Beautiful Pea Green Boat - Get Religion (1988)

If Third Mind Records have endured to any extent in the collective musical memory, I've an unfortunate feeling it's probably as - ugh - old school industrial pioneers, as young people who know more than the rest of us are wont to put it, thanks to the undeniably seminal Rising from the Red Sand and status as a footnote in the saga of Front Line Assembly - apparently. Having actually been there at the time - and even painted a couple of the record covers for that matter - I can confidently state that this is complete bollocks, and nothing underscores the back catalogue's resistance to silly labels quite like Beautiful Pea Green Boat.

At the time, Third Mind seemed cut from approximately similar cloth to Some Bizarre (who weren't fucking industrial either), not least because they seemed to have booked all the Wild Planet people which Some Bizarre should have bagged - Nurse With Wound, Konstruktivists, Attrition and so on; but right from the off it was obvious that Gary Levermore simply intended to release great music regardless of how industrial or otherwise it might be deemed, and there was a point at which his main focus very much seemed to be Beautiful Pea Green Boat. He sent me a stack of records for services rendered or something, amongst which was an early Front Line Assembly release that I liked, but thought it sounded like a Cabaret Voltaire knock off - mostly grunting and sequencers. Get Religion, on the other hand, was clearly the prize of the litter. With hindsight it probably sounds very eighties, but at the time it seemed like the newest thing we'd ever heard. I'd already encountered sampled orchestral stabs and the synth pulse of New York high energy disco but never quite like this, and never with the same depth of feeling as the most heart wrenching sixties soul. The key to their power seemed to be in the contrast of Ian Williams' state of the art technical overload - at least as of 1988 - with Heather Wright's sweet, almost folksy voice. I'd say imagine a combination of the Pet Shop Boys and the Cocteau Twins, but as comparisons it captures nothing of the tumult or drama of their music which, in spirit, is almost Byronic.

Third Mind was a pretty great label while it lasted with more than its fair share of classics, of which Get Religion was possibly the finest. They really should have been fucking massive.

WILDING ...and the GOLDEN HAMMER (2021)

Typographic affectations usually get on my nerves because often the most interesting thing about the artist will turn out to be the name, embellished as it is with extraneous bits of programming code,  meaning that the music usually sounds like the Cocteau Twins but with extra helpings of twee. On the other hand, I'm not going to argue with WILDING who has more than earned the right to render his name however he fucking well likes. Much like its predecessor, Hard Noise to Scumrise this is one of those rare albums which proves both terrifying and yet invigorating, like an hilarious funeral. It leans in far too close, gently intrudes a rough hand down the front of your pants, then looks you right in the eye as it delivers the most preposterous testimony you've ever heard; or at least that's what it does some of the time. There's less of the Hard Noise but musical abstracts continue to dominate, flowering from the arse end of growling blues numbers, even illustrating them in the case of the extended coda to Meal with bleeps and electronic squeaks which seem to depict the consumption of the postmortem corpse by whoever happens to be around - the whole heap of bacteria, who want to treat you like a cafeteria, as the lyric tells it.

 

Yes, the lyrics - Meal and Gezellum are particularly wonderful, although I also enjoy Music and Truck - which incorporates no less than 436 variations on the word fuck* and as such inspires fond memories of working in Catford. The lyrical wordplay is dexterous, vividly disgusting and massively entertaining all at the same time, inspiring me to lazy comparisons with persons whose work I don't actually know as well as I probably should - Beefheart, Vivian Stanshall, the rococo doggerel of Richard Stilgoe and his unbearable ilk buggered and transformed into brutalist vaudeville; or what we have is Peter Hope's Exploding Mind but funnier, except no way would you ever grow balls of volume sufficient to facilitate calling it funny to its face; and amidst all the seemingly nihilist revelations, it's curiously life affirming to find that 2022 has kicked off with an album which really doesn't sound quite like anything before.

*: I'm guessing here. I lost count at around thirty, and that was only a few lines into the song. It's a lot anyway.

