Nitzer Ebb - Showtime (1990)

 

The further we travel, the stranger they seem with the accumulation of hindsight; or if not strange - at least not how the Residents were strange - then not very much like what they seemed to be at the time. Beyond the sounds coming from boxes with plugs rather than boxes with strings, I suppose it comes down to mostly haircuts and graphics which kept Nitzer Ebb in the same corner of the record store as Borghesia and all those other marching up and down bands. Maybe there's a certain shared attitude expressed as a love of frowning, but such characteristics arguably extend the arbitrary field to everyone else from here to Led Zeppelin - although Showtime shares more common ground with Physical Graffiti than with whatever the hell Borghesia did, for what that may be worth.

They've freely admitted to starting out with sequencers because they couldn't be arsed learning guitar, and so inevitably first took to the stage as a sort of council estate version of DAF, more violent than hypnotic. As their sound developed, the mania remained the constant, and so the second album moved away from music sounding quite so obviously like the machinery from which it had been generated, bass deepening to a subsonic pseudo-organic rumble contrasting with the factory noise. Showtime went a step further, bringing in sounds and rhythms which seemed more in keeping with jazz and blues records, still stomping away but as a hybrid, like a sound trying to escape its own limitations. The reason none of this struck anyone as peculiar is, I presume, because the smoky menace and basement grind were there all along, but initially limited to Doug's harrowing vocal forever on the point of losing control.

Showtime seemed to slip past the post without much notice at the time, but you can tell it was the album before the one that sounded like Queen and the progression makes perfect sense. It lurches and growls with rockabilly intensity as the music fights itself, the swing and the drunken sway straining against electronics as precise and deadly as ECT; and the crazy thing is this wasn't even their best album, not by some way.

I actually wrote this about a month ago. The timing is just tragic coincidence.

SPK - Machine Age Sessions (2014)

I've seen SPK described in reverent terms defining them as untouchable pioneers of harsh electronic noise, and at the other end of the scale, as comical industrial chancers. On the one hand, those first two albums still take the paint off the walls like not much has done since, but on the other, SPK probably did more to inspire misuse of the letter k than even Porridge, and one of their early tracks was called Germanik, presumably on the grounds that Hitler had been German and that Germans like to march around and bark orders, so that's quite scary when you think about it. I suppose, there's also the fact of their signing to Elektra and turning into Level 42…

The way I heard it - as related by a friend who knew Graeme Revell through having spent his youth hanging out with Throbbing Gristle - was that Graeme Revell really, really, really, really wanted a sampler when they first came out, and thus reinvented himself as leather trousered metal-bashing popster so as to sign a ten album deal with Elektra for a ton of money, or something along those lines. He bought his sampler and recorded Machine Age Voodoo - which is the one that sounds like Level 42 - and then decided he wanted out of the contract; which he effected by recording the other nine albums in a couple of days. They were too shit to be released, and so Elektra let him go. That's what I heard anyway.

For what it's worth, I actually like Machine Age Voodoo. It's a bit too louche for its own good, could do with rougher edges, and is a lousy follow up to Leichenschrei, obviously; but aside from that, it's not a bad album on its own terms. In fact the worst thing about Machine Age Voodoo is that it failed to deliver on the promise of Metal Dance and those earlier forays into synthpop recorded for a John Peel session around the same time.

I've been waiting for that album for about thirty years, so it was a nice surprise to discover that it does actually exist, sort of, albeit as this bootleg - one side of Peel tracks, with a Kid Jensen session on the flip. The labels are black due to having been sneaked out of some naughty pressing plant in the dead of night, and the sleeve is minimal and underwhelming, but the quality of the pressing is wonderful.

This is the version of SPK which turned its metal-bashing to more musical ends, borrowed a sequencer from DAF, and pretty much invented all of those Front 242 types in the process. This was what Depeche Mode thought they sounded like, an adrenaline rush of frenetically grinding synth contrasting with Sinan's surprisingly beautiful, even ethereal voice while someone pounds seven shades of shit out of an oil drum. The Peel tracks are as electrifying as they were at the time of broadcast.

Then we flip over the disc to find the sessions recorded for David Jensen, or Kid as he liked to be known, the stuff which everyone seems to have forgotten. Jensen's show was broadcast exclusively on medium wave, and that's where these recordings come from, straight off the wireless - big fat muffled mono with a ton of hiss and Jensen talking over the fade out, channelling his inner Michael J. Fox like a good 'un. It would be a pain in the arse but the tracks are actually better quality here than on the thirty-year old cassette tape I still have somewhere or other, and they're also probably the worst thing Revell ever recorded so I'm not sure it matters. SPK seemed to be gearing themselves up for making a ton of money and were smoothing out their sound. The sequencers were a bit less frantic, more like something you would hear on a Karel Fialka song, the metal had been replaced with fashionable roto-toms; and yet somehow this material is difficult to dislike because it's the sound of SPK selling out as hard as they could, but not quite able to get there without sounding sarcastic. But, Can You Dance To It? - on which Revell raps like a jolly English master at a boy's school - resembles one of those local charity records which would occasionally garner five minutes coverage on a regional news show. The rest of the tracks patently represent a warm-up for Machine Age Voodoo, halting impersonations of bland synthpop hits, not quite achieving the balance and as such resembling some sort of Situationist appropriation which didn't quite work. The strangest thing is how, despite its peculiar blandness, the Jensen session is weirdly engrossing specifically because it's the very last thing you'd ever expect to hear from SPK. Strangest of all, despite its flaws, this album which never was is actually better than the soundtrack stuff he did later.

