Stephen Mallinder - Tick Tick Tick (2022)

I'm almost not sure what to say about this one. He's been at it for nearly five decades, yet continues to put out first class albums which build on what has gone before without sounding like a retread - always breaking new ground; and Tick Tick Tick substantially develops even on Um Dada from 2019. We're back with smooth electric disco, for want of a better term, but where previous efforts with Wrangler and Cabaret Voltaire have been, if not quite dark, certainly tinged with paranoia, Tick Tick Tick sounds kind of happy. Of course, the equipment used brings with it trace elements of acid, techno, handbag house, hardbag, or whatever the fuck they were calling it that year, but more than anything it puts me in mind of some of the weirder extended disco workouts from the likes of the Gap Band and others. Should it even need stating, it seems fair to say that the James Brown influence really wasn't just something with which to freak out all those conservative punk rockers and industrial music trainspotters. Hush seems to be the standout track with its haunting sample of what sounds like a wonky old tape of something orchestral, but it's very much a close run race. If all music was this good we'd be fucked because you'd never know what to listen to next; and talking of matters next, if whatever follows improves on this, I really won't know what to say and may have to resort to expressive dance.

What a time to be alive!

Canibus - Can-I-Bus (1998)

I was about to muse upon how Canibus appeared to have vanished in the wake of the first two, when a moment's online research reveals that actually he released about a million albums since this debut and seems to have done well for himself, even if it turns out I've been facing the wrong direction all of this time. Anyway, I recall that this one didn't do so well as everyone had hoped, given the lad's brief tenure as the next big thing; and he spent at least some of the follow up blaming Wyclef for fucking up the production on the first, echoing what had been said in a few of the reviews, which probably contributed to my giving it a miss. Plus Canibus seemed like a bit of a dick, at least in interview, banging on about flying saucers, freemasons and other conspiracies, qualifying this obsession by proposing that sceptics were uneducated fools who enjoyed being blind to the truth of the true facts, and so on and so forth.

Also, naming yourself after the ganja…

So once again, here I am two decades after the fact thinking, how bad could it have been?

Well, Channel Zero, in which our man explains about lost civilisations, aliens and stuff, is frankly fucking stupid, although one can't help but admire the lyrical dexterity by which he attaches this particular kick me sign to his own ass; but apart from that, Can-I-Bus is not at all what I expected. I was aware of his being a pretty decent lyricist - formidable even - and his name turns up in a few of those all-time top fifty listings. On the strength of this set, I'd say he could be top ten, not least if either Tupac or Eminem made it into any of the aforementioned listings - which I'm sure they did seeing as how they usually do. He's mostly a battle rapper, and it shows on this album, which would have been a bit monothematic except you're too busy tripping over the wordplay to notice; and extra points for the massively satisfying LL Cool J takedown. As the man says:

More lines than the bible quoted from Jesus.
More lines than a African herd of zebras.

Production-wise, sorry, but Wyclef did a great job. I don't see how it sounded too commercial - as was the accusation - in 1998, and in 2022 it may as well be an underground DJ Premier mixtape recorded direct from AM radio, just one copy owned by the artist's mum. It's a clean sound for sure, but hardly conventional or pop or mainstream beyond Wyclef presumably making sure it wouldn't scare anyone off playing it on the radio. It's not the greatest rap album ever, or the greatest debut ever, but it's fucking solid for something the artist ended up disowning; and if it failed to knock Illmatic or Ready to Die or whatever from the throne, we can at least justify Can-I-Bus named in the same sentence, which isn't too shabby.

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.

Bastard Fairies - Memento Mori (2007)

Fucking Hell. I knew nothing about this lot beyond that We're All Going to Hell is a cracker, so I look them up on the web, discovering that they were briefly an internet phenomenon of some magnitude, and also that they're no more due to Yellow Thunder Woman passing away just over a year ago at the age of forty. I therefore say again, fucking hell.

We're All Going to Hell blew my knackers clean off when I first stumbled across it on One'sTube - currently at 193 thousand views and rising - and being only loosely internet savvy, it's somehow taken me nearly fifteen years to nab the album, possibly because it seemed unlikely that it could deliver on the promise of that one song; but it does. Of course, it does.

There were two of them, a bloke from England called Robin, and Yellow Thunder Woman, which was actually her name due to Native American heritage. The music reminds me a little of the Eels, or at least how the Eels should have sounded, wrapping crushingly acerbic commentary in a pill so sweet that it's dancing around with flowers in its hair - acoustic guitar, bubblegum, apple pie, pseudo-McCartneyisms, country stylings with a touch of blues, occasionally incongruous electronic touches, and what sounds like a Casio SK1 preset on the chorus of Hell, and yet lyrically it's almost X-Ray Spex at their most scathing. The Day the World Turned Bluegrass, sort of...

There's no single element which makes the whole because everything is good, and it's difficult to imagine how this combination of words and music could be improved; but special mention should probably go to Yellow Thunder Woman who sang with a voice sweet as golden sunlight and yet powerful as an industrial laser, and natural - without any of that warbling vocalisation bollocks you hear when a singer has nothing but technique; and she's brown bread, which is upsetting.

I don't know what else to say.

