Smell & Quim play Wolfgang Kindermann & Kommissar Hjuler (2021)

Having just looked on Discogs I have learned that this album is apparently called GURKE, which I refuse to acknowledge on the grounds that 1) I've been thinking of it as Smell & Quim play Wolfgang Kindermann & Kommissar Hjuler for the past few months, and 2) that I object to the misuse of upper case, and 3) after the bollocks I endured just trying to get myself a copy, I'll call it what I fucking well like.

'Do you want one of these?' the man asked. 'It's a fancy hand crafted edition and everything.'

'Cor! Yes please,' I spluttered and immediately sent him my money. Nothing happened for a couple of months, so I made the appropriate enquiries. It seems our guy had underestimated how much postage would be required to send the album to Texas which, as you will know, is actually on fucking Mars.

So I sent him a bit more to cover extra postage, rocket fuel, cost of atmospheric heat shielding and the like.

Nothing.

It turned out it still wasn't enough and he now felt embarrassed informing me of this. There followed another few months of my sending increasingly sarcastic messages, demands for my money back and so on in response to a series of promises that it would definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely be sent this week because his dole money had come through, and so on and so forth - somehow missing the point of my having already paid the fucking postage - and then suddenly, a mere eight months later, the record actually showed up on my doorstep.

Amazingly, it was worth the wait.

I have no real clue what's going on here beyond that Wolfgang Kindermann is an Austrian poet and Kommissar Hjuler is a German sound artist who was apparently a cop up until 2013. Musically, the record features one lengthy piece each side - electronic sound collages with loops, noise, the Teddy Bears' Picnic, and the usual underlying suggestion of something aromatically pornographic about to transpire. It's immediately recognisable as the work of Smell & Quim, which is an odd realisation given that Smell & Quim are nearly always immediately recognisable despite the dizzying sonic range they've covered over the years, alternately resembling bedfellows to the Grey Wolves, Gristle, Whitehouse, the Residents and Beefheart depending on which way the wind happens to have been blowing; and here's another one sounding as weirdly disgusting and screwy and yet as paradoxically fresh as their earliest material.

The fancy hand crafted edition I bought - when honestly the regular version would have been fine, except I'm not even sure there was a regular version - has someone's hard drive physically hot-glued to the cover, meaning it's likely to fuck up my copy of the Smiths' Hatful of Hollow should I attempt to file it away with my other albums, thus demanding I keep the bastard to one side as some sort of art object. So, factoring in the additional process of flying it through space in the first place, Smell & Quim play Wolfgang Kindermann & Kommissar Hjuler probably counts as the most awkward record I've ever bought, besides which, even the Nocturnal Emissions one which came wrapped in a nappy may as well be Strollin' with Max Bygraves. It's therefore a fucking good job that it delivers.

Monica - The Boy is Mine (1998)

I took something of a funny turn around halfway through the nineties, one effect of which was that I spent about a year listening to very little which wasn't R&B performed by young black women with a penchant for that fucking annoying shaky shoulders dance that everyone was doing for a while. This was partially informed by a desire to hear music performed by persons other than white blokes in shitty trainers with guitars, and while it meant that I ended up listening to a certain quota of things that really weren't very good at all, it wasn't all bad.

Monica is probably best remembered for the single after which this album was named, a duet with Brandy who was also in the biz at the time. The two of them fell out over who got to name their album after the duet, apparently getting into an actual fist fight on live television during a show which had brought the two together for the sake of quashing the rumours of animosity - which I repeat here mainly because it's amusing. Anyway, the upshot was that Monica won.

The problem with this kind of album was usually the space taken up by the stereotypical balladeering R&B sludge. You know the sort of thing - slow as buggery, piano tinkling away, endlessly warbling vocal exercises, sounds as though it was lifted from the soundtrack of a Disney musical and was probably written by Diane fucking Warren as almost all of those drearily epic unit shifting love songs seem to be. Here we get five of the wailing fuckers, thus rendering approximately 38.5% of this thirteen track album effectively unlistenable, although it could be argued that the cover of Eddy Arnold's Misty Blue is borderline.

However, if you ignore these tracks you have something about the same length as a traditional vinyl album which is otherwise pretty great. Most of the production comes from Dallas Austin, a couple from Rodney Jerkins, and even a decent offering from the customarily annoying Jermaine Dupri. It's almost traditional soul music with a heavy, heavy, heavy emphasis on the blues, seeing as Monica is from Georgia, retooled as a series of weird staccato beats and samples because it was 1998; except done with the sort of heart and dedication to what seems like a fairly expensive production as you might expect from persons who don't sound like they'd ever bother with autotune, and would probably be insulted if you asked. Monica's voice has a certain vulnerable quality, and you might even say it's thin in comparison to some, but her strength is that she sounds like a human being rather than a series of ostentatious vocal exercises.