Nitzer Ebb - Industrial Complex (2010)

I didn't even realise they had reformed until a little over a year ago, and this one is now already seven years old, or of equivalent vintage to the first Black Sabbath album by the time Never Mind the Bollocks hit the shops. It's thirty-two years since Nitzer Ebb's debut album, which in relative terms is the same span of time as divides the aforementioned Bollocks from the Andrews Sisters bothering the top slot with Rum & Coca-Cola, whatever the hell that was. The passage of time sure is weird, and I feel somehow obliged to scorn this with the same kind of disregard as was showered upon the Rolling Stones back in my days as a younger and at least thematically spikier man; but I can't because it would be silly, and good fucking God what a cracker of an album it is; besides I always liked Start Me Up.

My first impressions were something along the lines of chuckles over how they've once again dug out the sequencers, perhaps having seen the error of their Led Zeppelin impersonating ways, as heard on Ebbhead and Big Hit.

That's right, lads, I smirked to myself, give the fans what they want, because I am essentially a bit of an arsehole.

So they've gone back to the same basic musical recipe book we all remember from the years when they were that band who sounded a lot like DAF; and yet what they've cooked up from those recipes seems very much a continuation of where they were going on the aforementioned Big Hit. Industrial Complex comprises songs, and songs with all those complicated changes and linky bits people like Elton John tend to write, as you will begin to notice once you get past being pounded around the head with a pulsing sequencer. Furthermore, Douglas McCarthy's voice - always distinctly bluesy - sounds better than ever, wrenching genuine soul and pathos out of some of those lines. What this adds up to is, I suppose, that band who sound a lot like DAF making music which somehow feels like the Groundhogs or one of that bunch. Some of this may be thanks to the drums - massive, pounding, and certainly acoustic - pushing the music along on a muscular, organic surge in peculiar contrast to all the bleeps and squelches; and yet it doesn't feel in any way mannered, which I only mention in case I should have accidentally invoked Depeche Mode's self-conscious efforts to sound like a real band by having the one who looks like a poodle play harmonica during their CBeebies version* of an old SPK record.

Hit You Back, I Am Undone, and the white knuckle glam stomp of On the Road are as magnificent as anything this lot have ever recorded; and fuck it - they were always better than DAF. I don't care what anyone says.

*: I should probably thank Gary Robertson for this joke.

Nitzer Ebb - Big Hit (1995)

I never really bought the idea that Nitzer Ebb had only ever wanted to be The Groundhogs, as peddled by the lads when they started sampling guitars and doing Queen covers on As Is and Ebbhead; and mainly because up until that point they may as well have been a DAF tribute act, so far as I was able to tell, albeit a jolly good DAF tribute act. That said, they were always at their best when at their bluesiest, I thought, even if the vocals were the only obviously blues inspired element, the rest usually being a bunch of bleeping sequencers having a fight in a pub car park.

Ebbhead was pretty good, in my view, and certainly an improvement on the slightly disappointing Showtime which, with hindsight was I suppose the transitional album between the marching up and down whilst frowning really hard era and rocking out like Kiss; but that was it for me. I failed to cross paths with Big Hit because, as with the new material of almost everyone else I was listening to at the time, it failed to appear on vinyl, and I didn't catch up with compact discs until a good few years later when my friend Eddy gave me his old CD player in order to shut me up about being unable to buy the music I wanted to hear. My tastes had also mutated somewhat by that time, and so it never really occurred to me that I might go back and pick up where I'd left off in 1992. Andrew Cox told me he'd seen Nitzer Ebb on the telly, and that they had turned into Nirvana with a guitarist and everything, but it seemed too late to go back.

Happily Andrew's observation was very much a generalisation, and Big Hit sounds nothing like Nirvana. More surprisingly, nor does it particularly sound like either Nine Inch Nails - although that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing - or any of those horrible industrial metal wankers all pretending to be the Blade Runner Ozzy Osbourne over grunting Metallica samples. Big Hit actually sounds like Ebbhead done right, by a band who had at last found their feet. The blend of prog-rockisms, live instruments, and sequencers is so seamless as to render comment obsolete, and is probably done better than anyone has managed to before or since; so this really isn't industrial types pretending they've been into Richie Blackmore's Rainbow from the very beginning so much as just a great rock band sprung from an earlier somewhat different incarnation. Big Hit is probably what anyone who liked Led Zeppelin in the 1970s imagined music would sound like in the year 2000, and Flood Water in particular gallops along like some sort of biomechanical update of Immigrant Song. It's funny how at the time this lot sounded like one of many, but with hindsight it seems they were fairly unique.