New Fast Automatic Daffodils - Pigeonhole (1991)

One of the wonderful things about YouTube, aside obviously from ranting atheist neckbeards sharing their important views with the rest of us, is how it allows one to catch up with music about which you may have wondered without ever getting to hear. The New Fast Automatic Daffodils somewhat passed me by at the time as I didn't really listen to music radio, didn't like clubs or gigs, and they never turned up in the record collections of anyone I knew. I read about them in the music papers, but nothing inspired me to rush out and buy a record on the off chance that it might not be shit. So from time to time I'll YouTube up some name recalled from centuries gone by just out of curiosity, in case it turns out that I've missed out on something I would have liked; and occasionally I like something enough to chase up the album, as has happened here.

The New FADs as I seem to recall them being abbreviated turned up at the same time as that whole Madchester baggy thing to which I maintained some distance having bought a record by Northside from a bargain bin for twenty-five pee and found it to be shite. I can see why they got lumped in with the Stone Roses and all, but they were actually pretty good, and certainly not the also-rans I probably assumed them to be. If anything they sound roughly like A Certain Ratio working their way backwards, devolving into Krautrock, roughly speaking - actually not that much of a stretch Madchesterwise given that Happy Mondays were basically Can with more drugs. Most of the tracks here tend towards extended jams rather than songs as such, workouts with choppy wah-wah guitar and a fantastic rhythm section with a ton of bongos and that. I can see why tossers in fishing hats might have regarded this as top or even sorted, and given that this didn't exactly sound like any of those other groups, it's a shame they didn't shift a few more records at the time. The only criticism I can come up with is that New Fast Automatic Daffodils wasn't a great name, and this compact disc version of the album could have stood to lose the last four tracks - it's not that they're bad, and one of them actually reminds me of Cabaret Voltaire around the time of 2X45, but less is more, and particularly so with rambling funky workout jam session type things. They're probably all taxicab drivers or working in kebab shops by now, but I hope at least one of their number is still able to look back on this material with fondness, and know that he recorded something which didn't deserve to get lost in the tidal wave of baggy Mancunian toss.

Panacea - Twisted Designz (1998)

The detail that's always guaranteed to put me off anything is nearly always its fucking stupid fans, and this is particularly so when it comes to music, especially regarding the sort of twat who can barely open his mouth without spawning some new and entirely unnecessary subcategory by which to define how bleeding edge he deems himself, because that's the shit he's like really into right now, yeah?

Take Clownboy - as I shall refer to him for the sake of convenience - denizen of an internet forum I once frequented. Got Djent? he asked in a thread of that title, a fiendishly imaginative play on the got milk? advertising campaign cleverly subverted so as to refer to a new subgenre of heavy metal he'd just discovered. Djent, he explained, is onomatopoeiacally named because they've invented this way of playing guitar with the strings muted to create an almost percussive note. I've now listened to a few supposed djent bands, and I still don't understand why it needs to be considered a whole new movement as opposed to, for example, just a bunch of gurning, hairy men playing guitars with a technique that was old even when every skinny-tie wearing new wave band was doing the same thing back in 1979 but with less grunting. Even more wearying was when Clownboy later invented his own new and completely original style of music. He explained that he didn't have a name for it, and he needed to get together some people who could play instruments in order to actually produce it - he couldn't play anything, presumably regarding himself as more of an ideas man - but it was going to be a cross between djent and dubstep.

Can you imagine that!?

He was really convinced this was going to be the next big thing.

Panacea was probably dubstep before dubstep, aside from the lack of any shitty autotuned pseudo-trance element; or it's drum and bass, digital hardcore, techstep, illbient, except like the work of any musician who isn't a complete tool, it does all of those things and more, working with what sounds appropriate rather than just ticking boxes. My first encounter with Panacea was when my friend Carl lent me the Low Profile Darkness album. I don't think either of us had ever heard anything that sounded quite so pissed off ,and yet which retained some sort of concessionary resemblance to music. We looked at the photograph of Mathis Mootz on the cover, apparently a fifteen year old fat kid from Germany, and we imagined all the usual tattooed buffoons reduced to something that may as well be The Dooleys' greatest hits by this chubby little fucker on a tricycle. Anyway, I've listened to various digital hardcore types thanks to YouTube, and Panacea doesn't quite fit in with them either, because it does more than just one thing.

As may be apparent from previous reviews, I'm no stranger to the grunting, shirty music of folks expressing their displeasure, but Jesus - this stuff really is dark, and probably because it goes for the pure emotional hit rather than wasting time in waving scary ideas in your face - Oooh look, there's a ghost over there, the ghost of a really bad man who robbed a bank, and I'm his BEST FRIEND and so on. The sounds are sharp as knives and perfectly orchestrated, ebbing and flowing like the wax and wane of muscular pains. Twisted Designz pretty much continues from where Low Profile Darkness left off in that it's a lot like dental surgery - you know you're going to be there for an hour or so, and that it's going to be fucking uncomfortable, so you sit tight and get through it because ultimately it's for the best. Whatever brand of supposedly hard and grumpy music you may be like really into right now, yeah?, Panacea makes it sound like a little girl crying over a prematurely melted ice cream cone.

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.

MFH - 1979-85 (2012)

MFH was a duo comprising David Elliott and Andrew Cox, and I should probably confess that what follows is hardly impartial given that Andrew was a close friend prior to his horrible passing in 2009. I met Andrew and David through their recording as Pump on The Elephant Table Album, and my noticing how their contact address was about three streets from where I was living at the time. I knew of MFH from weirdy cassette fanzines although I'd never heard their music, excepting Andrew's excellent solo tape Methods. All the same, we had plenty in common and it transpired that we knew at least a few of the same people.