So no, that shaky shoulders music didn't all sound the same in the event of anyone wondering, and occasionally there was an album which made you wonder why the others bothered; and if this one is played by robots, they're robots with real soul in their chips and circuits. Just be sure to skip tracks eight, ten, twelve, and thirteen - also five if you're having a bad day.

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.

Stylic - Preacher EP (2022)

 

I don't know why I took a chance on this one over other doubtless wonderful sets squirted forth from New York Haunted's virtual spigot on a seemingly weekly basis - because they're always great - and I suppose it was just the cover image which caught my attention by putting me in mind of Craggy Island's finest.

That's how superficial I am.

Well, superficial or not, other factors must account for why I've ended up playing the thing so much, namely that it bangs and is proper peng and fire and that, as we teenagers say. Preacher is techno or dance or summink, but with what I presume to be that distinctive New York Haunted sensibility in that it sits at a bit of a distance from everything else I've heard and is at least as much concerned with sonic power as getting your back up off the wall. Stylic's brand of techno has an undercurrent of the sort of EDM I recall from the nineties, particularly Nitzer Ebb before they turned into Led Zeppelin, without really sounding like anything from a previous decade. I assume this to be the samples, that specific snare and so on, rather than what it does on the floor; although the mood may also be a factor - a sort of euphoric stomp with added 303 squelch stood at the bar waiting for its turn. The second track, Led, is in particular a work of crazy genius, welding Robert Plant's orgasm noises from the aforementioned Zeppelin's Lemon Song* to Front 242 driving disco trucks across an international checkpoint. Why no-one has syncopated Plant's cum-face before is revealed as a complete fucking mystery as the track sweeps you off your feet, or your chair in my case.

Everything else holds up too, for what it may be worth - three tracks plus three remixes, although not of Led probably because it simply couldn't be made any more amazing than it already is; and we even get one of those remixes in which the label seems to specialise which veers towards Throbbing Gristle effects overload. Someone needs to vinylise this monster ASAP.

 

*: I'm pretty sure it's the Lemon Song but I can't be arsed to check right now. It's the one where it sounds like he's shooting his muck anyway.

Soft Cell - *Happiness Not Included (2022)

I feel I could justifiably just write fucking hell and leave the review at that. I generally experience a certain degree of scepticism regarding any comeback that wasn't Elvis, but I'm not sure it applies here. There's a difference between a group recording their first new material in twenty years and the reanimated corpses of formerly beloved entertainers giving the loyal fanbase udder one last desperate squeeze which - funnily enough, Soft Cell obliquely address on Nostalgia Machine, which almost counts as the grandson of Memorabilia if you squint a bit.

Anyway, I inevitably approached this one with caution because you never know, and even Elvis kind of blew it at the end. Thankfully, it sounded pretty good, and continued to sound pretty good, and then one morning I woke with I'm Not a Friend of God stuck in my head, something which probably hasn't happened since I woke with Little Rough Rhinestone lodged in my head back in whichever century that was. After Cruelty Without Beauty, I knew this would be worth a listen, but I'm not sure I imagined it would be this good.

It works because there's no self-conscious effort to repeat former glories beyond simply doing what Soft Cell always did best. We're not trying to pretend it's still the eighties like in Stranger Things, and we're not trying to pretend that anything is fun or cool because that's never anything that Soft Cell were about - in case you somehow failed to notice. Musically, we're mixing technopop with traces of soul of the kind Dave Ball always did so well, along with a few less obvious elements, and Ball's John Barry homages seem to have evolved into a relative of Aaron Copland - which is odd but sounds perfectly natural - and Tranquiliser has about it a trace of Nashville in certain respects; and yet Purple Zone, recorded with the involvement of the Pet Shop Boys and very much sounding it, is nevertheless perfectly at home.

Almond's lyrics remain as beautifully acerbic and well observed as ever, not least because no-one is trying to pretend we're still eighteen, and this stuff speaks to me just as it did when we were all a bit younger, randier, skinnier, and possibly more perverted. In fact it moves me right now in 2022 just as it did in 1981, and the title track is in particular an air-punchingly joyous fuck off to certain representatives of the generation which believes it invented many of the feelings expressed on this record but really didn't. I vividly recall once sitting in a school art room listening to a couple of hairies dismissing the teenybop benders who dared soil a Jimi Hendrix masterpiece, and I knew then that I was on the right side of history - to make an overused contemporary reference. This album lets me know that I still am, which is nice. Never mind the comeback, *Happiness Not Included may even be the best thing they've ever recorded.

