Severed Heads - Cuisine (1991)

 

Back in the late eighteenth century when I took to recording my own music by bouncing tracks from one wax cylinder to another, I had a vision of perfect pop music recorded by unorthodox means, which is probably why I couldn't pay people to listen to my stuff. It was partially inspired by the first two Eno solo albums being so beautifully infectious as to make the Beach Boys sound like that album Lou Reed made with his washing machine, yet with the sort of weird depth you'd find in a decent novel or painting; and by depth I don't mean the cobblers usually qualified as deep - mathematical musicianship, references to Tolkien, and anything else that sounds great when you partake, if you know what I'm sayin', man. The eighties explosion of bands who read books and played synths suggested that maybe I wasn't the only one to have the same idea; and then when I eventually stumbled across a copy of the Severed Heads' Rotund For Success, leading to my immediately buying every record I could find by them, I recognised something seemingly akin to what I'd been trying to do except about a million times better because it worked. I've never trusted anyone whose entire identity is their love of some band, but for a couple of years at least that could have been me with the Severed Heads.

Cuisine came out, which was exciting until I realised there was to be no vinyl release. I'd assumed those fancy new compact discs were some audiophile deal limited to mostly classical material, and we'd otherwise be carrying on as normal. Puzzling sightings of CDs by Kylie Minogue and Chas & Dave gave me cause to wonder if maybe I had it all wrong, and then suddenly no fucker was buying vinyl apart from me. I didn't know what to do. Foetus released a couple of CD only albums and my enthusiasm began to wither until, a couple of years later, my friend Eddy got so bored of my whining about there being nothing on vinyl that he gave me his old CD player. The idea took some getting used to but I eventually tracked down a copy of Cuisine in an effort to get with the programme. It was good but the moment had gone, like some weirdly uncomfortable interaction with an ex-lover. Of course, I eventually got over it when I discovered the Discman, even though my listening habits had wandered off in another direction by that point.

Thirty-five years later and we have Cuisine on vinyl as nature intended at long fucking last, and somehow it sounds like I'm hearing it for the first time, as the successor to Rotund for Success rather than merely some other stuff they did. I'm not sure I ever bought the idea of CD being necessarily superior to vinyl, nor the one about vinyl being somehow warmer or summink, but Jesus fuck! this record packs a punch of which I was somehow unaware. Severed Heads make sonic technological precision sound as human as even the most ruthlessly authentic blues guitarist captured with the sound of someone frying chips next to the microphone. It's what they do with the technology - deep intestinal bass, heartbeat percussion, and tunes which manage to feel both rapturous and traumatic at the same time. Emotionally, it's a rollercoaster - if you'll pardon my borrowing a phrase from persons who describe things as rollercoasters: the peaks and troughs of an overwrought teenager on some bipolar jag with plaintive lyrics bordering on Dadaism. A good Severed Heads record will make you feel great and tear your heart out at the same time, and this one is no exception because there's no such thing as a bad Severed Heads record - nothing they ever released has left room for improvement.

I know the above reads as self-indulgent hyperbole. These are just the words that came out when I sat down to listen to this album. The short version is that Cuisine is fucking great and you probably need to hear it.

Foetus - Halt (2025)

 

So here it is, the final Foetus record and it sounds very much like a grand finale - a culmination of forms developed over the course of the previous nine studio albums, although admittedly the mutant disco of Deaf and Ache are represented in spirit more than actual sonics. The new Foetus album - whichever one it is this time - always expands on its predecessor, taking the ideas further, albeit occasionally in a different direction; and Halt is no exception, building on the symphonic excesses of Hide and Love while marking a more concerted reinvestment in the crime jazz heard on earlier records. I'm borrowing crime jazz from some online review I saw because it's amusingly descriptive and—no kiddies, this isn't fucking industrial music. Anyway, the big band is bigger and raging harder than ever, he's growling again, and we have that seasick sound which seems more or less unique to Mr. Thirlwell, here sonically underscoring the point of The World is Broken, for one example, which staggers along on what would be swagger but for its fatal failure to develop sea legs. We have excursions into both opera and a sort of nautical folk - another new deal which nevertheless makes perfect sense - but the set is dominated by what feels like a variation on soundtrack music, the huge orchestral scores of the Biblical epic. This seems appropriate given the theme of endings - both the Foetus mission and human civilisation if the world outside the window is any indication. He's really not fucking about this time.

Did he ever fuck about? I'm not convinced. All those songs about hot times in the old town may seem the opposite of telling it like it is, as Thirlwell does on Halt, but the intensity is the same firehose of imagery and loathing and we shouldn't mistake extremes of emphasis for some guy stood on a stage pulling scary faces because that's showbiz. Serious as cancer, as the saying has it.

This one may conceivably be his crowning achievement, and certainly for something which lavishes in and so subverts familiar musical traditions, it somehow doesn't sound like anything else; and where Halt might resemble Flow or Thaw or Nail or any of its predecessors, it does so but more and better with a thousand additional shades of grey bringing terrible depth to the shadows.

This man is honestly a fucking genius.

Nurse With Wound - The Ladies Home Tickler (1980)

I'm fairly sure there should be an apostrophe in the title, but who knows where Nurse With Wound are concerned? This was originally issued with the Psilotripitaka box, then later reissued in an expanded version with additional tracks from various compilation albums, and this is a double vinyl reissue of that reissue billed - at least by Norman Records - as representing the earliest Nurse With Wound recordings, despite that Chance Meeting came out in 1979. I've given up trying to work out where this material was originated because it probably doesn't matter. I like Nurse With Wound without really feeling the need to own a massive stack of albums, but the involvement of Jim Thirlwell, presumably then still in short trousers, was enough for me.

First impression, despite some of it being vaguely familiar from somewhere or other, was actually what the fuck is this shit?, which is my own fault. I was trying to concentrate on something that was turning out to be quite stressful, and the cut-up tape of Dustin Hoffman giggling away in the background was kind of annoying. Then next day I played it all the way through and remembered why I don't have much by Nurse With Wound; and the day after that, still wondering what the fuck was that shit?, I gave it one final chance and everything fell into place. Stranger still, I found myself looking forward to listening to the thing each day as I made my way home.

Oh boy! I can't wait to get back so I can listen to my new Nurse With Wound album, is not a thought I'm accustomed to having, but there it was.

