Intensive Studies - Perfectly (ab)Normal (2019)

I anticipated something fairly noisy given the cover and involvement of +DOG+ persons, but this is quite different, or at least an album which makes sense as being approximately descended from Expandobrain - who were amazing, for those of you who remain stubbornly unconverted. Intensive Studies are a little more informal, maybe a little more raggedy around the edges, but it's roughly the same psychological landscape. What we have are songs played, possibly even improvised on the spot by a band of guitar, bass, drums and vocals. There's an occasional bum note or missed queue and not all of the songs end at quite the same speed as when they set out, so it could almost be a rehearsal recording, although the sound quality is exceptionally clear. I'd say it reminds me of Pavement, except I haven't heard much Pavement and only have a general impression of what they sounded like. I won't say it's lo-fi because that seems kind of insulting to me. More than anything, Perfectly (ab)Normal reminds me of at least a couple of bands of which I myself was a member, so technically we're talking up to the job at hand rather than anything flashy and definitely no guitar solos. Specifically it reminds me of at least a couple of bands of which I myself was a member and which had been listening to a hell of a lot of Warsaw and early Joy Division demos, although it doesn't really sound like Joy Division beyond some vague awareness of their having existed. Lyrically it makes me think of Steve Albini, inhabiting that same twilight land of screwy, slightly upsetting folk narratives of Biblical reality and rural feuds. Without seeming like it does a whole lot, Perfectly (ab)Normal really gets under your skin.

Buy it here.

+DOG+ - Die Robot (2019)

I've never really been in a position to find review copies dripping from my letterbox with any regularity, but it happens from time to time which, if nice in theory, is not without its problems. Of course, the obvious one is when someone you like sends you their work and it's fucking terrible, obliging you to either find something pleasant you can say about it or else stoop to well, I didn't really think I could do it justice so… The other one is when the legitimate freebie masterpiece is garnished with something by the guy who runs the label, which is why I now own one more CD by Der Blutharsch than I ever expected to own. On the other hand, there's this, which fell from the same envelope as Jenny Lives with Smell & Quim and Harsh Noise Movement, and which revealed itself to be frankly fucking amazing after just a couple of plays, which I really didn't expect. It may even be one of the best noise things I've ever heard.

Anyway, I did a bit of homework and discovered that one of this bunch, and actually the one with whom I'd been communicating on facebook, used to be in Expandobrain, one of those great lost bands who should have been enormous over whom I'd been quietly obsessing since taping Thyroid off Peel back in 1987 - not obsessing all of the time admittedly, but their legend had attained sufficient stature in my own personal mythology to at least have me yelling holy fucking shit at the screen before running into the front room to tell my wife knowing full well she wouldn't have the faintest idea what I was talking about.

Anyway, to reset to this morning, back before I realised there was a connection to anything I'd heard of, here's what's so great about this CD. As previously stated, I'm vaguely aware of the noise thing but I don't listen to a lot of it, which is probably why it's taken me so long to acclimate to the possibility of noise as anything other than just kicking your audience's head in for thirty minutes. I grew up with noise as transgressive confrontation, and only now am I beginning to appreciate that a distorted electronic racket can be at least as varied and expressive as any conventional instrument in terms of what it does - at least up to a point. I suspect we're still some way off the first noise power ballad, but, you know, it's not all an exercise in enforced bowel evacuation is what I'm trying to say here.

Die Robot seems to be, if anything, an ecologically themed concept album; or at least that's how it sounds to me. Excepting a folky acoustic guitar interlude and a location recording made in Istanbul, Die Robot mostly resembles what happens when you rummage around inside an old transistor radio with a screwdriver, sounds resembling nothing found in nature, buzz, hum, interference, distortion, grind, chug, tinnitus whistle and so on, and it's all amplified to a point bordering on, but not quite crossing over into discomfort. So it's mostly sounds your brain would filter out should they be heard in any other context, but here you're obliged to listen, and so you begin to notice effects and textures which are actually kind of absorbing, and which feel kind of good in much the same way as it does when you scratch an insect bite. Titles and half heard vocalisations hint at something, the interpretation of which may be in the ear of the beholder. Taking the term robot back to its original connotation of a creature which mindlessly repeats a task, even a stupid one, and not necessarily with mechanical overtones, Die Robot sounds like a broadside launched at human stupidity and the impulses which are presently destroying the planet; but like the very best surrealist masterpieces, this may well be nothing more than a pattern I happened to notice. The thing you should probably take from this is that for something which sounds like a power station having a fight with itself, there's a wide range of form and shade here, and a lot to be heard, even if you can't always tell what you're listening to.

Get it here.

Expandobrain - Mother of God! It's Expandobrain! (1986)

Here's a bit of an oddity, I suppose. Amongst a few tracks I taped off a John Peel show broadcast sometime in 1987 was Thyroid by Expandobrain. Peel didn't seem to know much about them, and I never heard their name again, which seemed a shame because Thyroid is a face-punchingly great song. Many centuries later I live in America and have somehow survived for three years without a turntable - or record player as is the correct terminology - due to the complications of stuffing my entire life into boxes and shipping it to another country; but now, at last I am fully equipped and once more spinning the living shit out of my beloved vinyl collection, and someone has invented the internet since I last considered Expandobrain. Sadly it transpires that they really were as obscure as I imagined, so there's not a lot out there, although I now at least have a means of getting hold of the album from which Peel played a few tracks. It's taken one hell of a long time, but it's been worth the wait.

I can't even remember what else was going on back in 1986 when this was recorded, and certainly not in terms of Americans with guitars. I was only ever an infrequent listener to John Peel's show, and I never really liked Sonic Youth, and I'm not sure I've ever actually heard any Hüsker Dü. The cover - very much resembling something scribbled on the back of an exercise book at school - namechecks Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Live Skull, Swans, and Moving Targets, regarding which I've heard one Meat Puppets track and have a stack of Swans albums which sound nothing like this. I suppose Dinosaur Jr. - another band to which I've never really taken - were around by then. I don't know where Expandobrain fitted in, but I suppose it doesn't matter.

I was anticipating Thyroid and a load of tragic b-sides, partially based on how good an album is likely to be when you've waited this long to hear it, but incredibly this one turns out to be good right through to the last track. Expandobrain - actually Expando Brain which looks wrong to me because I've thought of the name as a single word for nearly three decades - were your basic guitar, bass and drums in some guy's garage, fast and punky but tuneful, the sort of thing that Steve Albini might have ended up producing had they lasted, although for all the twangy angst and pounding tension, there's something wonderfully upbeat in here - reminding me a hell of a lot of the more recent Parquet Courts, maybe some sort of happy medium between the Monkees and a less wanky Sonic Youth with a touch of an angrier, more sarcastic REM before they became an international chemical processing franchise.

I don't know. The review is in there somewhere. Just pick out the bits you like. As I already said, Mother of God! has been worth the wait, and as a lost or potentially forgotten gem - which it really, really is - you might be advised to hunt it down now before obscurity and collector mania pushes the price up through the roof.