for the sake of being a collector, and anyone who ever used the term vinyls as a plural noun can go fuck themselves. A few Record Store Days back, they issued an exclusive double album of Devo live in Seattle, and because I fucking love Devo, I had to have it. I knew Hogwild would open at nine so I got there at seven, and even then found myself stood behind a hundred or so teenagers. The queuing itself wasn't bad. The only other person over thirty was queuing directly behind me. He was after something or other by Wire and told me he loved all the English bands of that era. He also told me that he used to live in Mexico City but had come back to San Antonio because he was tired of getting kidnapped, so it was an interesting conversation. Two hours later, the doors opened, and by the time I made it in, there was no Devo live double album to be had because apparently they hadn't even ordered the fucker; and yet copies were quite naturally already for sale on eBay and Discogs at extortionate prices, so I wasn't very happy about that.

This time I forgot about Record Store Day, despite having read that there would be a Tad album amongst all the usual worthless exclusives - Barry Manilow in red vinyl and the like. I guess I'd subconsciously resigned myself to being unable to get hold of a copy, and typically it was going for twice the price on Discogs that same afternoon; but I dutifully trudged along to the store next day, just in case, and fuck me…

Quick and Dirty is one side studio material and one side live, and the studio material is previously unheard, half of what we may as well call a lost Tad album - which is a very exciting thing indeed. It's been a while since I saw Busted Circuits and Ringing Ears so I have only a vague impression of how the band just kind of dissolved following a series of kicks in the proverbial teeth, and I'm not even sure I was aware they were still enough of a concern to have recorded the six newly unearthed tracks in 1999.

Tad, for the uninitiated, were how Joy Division would have sounded had they grown up in rural American woodland with only a job at the sawmill to look forward to - much harder to kill, more honest about the enduring influence of Black Sabbath, and numerous shitloads heavier. In fact Tad were pretty much the heaviest thing ever. The music speaks of rural horror, boredom, loathing, and shitty deeds undertaken for the sake of maintaining sanity, all of which contrasts with something quite vulnerable at the heart of the storm. Musically it's concrete blocks of grinding sound pinned together at bizarre mathematical angles, yet pinned together by human craft and muscle rather than engineering. There's a mechanistic quality in the relentless advance of these rhythms, born not from machines but from those brutalised by their own lives; or it makes Godflesh sound like the Sundays, if you prefer.

The six new tracks neatly fill a gap between Oppenheimer's Pretty Nightmare and the stuff Doyle recorded with Hog Molly a year or so later. Hog Molly chugged a little harder with less contrast in evidence, and were lyrically more single-minded, songs often relying on the repetition of innocuous phrases posing more questions than were answered; which can be heard here on Mummified Cop and others blending with the suggestion of melancholia and melody I assume must have come from Kurt Danielson.

I'm not usually wild about live albums, not even Tad's Live Alien Broadcasts which is decent but, bizarrely, somehow fails to invoke the raw energy of their studio recordings; so it's nice that the live side of Quick and Dirty really captures them, huge, crushing, terrifying, sweaty and probably a bit on the aromatic side, but still nailing it all down with absolute precision, and nothing lost to the sludge.

Quick and Dirty has made me very happy, so I suppose I'm going to have to concede the point that one good thing has come out of Record Store Day.

AC/DC - Highway to Hell (1979)

Just to get the namedropping out of the way, I've never met any members of AC/DC and nor am I knowingly related to any of them, but I briefly delivered mail to the house in Overhill Road, East Dulwich outside which Bon Scott breathed his last following an evening of partying with unusual vigour back in February, 1980. You could tell it was the place from the memorial graffiti which sporadically appeared on adjacent municipal surfaces. This was in the nineties which, by happy coincidence - at least for me - was the point at which I finally began to understand AC/DC, the key to which is that if you feel you need to understand AC/DC then you're probably thinking about it too hard.

They were one of those groups beloved of everyone except me in the town in which I grew up, and the reason they weren't beloved of me was because everyone else liked them, which meant they must be crap; and also that I hadn't actually heard any of their records. Someone or other lent me the 7" of Whole Lotta Rosie but all I can recall is thinking that it sounded a bit sexist.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can appreciate that AC/DC were basically punk for anyone who didn't live in a big city, as were most bands associated with that whole hairy scene of the time. All I could see were five blokes who looked like everyone at my school and who probably would have regarded Joy Division as poufs, and all the emphasis on guitar solos seemed designed to appeal to shitheads; but, I was a bit up myself - as they say - and doubtless annoyed that everyone seemed to be having sex with girls except for me, which wasn't actually AC/DC's fault, not directly. They seemed stupid, and apparently I wasn't able to work out that stupid was sort of the point, although raw, rootsy and basic would be a better way of putting it.

Years passed and I heard bits and pieces, and it became increasingly hard to deny the power of those choppy bluesy guitar riffs - just chords, but there was something special there, some sound they had in common with the finer end of Led Zeppelin, just more direct. There's a reason that the opening bars of Back in Black score that scene in Iron Man, as opposed to something by Ed Sheeran.

I eventually bought this because a record store had opened on Lordship Lane, but they didn't have much stock and Highway to Hell was about the only thing I could find which seemed like it might at least contain a few surprises. Specifically it contained one surprise, namely that it's a fucking masterpiece contrary to what I had believed at the age of seventeen when I knew everything. AC/DC do one thing and that's rock, which would be stupid but for how well they do it, almost better than anyone else ever; and they rock like few have rocked before or since because they have a vision.

Nobody's playin' Manilow,
Nobody's playin' soul,
And no-one's playin' hard to get,
Just good old rock 'n' roll.

I know. They really didn't need to print the lyrics on the cover. It makes them sound like shitheads, but let's face it - Manilow ain't that great, some soul music was kind of bland, and whatever other objections you may have, you probably wouldn't say it to their faces; and it might be argued that taking umbrage with AC/DC for appealing to shitheads whilst failing to address the concerns of the supposedly sophisticated is a waste of time and misses the point. It could be argued that this material is outrageously sexist - although on close inspection it's actually more like evil Benny Hill - but you might do better to direct any available outrage at something which actually makes people miserable in the real world.

It wasn't the first, it wasn't the last,
It wasn't that she didn't care.
She wanted it hard, wanted it fast,
She liked it done medium rare.

Milligan-esque narrative swerves aside, it's really just a record of men singing songs about how they like to drink beer and how much they appreciate nude ladies - which has been a theme central to rock 'n' roll and the blues from which it sprang from the beginning; and at the risk of turning into Milo Yiannopoulos, I generally share these interests with AC/DC so I don't have a problem with any of it.

On the other hand, Night Prowler makes for uneasy listening as the slowest, arguably heaviest, and unfortunately sexiest track on the album, seemingly belonging to the lyrical subgenre of heavy metal odes to stalking women; but it's a misleading impression possibly fostered by the rest of the album being songs sung for the ladies, sort of. The point of Night Prowler is the mania of the killer rather than his choice of victim. It's a horror story, so it's supposed to upset you, and by way of a clue, there's a bloke with horns on the cover of the record. You know, had I had the sense to embrace this back when I was seventeen, my life might have turned out completely different, and I have an uncomfortable feeling it might even have been a bit better.