Home Tickler is mostly tape edits - dialogue, familiar sounds in an unfamiliar context, Jim Thirlwell pissing about on a Wasp synth with William Bennett doing something or other as well; but because different tracks recycle sounds and sections of dialogue used on other tracks, the whole hangs together so well across four sides of vinyl as to sound like a single coherent, even orchestrated piece. This is probably an illusion born from repetition, but it nevertheless sucked me right in - compelling in anticipation of which random sonic splatter will hit the next fan, and strangely rewarding as your brain settles into this surrealist assemblage, even getting comfortable. It really hammers home the difference between Nurse With Wound and  anyone else who has ever been described as sounding a bit like Nurse With Wound.

I'm told that Mr. Stapleton no longer regards anything recorded prior to Homotopy to Marie as being proper Nurse, whatever that means, which, if true, seems a shame because this is magnificent. Typically, I now realise I need more.

Telefís - a hAon (2022)

Of all the celebrity deaths to occur in recent times, that of Cathal Coughlan particularly hurts, not least for coming within just weeks of release of the first Telefís album, itself revealing the discovery of a hitherto untapped seam of joyous bile. It additionally hurts because I honestly believe he was one of our absolute greatest vocalists combining a larynx equal to those of Sinatra or Tom Jones with an unparalleled acerbic yet lyrical wit of a hue so dark as to make J.G. Thirlwell seem positively breezy.

Jacknife Lee only now shows up on my radar, leaving a much bigger blip than I would have expected of someone whose claims to fame include producing Snow Patrol and the Killers; but his music is a perfect match for that voice and those words, and uncannily so. As a whole, the album suggests the compositional techniques of techno and hip-hop somehow amounting to what feels like late seventies television theme tunes, specifically late seventies regional television theme tunes with no obvious shame in overdoing either the vocoder or string synth. It carries a sense of doomed nostalgia for something which we all know was actually pretty miserable at the time, and which yet still somehow raises an admittedly conditional smile.

I could just have pulled that out of my ass, or it could be something implied by Coughlan's testimony which, as ever, does loads of different things at the same time - shoving something horrible in your face with a joke and a bitter smile that opens up a near bottomless pit of melancholy or regret, or summink.

It's nearly three in the morning,
and Danny won't come off stage.
The Stepney boys are offended.
He's forfeited his wealth,
with one catty tirade.

The lyrics are, as ever, like short bitter science-fiction novels in themselves - science-fiction in the sense of New Worlds magazine or Amphetamine Sulphate publishing - surreal, inscrutable, revelling in the truly appalling, and yet sad enough to bring more than just a single tear to the eye. It might be argued that Coughlan's doing the same thing he's always done, but it seems a redundant objection when it's done to such a standard; and so it seems doubly unfair that we should have lost the guy now that the real world has come to so closely resemble the absurdist horror described in his songs.

Zeke Manyika - Mastercrime (1989)

I assume my finger must have been well and truly off the musical pulse by the end of the eighties, which - admittedly - I recall as being mostly about who was drawing the X-Men comics at the time. I wasn't actually aware of this ever having existed until about a year ago, and it's only during the last hour that I've discovered it wasn't even his first. Obviously I remember Zeke from Orange Juice, The The, and some sort of vague association with Foetus, and Mastercrime reveals him to be very much a musical force in his own right, or at least it did thirty years ago back when I was busily agonising over whether the refugee X-Men would ever return to their School for Gifted Youngsters in Westchester County.

First impression, which I suppose I may as well go with because why not, is that you can hear how he was such a good fit for The The, and particularly Soul Mining, although I may actually be hearing Manyika's aural footprint on Johnson's record, for what it's worth. The gospel element is more pronounced with an added afropop sensibility which reminds me of Young Fathers, most likely due to my extensive ignorance of the form, and it inhabits the same cinematic Savannah of the soul as The The - if you'll pardon the sheer ballsache of such a cliched description, which in all fairness you probably shouldn't. I knew what I was doing.

I have a vague idea that Some Bizarre had taken a lower profile by this point - unless it really was the case that I missed everything - but it seems a great shame that Mastercrime should seemingly represent some kind of half forgotten afterthought given that it's at least as good as any of the label's other top tier releases.

I probably need to track down a copy of that first album now.

Severed Heads - Clifford 2000 (2020)

Severed Heads were more or less my favourite thing ever for a long, long time, but I lost track when everything switched to compact disc and 1991's Cuisine came out in that format alone. I couldn't really afford a CD player at the time, and I wasn't convinced by the new medium or the fervour with which friends seem to be replacing entire record collections. Cuisine and Male, the live Foetus thing, were the first albums I really wanted but which I wouldn't be able to play. Of course, I eventually caught up, only to find that Cuisine had a bit of a going through the motions feel, like an album made while trying to get to grips with some new piece of equipment - which may have been the case for all I know. 1994's Gigapus was a significant improvement, but still it felt a little as though it might otherwise all be over. Even the high points were beginning to sound a little closer to Stock, Aitken and Waterman than I usually liked.

Of course it wasn't the end, because Severed Heads carried on releasing albums on CDR, ordered by fax, and which didn't make much difference to me because I wasn't online until about 2007; and CDR has been about the worst, least reliable medium we've had, so I've always felt somewhat reluctant to pay money for one. I have forty year-old cassette tapes which still play fine - in fact most of them still play fine. Of all the CDRs I've ever burned or been given, I have a handful which remain good.

Never mind, because Clifford 2000 is a potted history of what Mr. Ellard got up to in the years following Gigapus, now preserved on four sides of durable vinyl guaranteed not to turn into Merzbow just before your record player refuses to acknowledge its existence; and it's sort of heartbreaking to discover how good this stuff was - Severed Heads at their very best, the dissonance combined with heartbreaking melodies and a certain je ne sais quoi of the bed-wettingly peculiar, unashamedly populist and yet put together upside down and always with something bolted onto the rhythm where you least expect it, so it sounds like pop without actually resembling anything you've heard before. Clifford 2000 might even be the greatest collected Heads since Come Visit the Big Bigot and is as such absolutely essential; and while we're here, I'm sure I have room on the shelves for a few more in this general spirit, should anyone feel inclined to issue more enduring versions of the Op discs or any of the others from which this material is harvested.

Finitribe - Grossing 10K (1989)

I only quite recently found out that Chris Connelly was once a member of Finitribe, which I suppose dooms them to becoming a footnote in the history of Ministry; which is a shame because they were better than that, or at least had the potential. Connelly - for whom I generally have a lot of time, by the way - had jumped ship by the time they recorded this, their second album, and it's one I've always enjoyed whilst never quite being able to get a handle on.