Black Lesbian Fishermen - Ectopic Apiary (2015)

Such are the wonders of our friend, the download, that I apparently managed to lose this on my computer, following which it stayed lost and all but forgotten for about five years, shared amongst a plurality of folders on my external hard drive named after anything but the actual fucking artist or album. Thank you, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or whichever one of you twats has taken it upon yourself to improve the quality of my life by making my computer worse.

Anyway, recovered during a cyberspring clean, I've been listening to Ectopic Apiary all week and am jolly glad to have remade its acquaintance. Black Lesbian Fisherman are described on the internet as an international ambient drone collective, which probably sells them a little short. At least three of them live in Greece, one being Alan Trench, formerly of Temple Music, Orchis and technically my old gaffer from the World Serpent days; another being Rebecca Loftiss whom you may recall from Language of Light, possibly. Before you ask, I have no idea about the name and I'm not really bothered because it probably doesn't matter.

I'm not sure it's really either ambient or a drone, although it's definitely neither neofolk nor industrial - should anybody have been squinting suspiciously at any of those names - but its fingers are to be found in innumerable pies and it's possibly worth mentioning that Ectopic Apiary isn't scared of committing the occasional meandering guitar solo. My notes on the near fifteen minutes of Ragged Ritual summarise it as medieval Pink Floyd, which is, by the way, definitely a recommendation. Aside from the dreamy psych-out thing we have going on, pseudo-Arabic rhythms and thematically philosophical vocals render this a highly distinctive set which eludes the usual pigeonholes. Certain points remind me of the Cocteau Twins or Muslimgauze or maybe how I wished Current 93 had sounded, and the deep, deep base of Ice invokes Public Image Limited, or possibly Splintered channeling Public Image Limited; although I'm probably clutching at straws, such comparisons being vague approximations. If the history of painting is any good to you, then the sound of this album is on the scale and grandeur of one of Claude Lorrain's seaports, albeit with something strange and unfamiliar rubbing up against the more traditional details.

Mighty fine anyway.

ABBA - The Magic of ABBA (1980)

I thought ABBA were amazing when I was a kid, definitely the bestest since the Beatles. Naturally I fancied the blonde one and have vague memories of some formative fantasy involving the Beatles reforming so that they could play a concert with ABBA, which would be the bestest concert ever, at the conclusion of which I'd somehow cop off with the blonde one, despite my being merely ten. ABBA was proper music, and so Matthew and myself would quietly sneer at Sean who was still listening to the Wombles.

My dedication waned as the years passed, particularly once I'd discovered Devo, but endured at least enough for my collection to include a scratched 7" of Knowing Me, Knowing You procured from a bargain bin at some point. Later when I joined Academy 23, Andy Martin developed some weird theory about my being a massive fan of ABBA and would entertain himself by imagining my visitors astonished and scandalised as I blasted them first with Coil, then all those ABBA albums like the crazy, unpredictable character he had apparently mistaken me for. The joke got on my tits after a while. I had one scratchy single and, in any case, had never particularly liked Coil.

ABBA's legacy was further diminished by Mamma Mia!, or the fifteen minutes I manged to watch of the DVD, wherein ABBA songs somehow punctuate the saga of Meryl Streep seeking to identify the father of her daughter, Karen from Mean Girls. It could be almost anyone, it seems, because Karen from Mean Girls was conceived during a train full of Ruperts pulled by Meryl Streep at some ghastly seventies sex happening.

Nevertheless, here we are. I always liked the idea of a greatest hits album without ever quite getting around to buying one. Friends and relatives now routinely present my wife with stacks of their old, unloved vinyl records which she paints and transforms into decorative objects, and the latest skip delivered to our door included The Magic of ABBA. It seemed a shame to turn it into another ornament given the record being in excellent condition, and given that we already have a whole garage full of Mantovani and the like.

Yet somehow I find it genuinely weird listening to this thing in 2020, having failed to truly pay attention to these songs since they seemed like the only real competition for the Beatles. ABBA wrote decent songs for sure, but with hindsight it sounds as though they may have been inadvertently responsible for that sparkly sound everyone assumes came from the Cocteau Twins, beloved of television and advertising executives around Christmas - the musical equivalent of Thomas Kinkade's twinkly winter scenes. The twin vocals are strange too, overproduced possibly with Phil Spector in mind, only really working when one individual vocal takes the lead and otherwise coming close to a forerunner of autotune.