 

 

Nocturnal Emissions in Dub (2022)

Not entirely to be confused with the one I wrote about back in 2016, this is a fancy physical pressing of the best material from the two previous albums, neither of which were available on vinyl, all beefed up by Dougie Wardrop of the Bush Chemists, if that name means anything. If the idea of Nocturnal Emissions recording dub reggae still strikes anyone as a bit odd, it really shouldn't, and this slab of black plastic blasts away what doubts may be entertained pretty much as soon as the needle finds the groove, settling into a fairly distinctive variation on the digital rasta sound which eventually became dancehall. Like I already said, it's something in which the hand which crafted Viral Shedding is clearly heard, particularly in the bass, but which absorbed a different set of influences from its south-east London environment in a variant timeline.

Nigel has done this sort of thing before, specifically hopping from one genre to another without really being too bothered about messing up the neat progression of the unfolding discography, hence occasional forays into drum & bass, techno, world music, whatever else he felt like doing at the time; and he's one of the few artists who seems to get away with it, thus avoiding looking like Jonathan King's rap album (which hopefully doesn't exist but who fucking knows). I would guess he succeeds because those areas into which the Ayers toe is occasionally dipped seem subject to the same sort of creative considerations as inform the core Nocturnal Emissions material, namely that the pushing of boundaries is actively encouraged.

Being a vinyl record, I listen to this one over speakers rather than headphones or earbuds - as I tend to use with CDs and downloads - and all its digitised sine waves and evidence of programming really come to life through the warmth of analogue reproduction. It may even be one of the best of Mr. Ayers' four plus decades in the biz.

Left Hand Right Hand - Hidden Hands (2022)

I was aware of the existence of Left Hand Right Hand back in the nineties and yet somehow they completely passed me by. I had a track by them on the fifth Impulse compilation, the excellence of which I noticed only fairly recently when digitising said tape in the hope of capturing the goodness before the oxide crumbles.

Hidden Hands gathers tracks from across the broad span of their career - some new, some old, some previously unreleased - and thus seemed almost as though it had been tailor made specifically in response to my curiosity. Its release also brings the realisation that Karl Blake has been involved, which is embarrassing because I've vaguely known Karl since we were both in bands we no longer enjoy talking about, back in the aforementioned nineties - different bands we no longer enjoy talking about, I should probably stress. Also, there's a Clock DVA association with frequent collaboration from Charlie Collins - whose work is always worthy of investigation, plus the drummer from In the Nursery back when they used to be Joy Division with cowbell.

Anyway, now that I'm finally up to speed, Left Hand Right Hand are intensely rhythmic in the sense of existing somewhere between Test Department, 23 Skidoo, Muslimgauze and records one tends to find in the World Music section. There's a lot of pounding, many polyrhythms, more than a trace of free jazz - albeit without the chaos - plenty of atmosphere and actually not very much in the way of electronics; so the disc takes the listener from crushing rhythmic force to market places in north Africa to the far east and back again. The most striking element, however, is how these tracks share a very distinctive common identity marking them as something apart from any of the names I may already have mentioned. Even when the most incongruous sounds are weaving around the massed drums, tablas, plastic tubes and what have you - distorted guitar, haunting clarinet, ambient noise - there's an epic scale as though everything heard is framed within the gilt outline of some vast nineteenth century landscape painting. I found myself reminded of Ben Hur and Egyptian masses grunting and groaning whilst hauling monolithic rocks on more than one occasion.

Better late than never, as I keep finding myself saying.

Second Layer - World of Rubber (1981)

Here's another reminder for my kicking myself at having somehow missed the Sound during that year when they were at their peak and probably would have displaced Joy Division and the usual bunch as soundtrack to my entire existence, had I actually been aware of them. Second Layer were either forerunners to the Sound or a side project, depending on which bit of internet you're looking at. I had some misgivings about this reissue of a partially unknown quantity, not least the titles hinting at the sort of thing I'd rather not discover about what my potential heroes got up to in their own time, because unless you're Soft Cell, culturally Belgian, or the version of Adam & the Ants which hadn't yet got around to recording Dirk Wears White Sox, you're probably going to sound like a twat. Thankfully, whatever that World of Rubber may have been, it doesn't seem to involve Adrian Borland breathing heavily, so far as I can tell - and lyrically he was always very direct and not prone to anything ghastly smuggled across the sexual border as a metaphor.

Second Layer were more or less the Sound stripped right down to just bass, angular guitar, and primitive drum machine fed through a bunch of pedals - something inhabiting the same sonic ballpark as Métal Urbain and the first couple of Cabaret Voltaire albums but with Borland's characteristically anthemic touch - which you might not think likely to work in such a setting, but it really does and as such sits well alongside the first couple of albums by the Sound as a slightly moodier cousin. This CD reissue ends with Skylon, a track previously unreleased from a related project of breezier disposition providing powerful contrast to the thoroughly bleak Black Flowers, the original closing number. The more Borland I hear, the more I wonder why the Sound's reputation never came anywhere close to matching the quality of their music, because surely it can't all come down to Korova Records spunking away their entire budget on Echo and the sodding Bunnymen, can it? Given Borland's tragic passing in 1999, it may be a bit late to even ask the question, but should anyone be inclined to do so, this reissue serves as further testimony to the power of his distinctive and yet overlooked voice.