For anyone who hasn't heard Grossing 10K, it really, really sounds like an eighties band who've just bought a sampler and can't leave the fucking thing alone. The way it was put together now feels a bit obvious and hokey, I suppose, at least in so much as that other people did this kind of thing without it seeming quite so brash and silly; but then again, maybe the cartoon aspect - samples from Road Runner, Muttley sniggering and so on - was part of the point. It's hard to tell, because the production is so ruthlessly clean and shiny that it could almost come from the demo buttons on whichever drum machine they were using - and it's one I'd say I've definitely heard before, that crushing kick and the crash of a snare suggesting certain angular haircuts. Digital piano tinkles, whale song is replayed on different keys, and the beat box is far too loud, apparently stuck on machine gun. It sounds as though someone was waiting for the invention of drum and bass.

I think the key to Finitribe is that they were never some industrial dance footnote, but rather were the Scottish Tackhead, or Crass with technology and better jokes, or something of the sort. The production is often a little too clean, but the record makes more sense where it dirties up a little, approaching something Mark Stewart could probably have worked with; but every so often, it all comes into focus and we hear an equivalent of the sunlight bursting through clouds effect, as with Built In Monster, which is just fucking majestic - the kind of heartbreaking pseudoclassical grandeur Foetus only manages every once in a blue moon.

Grossing 10K is a novelty album with a social conscience, silly, elegant, and chilling all at the same time; and if there's room for improvement in some respects, it still doesn't sound much like anything else.

Z'ev - Salts of Heavy Metals (1981)

Here's another one I bought, then sold so as to finance purchase of obscure Foetus records, having concluded it was a bit of a racket with nothing anywhere near so catchy as his hit single on Fetish, a faintly bewildering cover of Wipe Out by the Surfaris; and now I've bought it again because it felt strange that I should no longer have a copy; and I'm sort of glad I did, I guess.

Someone or other once described a certain band as the sound of metal dustbins thrown down a fire escape. It may even have been me, although if so I probably nicked the description from someone else. Anyway that's what Salts of Heavy Metals actually sounds like, mostly being Z'ev, who was a chap rather than a fully instrumented beat combo, kicking things he'd liberated from scrap yards across a stage, not even rhythmically. It's just a noise which seems slightly out of place on a record, which is why I still find it intriguing.

Coming back to Salts after a couple of decades, my first hunch was that it represents something like antimusic in the vein of the New Blockaders, but having boned up on the lad's interviews, it's clear his intentions were musical, and that all those lumps of metal hauled back from the side of the road were chosen for their tonal potential; and the more you listen to this record, the more sense it makes.

Needless to say, there's nothing particularly restful on here and there's not much variation in mood, but the tracks sound quite different to each other despite the brutalist method of composition; and the closer you listen, the more you find to enjoy, or at least appreciate. The best I can come up with to describe it is a sonic analogy of abstract expressionism, with the atmosphere - mostly a pretty tense one - formed from what are effectively random scrapes and slashes of noise.

My other hunch - other than the one about Salts being antimusic - was that the performance was surely the thing with this sort of stuff, and a recording will inevitably fail to pack the same punch as the spectacle of a seven foot skinhead swinging bits of tractor around his head on lengths of chain; and it's certainly a point, but then again a record is a different medium and probably shouldn't be judged by the same criteria. This still leaves us with the oddity that here the noise is nevertheless presented as music which, as I say, is probably what makes it so weirdly enticing. It's a sound you wouldn't expect to come out of your speakers, and is of such composition as to inspire questions about where the music ends and the random noises and fridge hum of one's own daily existence begins, or if there's even a division.

Salts of Heavy Metals probably isn't likely to become a staple at any of those Christmas parties I never host, but it's still really nice to have it back.

Nurse With Wound - Insect & Individual Silenced (1981)

It seems Steve Stapleton ended up hating this one, hence its patchy bordering on barely-happening reissue history. On the other hand, it's fairly dear to my own heart, or at least dear-ish - being the first Nurse With Wound album I ever bought, a purchase facilitated by a rare trip down to that London, and specifically to the Virgin megastore because it was a bit fucking tricky getting hold of this stuff if you lived out in the sticks. I had Homotopy to Marie on order at the short-lived Shipston-on-Stour record store for about a year before the proprieter eventually gave up.

I say dear-ish because clearly I didn't regard the thing with such affection as to keep me from flogging it to Vinyl Experience in the nineties along with a stack of Whitehouse albums when raising funds for early Foetus records - two albums and four singles which are great records, so I never quite regretted sacrificing my copy of Insect & Individual Silenced, although it would have been nice to have been paid more than twenty fucking quid for it, particularly when it was in the racks for eighty a week later. Twenty years pass, and I notice that I still have a tape of the album, because I used to obsessively tape albums as I bought them, and the tape is of such quality that, once digitised, it's pretty much the same as having the album back; so that's nice.

You probably already have a fairly good idea of what Nurse With Wound sound like, and that's what Insect & Individual Silenced sounds like, except more so to my ears because it was the first one I heard. This was my introduction to a whole new, seriously weird world. The most startling aspects of the record, at least to me, were the razor sharp edits chopping up disparate slabs of sound without the usual luxury of reverb to make it seem at least a little moody and romantic; and the way in which the next sound you hear is usually the last you would expect, and the one which makes the least obvious sense. Alvin's Funeral builds up around what are probably random notes pinged from the spokes of a revolving bicycle wheel, combined with unnerving bursts of feedback and worrying poetry in a little girl voice which I always assumed to belong to Danielle Dax, but I could be wrong. The other side features two tracks, first being Absent Old Queen Underfoot, a collaboration with Jim Thirlwell and Trevor Reidy of the Shock Headed Peters. It's mostly subdued noise and brushed drums serving more as irritation than rhythm, like flies bashing against a window; truthfully, it doesn't really do much, but works well as an uncomfortable respite after the barrage of Alvin's Funeral. Finally there's the six minutes of Mutilés De Guerre which closes the album with loops of dialogue, electronic noise, and a bit of Ludwig van himself on the old ukelele - again maybe nothing special in its own right, but powerful in context of the album as a whole by contributing to a peculiar sense of narrative progression.

Insect & Individual Silenced should be experienced as though it were a surrealist film, a cousin to the work of Man Ray, Maya Deren and others, but struck through with something equivalent to the uneasy mutterings of Hans Bellmer; and happily, being a musical recording, the album has sidestepped the cauterising effect of the art establishment and is thus able to present Dadaist shock without us having to watch Waldemar Januszczak wanking himself silly. Of course there are still the trainspotting twats who will tell you this was early industrial music, but as it makes Gristle sound like Pink Floyd I'd say we can safely ignore such bollocks.

Lord knows why Stapleton was so down on this one. Personally, I think it's wonderful.