Wankers will of course object on the grounds of it being cheese and just a bit of fun and I should lighten up and what's wrong wiv me and it's just a bit of fun; but I don't know. ABBA don't sound terrible, but being less shit than Mud or the Rubettes is hardly a recommendation, and no golden moment has endured without something getting in the way - never mind the Eurokitsch of Fernando, Chiquitita and their like, even the good stuff sounds strange. I can no longer listen to the proto-metal of SOS without my brain hearing Little Frank singing, but with my cardboard hands it would be no good; and Does Your Mother Know just seems a bit Jimmy Savile: yes, I would indeed like to shag you, but I'll politely decline your kind offer on the grounds of your being twelve, if it's all the same.

The darker, more haunting tracks, The Name of the Game and Knowing Me, Knowing You still just about manage to foreshadow Joy Division but seem to be exceptions to a generally underwhelming rule. This really should have been better. It's true what they say about how you can never go home.

Cocteau Twins - Garlands (1982)

Behold This Thine Confusion, one of the lesser known episodes of Star Trek - and it shouldn't need stating that I'm referring here to the proper version with William Shatner - featured a fairly unusual story line in which members of Joy Division and Siouxsie & the Banshees were accidentally combined in a transporter accident, so becoming fused into a composite group called Siouxsie & the Division, and enjoying brief Romulan chart success with their Terrifying Marble Statue album, much to Scotty's bemusement. The even lesser known follow up episode saw the Enterprise flown backwards around the sun, thus achieving time-travel and stranding the unfortunate Siouxsie & the Division upon a remote pacific island in the late twentieth century whereupon they found themselves obliged to play their gloomy repertoire of spooky songs with titles like Cobweb Statement and It is a Ghost to the bewildered natives of that island, much to Spock's bemusement. Many years later, long after Siouxsie Curtis and the other hybrids had escaped on a raft constructed by inflating spent condoms that had been washed up on the shore over the years, the islanders continued to perform something which sort of sounded a bit like the music of those strangely unhappy sky Gods who had once walked amongst them, and that's how the Cocteau Twins came to be, or rather just Cocteau Twins without the definite article, because the would seem more prosaic and might imply that they were just a band rather than a mysterious force.

Four million years ago, back in the 1980s, I had records by both Joy Division and Siouxsie & the Banshees, but somehow the Cocteau Twins never quite found their way into my collection. They sounded interesting, moody and reasonably mysterious, but I just couldn't  close that gap and would always end up buying Devo albums instead. At one point I was in a band with my friend Carl. We were called The Dovers and amongst the thousands of songs we turded out on a daily basis was one entitled Flippy Floppy Flaps which I suspect came about when we both realised just why neither of us owned any Cocteau Twins albums. As a musical cake factory, their sparkly shanties sounded nice enough, but there was something about the complete lack of content that got on my tits. It all struck me as somewhat po-faced.

I picked up Garlands having realised I never could quite get the bassline of Wax and Wane out of my head, and because it was six dollars, and through sheer curiosity; and it's strange listening to this thing in the year 2013, this album I almost certainly recall as being one of the reputedly most something-or-other things ever recorded, a real milestone that you must own, and the disc that taught a thousand boys and girls to express their innermost selves by wearing black clothes and back-combing their hair. It's always a pleasure to hear the mighty Roland TR-606 drum machine doing its thing but Jesus - how they ever managed to get a whole album out of this: a ton of digital reverb, a carrier bag full of those effects pedals that every fucker and his milkman used in the eighties, and a woman making squeaking noises for half an hour: I'm not saying it's terrible or even lacking in some sort of vision - albeit not a terribly adventurous vision - but Lordy it sounds so thin it makes you nostalgic for Def Leppard.

By rights, they really should have named the band Roland Effects Pedal Demonstration Team but I suppose that doesn't sound quite so waify or romantic.

No wonder Spock thought they were rubbish.