Temple Music - Soon You Will All Die and Your Lives Will Have Been as Nothing (2009)

Temple Music was formed by Alan Trench and a couple of pals back in 1995 as an outgrowth of other, loosely related things. I saw them live in 2011 - I think it was - and assumed they had ceased to be soon after, reforming as the Howling Larsons and therefore leaving this behind as a coda of sorts. However, it seems I'm mistaken and there have been a number of subsequent releases, two of which I've actually owned all this time, so I guess this may be a reissue.

Some may recall Alan as a patron of World Serpent distribution, the label which brought us Der Blutharsch. Der Blutharsch recorded aesthetically extreme music of pseudo-martial composition which, as such, was often lumped in with others of the stiff right arm brigade - possibly due to the titles, occasional allusions to the Hitler Youth, and appropriation of artwork by Werner Peiner whom you may remember from world wars such as the second one. I had the pleasure of at least one evening on the razz in south-east London with Albin Julius of Der Blutharsch. He was an oddball in black clothes with an upsetting haircut, but otherwise seemed like a decent guy; and having spent an unfortunate plurality of evenings on the razz in south-east London with actual Nazis, I feel reasonably certain that he wasn't one.

Anyway, it probably doesn't matter given that he's no longer with us, and Soon You Will All Die and Your Lives Will Have Been as Nothing was issued, or possibly re-issued in memoriam, which seems fitting. Temple Music had a very much Mediterranean sound, one which seems to foreshadow the more recent music of its crew. It's loss, rocks, sorrow, wine, bleached animal skulls, and whatever token Charon may require for passage across the great river this month, all beneath a killing sun with crickets in the background. The dark ambient tag has inevitably attached itself, but the drones and the jangle of bells in the wind seem to come from something older, and something which has endured despite everything. I've listened to this CD and thought about Albin and wondered just what the hell was going on with that guy, although I doubt I'll ever have an answer. All that remains is the sound of waves lapping against the side of a boat.

Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002)

I kept hearing this amazing song on the radio at work, but I could somehow never catch what it was or who it was by; and it took me about a year to work out that it was actually Coldplay. This came as something of a surprise because although admittedly it sort of sounded like Coldplay in slightly more pensive mood, it sounded better than Coldplay.

I never developed any particular loathing for Coldplay, but never saw any particular mystery in the idea that anyone might have done so. They sounded like an absurdly formulaic version of something which might have been more listenable under other circumstances, music for estate agents and automotive commercials, music for photogenic home insurance couples who'd listen to U2 but would rather not have to think about those kids in Africa with flies on their faces - corporate angst; and that's even before we get to Gwyneth's fanny candles.

Nevertheless, God Put a Smile Upon Your Face really wormed its way into my head - a song which sounds like the moment before a thunderstorm stretched out to three minutes, a depressive, doom-laden crescendo running away from itself. I would have bought the 7" but I'm not sure it existed, and CD singles always seemed like a bit of a waste of time, so here I am with an entire album - eleven fucking tracks. Strangely, tracks two to five were all singles, preserved here as a big chunk of hits at the beginning of the album and serving as a lesson in why it's taken me two decades to buy a cheap second-hand copy. It's not that In My Place, Clocks, or The Scientist are poor songs so much as that they're the same fucking song, and hearing it every thirteen minutes or so on whatever turdy indie station we kept it locked to at work used to get pretty fucking painful some weeks. Hearing them again after twenty years without the additional gurgling testimony of Jono Coleman or Christian O'Connell or some other dreadful fucking twat is less painful than I expected, and the more I listen, the more obvious it becomes that it's the context rather than the songs. This may also tally with the fact that God Put a Smile Upon Your Face didn't do anything like so well as the other three singles and never quite got to the point of outstaying its welcome at East Dulwich SDO.

Starting again at the beginning, allowing Coldplay a fair crack at the whip and ignoring both the terrible name and unfortunate association with Gwyneth's fanny candles, this isn't a bad album. In fact I find it unusually listenable. It isn't really that the good stuff amounts to the tracks which weren't singles, although there's a subtle difference in mood which probably accounts for In My Place, Clocks and The Scientist having been picked out; but the material you may not already have heard a million times somehow sounds more like a real band, and certainly less formulaic in pushing all those emo buttons with wistful verses building up to the same crescendo every time. Wikipedia gives their influences as bog standard hyper-mainstream shite but to me they sound like a post-psychedelic band, essentially Codeine with bigger production and Beatley chord changes; and this album is a lot more depressive than you might expect. I realise that this record should be shite but isn't probably doesn't fully qualify as praise, but I'm still slightly stunned to find myself listening to Coldplay and enjoying it. Had we never heard of them, had we not had to endure so many years of having them shoved down our throats over and over and over, it might be easier to listen past the bullshit and appreciate what they do.