Steroid Maximus - ¡Quilombo! (1990)

I was quite excited all those centuries ago when I first heard that Thirlwell had a new band called Steroid Maximus, because that was how it was described in whatever rag I was reading - a new band suggesting something streamlined and punky with some guy on bass and maybe a drummer. It was a bit of a disappointment when the new band turned out to be just another secret identity, albeit one making no direct reference to the Foetus brand. I'd been excited because said Foetus brand had begun to sound a little fat and bloated at that point, basically a man growling about doing you up the bum whilst drinking moonshine to the sound of a million heavy metal guitars. Thaw had been a massive disappointment and the psychotic badass schtick was looking a bit saggy around the ballbag.

¡Quilombo! at least suggested some returning interest in a varied musical palate on Thirlwell's part, but I couldn't work out why it needed to be its own thing. Wasn't it just Foetus instrumentals, maybe things for which he'd never worked out a vocal? Maybe it was his classical incarnation, although that doesn't really work when you look too close. Only the worst kind of arsehole technophile believes you can sample a bunch of orchestras and make your own classical music. Perhaps, for want of a better term, Steroid Maximus was his soundtrack work; or maybe this stuff had always been intended as instrumental, and the notion of putting out a largely instrumental Foetus record went against the grain, for whatever reason. Maybe the world would explode were there ever to be a Foetus album with a title of more than four letters.

Then again, there's nothing actually wrong with this guy's purely instrumental work, and Lilith from Sink - for one example - is one of the greatest pieces of music he's ever recorded; so with this in mind I listened and let the thing settle, let it build up some familiarity. A couple of decades later, my initial reservations seem crazy. Taken as a piece rather than just a collection of unfinished instrumentals - which I suspect it never was - ¡Quilombo! alludes to exotica, easy listening and big band. It's all quite obviously built up from samples, although has been done with real skill and so avoids any distracting attention drawn to the methods of its own composition. Essentially it's a Foetus record made using just mood and atmosphere to invoke the customary unease, a record which seems to deliberately avoid stating the obvious in musical terms - hence the absence of scowling heavy metal guitars. One of these almost sounds like a sea shanty, for fuck's sake!

Actually, a couple of decades later, and taking into account that nearly everything about the record is wonderful - not even just the cover art, but the quality of the printing of the cover art - and ¡Quilombo! feels like a masterpiece in its brevity, its singularity of vision, and all of the peculiar musical hoops through which it jumps in pursuit of that singularity. It's Thirlwell stretching out and enjoying himself again after a tough couple of years, mixing himself a cocktail, still keeping it kind of dark and unsettling, but doing it in style.

Sylvie & Babs - The Sylvie & Babs Hi-Fi Companion (1985)

Yes, I'm well aware of it being Nurse With Wound, thank you very much, but I'm pretty sure it was listed as above when released, the reason being that Steve Stapleton regarded the Hi-Fi Companion as something quite separate and distinct from the Nurse With Wound canon, which it sort of is, or at least was. So I'm sticking with the original version of the story, plus I seem to recall the United Dairies mail order list had this down as something other than Nurse With Wound, and listed under comedy for what it may be worth - along with Hastings of Malawi, whatever the hell that was.

Of course, it's now difficult to get through a whole day without having to hear some cunt's aspirationally humorous plunderphonic deconstruction of existing bits of music, but back in 1985, 'twas not yet so overegged a pudding as it has become, and possibly because no-one had a sampler so it was harder. Sylvie & Babs were principally Stapleton and the gang making music with bits of other people's records, and - so I gather - making it the extraordinarily complicated way by splicing together inch thick strips of studio tape and so on in the spirit of Pierre Schaeffer and those guys as opposed to just sitting next to the radio with one finger on the pause button and then selling the end result to people with a photocopy of your knob on the cover like Hamilton Bohannon* would have done.

To start again at the beginning, if you've ever described Nurse With Wound as industrial, then you're a fucking clown; you wear big red shoes; you have a bowler hat on your head with a giant flower coming out of it; and when you drive your car, you honk the horn twice every few yards and the doors have usually fallen off by the time you reach your destination, which will almost certainly be a clown shop which you're visiting in order to make purchase of clown supplies. This description also applies, albeit to a lesser extent, if you've ever described Nurse With Wound as a noise group or - ugh - sound artists; although Nurse With Wound are very much about sound and the psychological and physiological effects it can have on the listener: so it's definitely music, but works more like a sonic analogy of the art of Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and other Dadaist types than does music with tunes, verses, a chorus, or which is made using musical instruments. The next sound you hear on a Nurse With Wound record may often be the last sound you would expect to hear depending on whatever has gone before, which distinguishes them from those acts more obviously reliant on repetition. It can be hard work listening to Nurse With Wound, but also very rewarding because it's never quite like anything you will have heard before, possibly including previous Nurse With Wound albums. They're not something you can listen to all the time, but every so often, you'll find there's nothing better if the time is right.

Well, that's the theory anyway, and I haven't actually heard the last five-hundred or so records so for all I know he may be cranking out handbag house with Nick Griffin these days, but for the sake of argument, let's just pretend it's still 1985 and that I'm right. I failed to buy this at the time because there was other stuff I wanted, and Nurse With Wound were an acquired taste even by my standards; also, it wasn't that easy to get hold of their stuff. I had Insect & Individual Silenced, which was fucking great, but apparently not so great as to keep me from flogging it when I decided I really needed those first two albums by You've Got Foetus On Your Breath. Millions of years later, I find this on CD and notice that I actually know three of the people who appeared on here amongst the lengthy list of collaborators, which is weird. In fact, I've been in bands with two of them; and one of them was Andrew Cox who was my bestest buddy for a while, and who is no longer with us, and who I still miss like crazy; so I couldn't really not buy it.

I suspect all those bargain basement cassette versions of Nurse With Wound have spoiled the real thing for me over the years, because in 2017 Sylvie & Babs sound drearily familiar rather than weird and surprising, at least on first listen. The key seems to be getting past the point of trainspotting where it all came from - snatches of My Boomerang Won't Come Back and the like, which seem intrusive whilst they remain familiar, although maybe that was the point. After a few spins, it picks up - which again is the opposite of what I expect to get from a Nurse With Wound record given how they seem so often reliant on shock and surprise; but this eventually settles into a sort of musicality suggestive of narrative which is almost certainly in the ear of the beholder. I suppose this could be what differentiates Sylvie & Babs from Nurse With Wound - unless it's just my lugholes - namely that increasing familiarity with the material brings some sort of pleasure, just like you get from Sting and Coldplay, beyond which, one is drawn to focus on the bizarre acoustics at play. That made sense in my head when I thought it.

The Sylvie & Babs Hi-Fi Companion is decent, and it's nice to hear Andrew's voice again - repeating the phrase it ain't necessarily so, in case anyone was wondering - but it isn't startling, and more than anything it makes me wish I'd found some other means of financing my purchase of those early Foetus discs. Time to get looking for another copy of Insect & Individual Silenced, I suppose.

*: Name changed so as to protect the annoying.

Front 242 - 06:21:03:11 Up Evil / 05:22:09:12 Off (1993)

Dammit - I used to love me some Front 242. I bought 05:22:09:12 Off - the second of these paired albums - when it came out, despite the alarm bells which went off when I noticed them subject to full page advertisements in various Vertigo comics of the time. I bought 05:22:09:12 Off when it came out and never fully warmed to it, which is why I didn't bother buying the other one. It sounded like half a record, something incomplete, which I guess is exactly what it was as I now realise. These two were originally meant to be a double CD, two halves of the same thing, roughly speaking a concept album about good and evil...

I suppose I could leave the review at that.

Front 242 were the greatest thing ever, at least for a short time, at least for most of the period beginning with Official Version and concluding with Tyranny > For You <, providing you don't hang around too long in the general vicinity of Front by Front. Sadly, 1993 seems to be the point at which they lost sight of what made them great in the first place, the moment where those lesser artists upon whom they'd had such a massive influence started to make the better records. Richard 23 didn't have a whole lot to do with either of these albums so I assume his input was in some way crucial, even if it was just telling the other two when something was crap. This was the point at which they turned up in Melody Maker wearing tracksuits and baseball caps and with a rapper now in the band.

So I already had 05:22:09:12 Off on vinyl, but I saw the two CDs for ten bucks which seemed like a good buy, potentially. It turns out that the two discs actually feature slightly different line-ups of the crumbling band, so I suppose the division is justified. 06:21:03:11 Up Evil features collaborative work with members of Parade Ground, whom I vaguely recall as being one of a million EBM also-rans perpetually clogging up nineties compilation albums with grunting tracks about working, obeying, stomping, marching, wearing Doc Martens and being really strong. Consequently the album is mostly generic techno of the kind made by people who don't actually dance - overproduced, too much going on, and with an excess of reverb invoking the same mood as is featured on every other cunt's record. It misses the point of what made Front 242 so special, namely that it wasn't the repetition. Unlike all those other aviator-goggled clowns, Front 242 worked because their music was composed along lines closer to the classical and orchestral than to the traditionally dance-orientated. There's repetition, but beyond the repetition there'll be some new element entering the picture with almost every bar, often details occurring just once during the track; so whilst it's nevertheless all very much programmed, it's a highly individual approach to programming. By contrast 06:21:03:11 Up Evil is mostly just your bog standard thump thump thump thump pulse pulse pulse rumble rumble obey my commands, weaklings goth chord goth chord and back to thump thump thump... It lacks variety.

05:22:09:12 Off is marginally the better record with the grammatically dubious Serial Killers Don't Kill Their Girlfriend and Crushed recalling the majestic solemnity of Tyranny > For You <; except once you get past those two and dispense with the underwhelming rapping of Animal, you could still be listening to the first record. So we have two cracking tunes and the rest of it may as well be that scene from The Matrix where Samuel L. Jackson takes Neil to his underground kingdom of totally awesome tattooed crusties and they all listen to really loud rave music. There's also a Foetus remix of one of the tracks, I suppose, but the most that can be said about it is that it answers the question of what Front 242 would sound like if remixed by Foetus. This really didn't need to be two discs where a 12" of Serial Killers Don't Kill Their Girlfriend and Crushed would have done just as well.

Peter Hope & Charlie Collins - Destroy Before Leaving (2016)

This is another one of those download things which exists only as electric magic. I downloaded a couple by Blank Banshee last week and told myself I wasn't going to make a habit of owning stuff with no physical dimensions, but fuck it - it's Peter Hope and it was a quid - actually it was free but it seemed polite to make some sort of donation. Anyway...

Peter Hope and Charlie Collins will of course be remembered as vocals and saxomophone of the Box, who were in turn Clock DVA minus Adi Newton and somehow wound much tighter. You can still feel some of that legacy in these six tracks - dark, dirty, and kind of jazzy without any of the usual unfortunate connotations which have adhered to jazz since it was assimilated by the man. That said, it doesn't exactly sound like jazz beyond the noodling presence of whatever Collins is playing - some sax, some clarinet I think - and a few details of mood. On the other hand, what it very much does sound like is twenty-first century blues, meaning the genuine Robert Johnson deal updated as is appropriate to time and culture, as distinct from some Mark Knopfler heritage project; also as distinct from certain Foetus efforts inhabiting similar territory but sounding a great deal more mannered and studied than this raw outburst of noise, gravel and loathing. Were time travel a thing, you could take this back to the Mississippi Delta in the thirties and I'm pretty sure those guys would recognise it immediately. Of course, beyond Hope's characteristic growl and Collins' riffing, what you have might almost be Einstürzende Neubauten in sonic terms, but it should probably be remembered that whilst the original bluesmen had guitars and harmonicas, they really weren't in the business of making pretty music. So to dispense with most of this paragraph, Destroy Before Leaving is a blues album, and a powerful one, and that's everything you need to know.

Get it here.

KMFDM - Retro (1998)

I always liked the idea that KMFDM stood for Kill Motherfucking Depeche Mode, and I seem to recall another version of the acronym positing a disgusting but faintly amusing allegation about Kylie Minogue; and of course that bloke from Brute! drew all their record covers; and there was the involvement of Raymond Watts who is credited with something or other on an early-ish Foetus album. I knew I'd probably heard something by KMFDM at some point, and they always seemed to turn up in the same places as a few other groups I've liked, and Retro is a best of compilation, so...

Kill Motherfucking Depeche Mode would probably be funnier if KMFDM were better, but they aren't. Let's think about that just for a moment - the band which isn't as good as Depeche Mode. Actually, I'm not even sure they were as good as I Should Be So Lucky era Kylie Minogue.

What we have here is grunting Belgian new beat with sampled metal guitars and the sort of growling effects heavy vocals you only get from really mean men who drink lots of beer and have massive penises and who get lots of nude women to kiss them and show them their boobs and that, the sort of mean men you wouldn't want to mess with; or I gather that's the intended impression. Unfortunately it all sounds like something knocked up for the demonstration CD you'd get when making purchase of an Akai S5000 sampler back in the year 1992, or whenever it was those things came out. It strives to pound and grunt and make you sweat - work pain obey blah blah blah kerrraaannnggg grunt work pain struggle thud thud thud... but the thing sounds so clean you could probably eat your dinner off it; and even if you enjoy the guitars, there's no earthly reason why you would listen to a KMFDM record in preference to the Young Gods or AC/DC or - fuck it - that Depeche Mode song which has a guitar on it. There's no reason why you would listen to this in preference to Front 242 or any of those acts who did this kind of thing properly. I'm not sure you would even listen to this in preference to fucking Ministry or - God help us - Pop Will Eat Itself.

Just to summarise, we're discussing a band who weren't as good as Depeche Mode, Ministry, Pop Will Eat Itself, or I Should Be So Lucky era Kylie Minogue. Let's just pause for another second so that we may properly acclimate to the concept.

I mention Pop Will Eat Itself because KMFDM were similarly inclined to refer to themselves in song - this is KMFDM you're listening to, KMFDM in the area, and so on. All that's missing is the sample of that guy suggesting we put the needle on the record when the drum beats go like this, or whatever it was he said.

This being their best of, I dread to think what the really shit stuff was like. I seem to recall KMFDM's name coming up as one of a number of potential scapegoats in the case of teenagers with guns going nuts at Columbine High School all those years ago. Whilst I personally suspect there's a great deal more to such tragedies than angry sentiments expressed on a noisy record album, it has to be said that this one really is unusually shitty.

Blood Uncles - Libertine (1987)

I'm still not quite sure how this lot ever managed to slip through the cracks. Their rise and peculiarly swift fall happened to coincide with my being too skint to afford real food once I'd bought my weekly stash of Marvel comics and made allowances for beer, and so I was reduced to musical purchases selected mainly from the bargain bins and second-hand stores of Chatham. Thus did I pick up the 12" single of Crash, having a vague feeling I'd seen these Blood Uncles on the telly at some point. Astonishingly Crash turned out to be one of the best records I've ever picked from a bargain bin.

I had been sceptical given the involvement of the big-boned lad from the Exploited - whom I'd never liked on the grounds that they looked and sounded like a punk band formed by aliens based on either transmissions of Spitting Image picked up in the depths of space, or sensationalist articles from the Sun excavated from the post-nuclear ruins of the planet Earth. I had also been sceptical given the subject matter of Crash - having a wank over automobile accidents, a subject which had surely been done to death by 1987 - I mean even Sheena bloody Easton had probably cookie-cuttered out some ode to taking it up the pooper during a seven car pile up on the M6 by then; but, despite everything, Crash was a fucking mammoth single, bypassing all possible objections - not least thanks to the utterly chilling Never Happy Man on the other side - and probably the best fifty pence I've ever spent.

Anyway yes, the Blood Uncles were John Duncan, formerly of the Exploited, Colin McGuire, and vocalist Jon Carmichael - one of whom apparently went to school with my pal Alan Mason, although I can never remember which one it was. Crash made such a strong impression, slaking my musical thirst as it did during a time of severe drought, that I almost quacked my pants when I saw there was a full album. I took the thing home and it remained stuck to the turntable for the next six months. Libertine is big, grimy, gonzo rock, screeching feedback, bluesy hangovers and coughing up what's left of your innards with a vigour that makes Nick Cave sound like some sort of health nut, kind of like a stadium rock version of Foetus, I always thought; and like the best rock, it was a bit deranged with a faint tang of the laughing academy particularly in tracks such as Breakdown Express and Danny's Favourite Game - not really the sort of thing you would expect to see on Going Live! of a Saturday morning. More incredibly still, amongst the stench of gasoline, hard liquor, and prescription drugs, Blood Uncles not only managed to cover Prince's Let's Go Crazy without sounding even remotely ironic, but did it to the backing of what I'm pretty sure was a Yamaha RX15 drum machine - the sort of thing which doubtless propelled Nik Kershaw and Howard Jones to Smash Hits infamy - somehow ramped up to the kind of monstrous sound you expect from a Steve Albini production.

This group had everything - tunes, raw power, gut-wrenching pathos, and a genuinely dynamic vocalist who always sounded like his life depended on it, so I have no idea why it never happened beyond the general public having no taste. Nearly thirty years on and this one still brings me out in a cold sweat.

Sleaford Mods - Retweeted (2014)

When I first heard Mr. Jolly Fucker by Sleaford Mods I felt compelled to seek out more, so startled was I by the sound - so basic, so exciting, and so face-punchingly angry. Within a couple of hours of poking around on YouTube, I knew I needed to get my hands on every last squeak and fart ever recorded by this group. It was therefore a bit disappointing to realise they - or he if you insist - had already pooped out at least four albums of material that I would probably never get to hear, despite this being the age of everything that ever existed becoming available once again. I used to be so good at this sort of thing, knowing what was out there and what was what, as a stack of early Foetus singles and Unkommuniti tapes are my witness.

Retweeted, collecting the best of that early stuff, was therefore well worth the wait, and well worth the additional wait of my having to buy an amplifier and record player so I could play the thing.

I can sort of see why the band - now that there's definitely two of them - seem to have drawn a line between this - mostly Jason Williamson and others - and Austerity Dogs onwards with Andrew Fearne pushing the buttons. It's hard to tell quite what the difference is, but there definitely is one. I never quite got those Wu-Tang references mixed up with all the other efforts of everyone scrabbling to describe the band - Crass meets John Cooper Clarke, Roy Castle fronting the Fall, Swans covering Splodgenessabounds... but anyway, I can see it here, or at least I can see Sleaford Mods as more or less an English Mobb Deep - as has been mentioned in some interview or other. Even without the occasional NWA reference or Illmatic sample, it's that same sensation of taking a piss in an alley behind the kebab shop and it's raining, and you're stood in a puddle with shit shoes and wet feet...

Where the hell was I?

Much of Retweeted sounds even angrier than the recent material, at least to me, although it could be the punk rock samples, loops from various Pistols and Alternative TV records evoking certain associations with punch-ups and a surfeit of crap lager. The slightly annoying thing is that I realise I was trying to do this myself a few years ago, right down to looping Pretty Vacant in an attempt to spin my own yappy yarns of minimum wage misery with some sort of local underpinning; but not too annoying, given that the stuff on this record does it about twenty times better than I ever managed, and without trying quite so hard; and in case it needs stating, the lyrics were brilliant even back then, terrible, hilarious, and strong enough to strip the paint off most walls. The more I listen to Sleaford Mods, the more I notice how bad so much music has been for at least the last couple of decades. I suppose, if you want to get snippy, this is just some fat old codger praising music which kindly references Ronnie Biggs' Biggest Blow and other crap left laying around by my generation, and I should probably be listening to Skrillex or Neutral Milk Hotel or fucking Ha Ha Tonka - which really is the name of some band; but bollocks - simply being an old cunt with a long memory doesn't necessarily render one's experience any less valid or even vital than that of a twenty-year old told to wait another two decades before forming an opinion. So maybe this is old people's music because teenagers spend their money on ringtones of autotuned Pokémon themes rather than Sleaford Mods, but so what, and does it really matter?

Jason Williamson's sleeve notes state that he isn't particularly proud of these old tracks, which I can sort of understand, although he probably should be, not least once you consider the competition. Retweeted remains a genuine racket, a real joyful noise, and it does what music was always supposed to do, and which not much of it has been doing for a while.

Cosmic Rays - Cosmic Rays (2014)

I should probably own up to a certain potential for bias here, having known the drummer of this lot for the best part of the last three decades; so I'm favourably disposed towards their music before I've heard it. At the same time it may be worth pointing out that if it had turned out to be crap, I would probably have found the situation embarrassing and left it at yes, Charlie, it was just the sort of thing I like without bothering to either write or post a review here.

The Charlie in question carries the surname Adlard and will be known to at least some as the artist on, amongst other things, Image's Walking Dead comic. He's joined here by fellow comic artist Phil Winslade, known for various things amongst which was Vertigo's Goddess, as written by Garth Ennis. Wikipedia claims he landed the Goddess gig when he showed the aforementioned Ennis his portfolio at a comic convention in Coventry. Weirdly, I'm pretty sure both Charlie and myself were at that same convention. We too spoke to Garth Ennis - which was quite exciting - and I told him that the tone of Troubled Souls reminded me a little of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, which he seemed to appreciate. What a weird, small world it has turned out to be.

Anyway, Cosmic Rays are two comic artists and two of their friends. I think the name may have been intended as some sort of vague pun - comic and cosmic - but anyway...

For the record, Charlie was a phenomenal drummer even back when his drawing ability was more village fête than Eisner Award, so it wouldn't really be fair to call this a vanity project, should one be tempted to do so; and it certainly doesn't sound like one. What it does sound like is heavy rock - as quite distinct from metal - which acknowledges no strong musical influence of anything since about March 1982. I picked that particular date because that was when Iron Maiden released The Number of the Beast, and my initial impression of the Cosmic Rays album leant in that general direction mainly thanks to the histrionics of the two opening tracks. Closer and repeat listening reveals this comparison to be pretty flimsy, not least because whilst there's neither rapping, drum and bass remixes, nor anything which would startle Tommy Saxondale to any great extent, Cosmic Rays manages to avoid sounding like an exercise in nostalgia, working perfectly well as its own entity. There are moments I'm reminded of the Who or maybe the Kinks, and there's Shoes which could have been recorded by one of the bluesier incarnations of Jim Thirlwell's Foetus, but there are too many individual subtle touches which dispel such comparisons, too much which varies from the standard rock template - the buzzing fuzz of the bass, the ornate keyboard noodling, and sharp as a knife production which keeps even the noisier flourishes sounding clear as a bell and definitively stamps the collection as belonging right here in the twenty-first century. The closest I've been able to get to any sort of general comparison is that I can imagine a lot of these songs being performed by the Black and White era Stranglers, which is odd as Cosmic Rays sound nothing like the Stranglers, so I suppose it's some subtlety of chord changes or composition or the general vibe - a sort of pulsing black leather Englishness for want of a less comical simile.

Having known Charlie for a while, and enjoyed at least one of the previous bands for which he bashed the skins, so to speak, I knew this was never going to be terrible; but it's a pleasant surprise how genuinely good it is, and how fresh it sounds for something which could be considered a fairly traditional rock album in many senses. May this be but the first of many.

Available here and now in a lovely double vinyl edition too.

Mex - Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde (2014)

Mex is one of those best kept secrets you always hear about, although he really shouldn't be, and it seems typically ironic that whilst his best work has yet to set any mainstream chart ablaze, you've almost certainly heard him on something at some point given his session and studio work dating back to at least the first version of Wham Rap! by Andrew Ridgeley and the other feller. I myself first encountered the music of Mex when he cropped up on a cassette compilation put out by the Cause For Concern tape label. I hadn't long discovered that whole early eighties DIY tape scene, and I'd dived in with such enthusiasm as to have lost track of what was going on in the world of regular music with its coloured vinyl and Susan Tully dressing up like Boy George. My corner of the ferric oxide universe was a fairly noisy one populated by Cultural Amnesia and their ilk, so Mex came along as something of a breath of fresh air, independent, home-made, and yet definitely the sort of pop music you need when you're a teenager - so breezy as to make Haircut 100 sound like Kleistwahr. I bought the single Happy Life, which still rates as one of the greatest pop songs ever recorded to these ears, and then I bought the tapes.

Both Alternative Pop Music and Intense Living - which should be considered the first two Mex albums, with this one as the third - are low-fi for economic rather than aesthetic reasons, but even with the occasional muddy mix or duff note or the rhythm of what sounds like a Bontempi organ, I played those fuckers to death, and I can still sing the songs even now despite my copies of the cassettes being presently interred within a cardboard box on a different continent.

Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde is, as I say, the third album, which is exactly what it sounds like, rather than a comeback in consideration of the thirty year gap. Whatever magic he was working back then remains patently undiminished, and this time the songs benefit from all those intervening years of experience and a beautifully crisp production. The Mex himself was apparently a little nervous about what sort of response this collection would receive, which is understandable given that I was myself a little nervous about listening to it for fear of the possibility of it being some grizzled old bloke reviving past glories and ending up resembling Creme Brulee's Les McQueen from The League of Gentlemen.

It's a shit business...

Happily such fears are proven entirely unfounded, even should be considered blown away by the opening bars of Angry Man which, whilst being unmistakably Mex, peculiarly also invokes the rockier end of Nine Inch Nails and even Jim Thirlwell since he packed in the grunting and growling and took to singing once more. Being Mex, there's a Beatley element, maybe a trace of Kinks with the more tuneful hundreds and thousands of the punk rock cake sprinkled over the top, but nothing that renders the occasional saxophone or trumpet solo too incongruous - kitchen sink psychedelia maybe, or something along those lines. The tunes, sombre as they may be in a few cases, work their way under your skin like the very best of Beck or Blur or whoever else once dealt in this sort of bitter-sweet pop; except this album, against all the odds, bears no trace of nostalgia or recaptured glories. The material is too strong, too confident for that, even pausing to give the listener a thoughtful neck rub at the halfway mark with the sadly poignant Think About It.

By rights We Don't Speak The Same Language Anymore should be a hit of such magnitude that we're all thoroughly sick of hearing it before the year is out, but then by rights some boutique vinyl label should be battering down Mex's door for permission to reissue his entire back catalogue. I'm not sure if either of these are likely to happen, but then again I never expected a 2014 Mex album to sound anything like this good. Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde is, excuse my French, fucking gorgeous, a perfect pop record. Full marks also for the presentation, one of those screwy jet black compact discs upon which the label side is printed so as to resemble a tiny vinyl album.

Don't just sit there. Buy it!

Fatima Mansions - Valhalla Avenue (1992)

Fatima Mansions managed to more or less pass me by at the time, excepting North-Atlantic Wind which Andrew Cox stuck on a tape and which impressed me as possibly the most terrifying song ever recorded; and yet somehow I never got around to further investigation, aside from the Nite Flights 10" which, two decades later, I've still probably played only once. I don't know - it was a blind spot, I guess; possibly the influence of Melody Maker which I read weekly, but almost entirely for the David Stubbs material which was always roughly forty times more entertaining than anything else in there - notably features on all those bands with Union Jack guitars singing quirky songs about Harold Pinter characters whilst pretending Cathy Come Home had only just hit the picture houses.

Or was that all a bit later?

Who cares? It was shite anyway, and whilst Fatima Mansions were patently nothing to do with any of that - or the spirit of optimism in general - I seem to recall their getting voted album of the year or something, which was probably enough to put me off the scent.

With hindsight, even leaving aside the most terrifying song ever recorded, I can see why Andrew enjoyed this stuff. Valhalla Avenue, and I suppose by extension Cathal Coughlan's songwriting, puts me roughly in mind of a happier Jim Thirlwell of Foetus, or at least a more gleeful Jim Thirlwell. It's theatrical to the point of being offensive, apocalyptic cabaret for want of a less ludicrous term - material of such a quality that Sinatra could quite easily have sung a few of these had he been less worried about offending anyone within a fifty mile radius. Actually, I have no idea whether Sinatra ever worried about offending anyone, but lyrical turns such as people dressed as cows form an orderly queue for a drug that makes you dead for a second or two seem a little more barbed than his usual fare, and he probably wouldn't have gone for that whole pretending to bugger oneself with a figure of the Virgin Mary whilst on stage in Rome routine; and yes, seeing as I've introduced religion as a subject, this is the sort of madness which could only have been born of Roman Catholicism in all its God fearing spectacle, which - to briefly turn on the autoreview whilst I go and make a coffee - might account for the manic fervour of Coughlan's delivery, a golden voice delivering sermons with the insane force of ten Ian Paisleys. John Peel apparently said he could have happily listened to Coughlan singing the phone book, and yes, I take his point. Listening to Go Home Bible Mike, it doesn't take long before you too wish Bible Mike would piss off. In fact even vicars listening to Go Home Bible Mike will almost certainly find themselves telling the guy to stick that feckin' book up his poo-chute. Then of course we come to:

In the all-night party at the chemical plant,
Everybody's feeling grand.
The Irish peasants haven't had this much fun,
Since their ancestors fled the land.
A man with a hammer smashes down a wall,
And everybody shouts, "Hooray!"
And the virgins get taken in the shower stalls,
Where the cyanide comes up the drains.
Don't call an ambulance if you can't pay.

North-Atlantic Wind - a nihilist hymn to the inevitability of birth into a cruel world preceding a bleak, meaningless death - still chills me to the bone, and it's just a song, albeit a song which makes Killing Joke at their most embittered sound like Travis having a wistful day because it's raining and the really great indie music record shop is closed; and yet it's scored with that big band sound that could segue effortlessly into something from The Lion King at any moment, whilst nevertheless sharing certain compositional similarities with Nine Inch Nails.

I'm not sure why it's taken me twenty years to catch up with this, but I'm glad to have finally cottoned on.

Strapping Young Lad - The New Black (2006)

I grew up in the town of Shipston-on-Stour which had, I would guess, a population of around 4,000 of whom 3,996 were all massive fans of Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Def Leppard, Black Sabbath, Dio, Tygers of Pan Tang, Judas Priest, Saxon, and er... Meatloaf. This left the four of us who weren't quite so keen on heavy metal feeling at times a little self-conscious and subject to a degree of name-calling, also some grunting and pointing - not wearing a shitty denim jacket with misspelt band names scrawled on the back in biro being apparently indicative of raging homosexuality. This experience has not left me so well-disposed as I might be towards the genre once dubbed the village idiot of the music business; although with that said, I thought Iron Maiden and AC/DC were okay.

Metal isn't really something I've been keeping tabs on - unless you count Nine Inch Nails, which personally I don't - so it's mystifying to see how much it's progressed over the last few decades. Strapping Young Lad caught my ear, so to speak, because it's a great name, and I accidentally stumbled across the video for Love? and found myself fascinated by this prematurely balding man growling over a tune apparently written on a cement mixer. I'm no stranger to noise, and it's interesting to note how bands like Venom and Whitehouse no longer seem divided by quite such an aesthetic gulf as was once the case, but still - there's something about grown men pulling faces and singing odes to the man downstairs in the voice of Cookie Monster that's just a bit too stupid to take seriously. For my tastes, metal either succeeds or fails by how seriously it takes itself in relation to how scary it's trying to be, and Strapping Young Lad at least seem aware of the absurdities of the genre, even to the point of taking the piss out of them; unless they're being serious.

I still can't quite figure this one out. The New Black makes for fascinatingly peculiar listening material, although that's not quite the same as saying that I like it. Devin Townsend, upon whom this entire circus tent is pitched, is clearly a talent who knows how to throw a tune together, and this really doesn't sound like anything I've heard before, and yet...

The guitars chug away with ticker tape energy, bass pedals going at machine gun pace, Townsend grunting, howling, or going operatic and all pinned onto some sort of screwy prog rock template with all manner of unexpected shit thrown in, moments of distorted seventies glam, a horn section, high-pitched voices and all sorts. Townsend has apparently cited J.G. Thirlwell as an influence which makes a lot of sense. Strapping Young Lad are probably Foetus with Led Zeppelin rather than big band swing as cultural foundation; but, as I say, I'm still not sure what to make of any of it. I'm too divorced from the entire genre to understand what the hell is going on with songs like Far Beyond Metal addressing some otherwise unidentified ironic pop-rock fuck, or the generally excellent Fucker in which we're all fired up and we're ready to go, to give it all up at the metal show - it could be a protest song or he could be taking the piss. I have no idea and no way of telling. On top of inscrutable sentiments, The New Black is also a little more relentless than anything to which I'm accustomed, crushing and yet sounding somehow obsessively clean and digitised, and I can't tell if the contradiction works or not. It's probably just me. This is certainly one of the strangest things I've listened to in a while, and it's probably what the stuff I once listened to sounded like to all those metal types back when I was growing up.