It's a little odd only now getting to hear MFH having known Andrew so well and for so long, particularly as he's no longer with us, but it's more or less what I expected given Andrew and David's appreciation of Cluster and others. Their music didn't exactly sound like Cluster, but it shared more common ground with the German avant-garde than with many of MFH's wilfully industrial contemporaries, all busily frowning as they twisted those VCOs and pretended to be the science-fiction Black Sabbath. What we have here are nineteen instrumental, or at least non-vocal tracks culled from the five cassettes released by MFH - all quite atmospheric and with a clear love of improvised sound composition which makes it quite difficult to identify some of the sources. I fully expect the next person who overhears me listening to this to declare that it isn't music, except actually it kind of is. Even at their most abstract and atonal, MFH made great use of repetition and texture to create something which draws you in if you're prepared to give it a chance. Being culled from a cassette source, it's lo-fi by necessity rather than as a virtue, but this isn't a problem. These pieces might best be approached as abstract paintings in sound, fascinating oddities which might have formed by means of some obscure geological or organic process, and the more one listens, the better they work. If it's any good to you, I listened to this today whilst out on the marshlands of Salado Creek here in San Antonio. It was warm and I spent a few minutes just watching swarms of dragonflies go about their business. This was a pretty good accompaniment.

The history of this kind of music is rewritten on a more or less yearly basis, and it's got to the point where people now use the term industrial music as though it ever really meant anything; and give it another ten years and the whole thing will probably turn out to have been invented by one of those saggy old groups of Joy Division covers Nazis, which is obviously bullshit. It's therefore definitely a good thing that MFH are now honoured and remembered by this wonderful retrospective. They may not have set the world on fire, but they are at least worth remembering.

Available from the Forced Nostalgia label.

Keane - Hopes and Fears (2004)

Excepting possibly post-2005 Doctor Who, root canal dental work, club culture, anyone who has ever used the term industrial rock, and a whole ton of other shite, there is little that I dislike with quite such bile as that which proudly proclaims itself to be indie music - the sort of whining crap legitimised by talent vacuums like Travis, Coldplay, and the rest of their vile and unnecessary ilk - bands apparently spawned when one of the more pitiful Radiohead numbers copped off with U2 at the height of their flag-waving indulgence. It is something which strives to approximate the sound of that which was once vital, commodifies whatever vague remnants of artistic expression have survived the process, then sells the resulting homogeneous goop as lifestyle enhancement consumer product. It is the sound of a man crying onto his Ikea furniture, and it's fucking everywhere.

Back in the days when I had a job I would be subjected to hours of such moribund shite courtesy of Virgin FM or Capital or some such radio station. It was like being stuck inside an advert for car insurance, but just as the law of averages dictates that even Coldplay had one half-decent song, some respite was provided by Keane who somehow managed to do the same thing as Snore Patrol and all the other cockmonglers yet without making me want to hunt them down, knock their glasses from their shared face and take their dinner money. Often sounds heard echoing around the inside of a noisy warehouse may prove entirely unfamiliar when subjected to closer examination, but the tracks on this CD actually resembled the version of Bedshaped that once howled amongst the rafters of our sorting office and worked its way into my music gland; in fact it sounded better if anything.

Aside from the obvious absence of guitar, I'm still not sure what sets Keane apart from the other tossers, so it's probably songwriting or one of those non-quantifiable elements which can be difficult to evaluate unless it's conspicuously bad. Hopes and Fears isn't perfect - in places a little too smooth for its own good and lacking in contrast, but after a few plays you cease wondering how much better it would have been with Steve Albini producing and just let it work on its own merits. It's overwrought and hilariously introspective, probably, but then the same is true of many, many artists, and whether or not they get away with it depends on a whole ton of shit of the kind which distinguishes Joy Division from Ha Ha Tonka and similarly mannered MySpace clowns who really should have spent a bit more time coming up with a fucking band name. Against all odds, Keane get away with it providing you squint a bit and pay no attention to the marketing, at least in so much as Bedshaped is thus far one of this century's wrist-slashing classics, if you ask me. I wonder if any of the other albums were any good.

Revolting Cocks - Big Sexy Land (1986)

I liked the idea of this band, if you could really call some guy hanging around in a studio with his mates a band. After all, there was the determinedly offensive name, and the involvement of at least two members of the greatly superior Front 242, and that they were obviously all just having a laugh; and of course Stainless Steel Providers was possibly the greatest single to ever feature a two-note bassline; but I found myself hugely disappointed that the Cocks didn't turn out to be those three shifty looking chaps they always had on their record sleeves, but were another one of those horrible industrial supergroups who, much like Journey, Pigface and the Traveling Wilburys, worked by the flawed premise that if you get enough famous people together in the same place, awesomeness will surely come to pass. I've never bought into the idea myself. It smacks too much of wouldn't it be amazing if they had Spiderman in an episode of Star Trek?

Whilst I would hardly wish to imply that Alain Jourgensen - the Jeff Lynne of Revolting Cocks - is in any sense bereft of talent, mainly because I thought Lard and Pailhead were decent enough, there looks to be an awful lot of poop in his back catalogue from where I'm standing.

Ministry were Depeche Mode who wished they'd ticked the box marked Slayer, and that was on their good days; the group who daringly brought caged titty dancing and rubbish tattoos back to rock because that's what we really needed - Whitesnake with a fucking synthesiser, although maybe not quite so poetic seeing as Ministry were seemingly aimed at people who hadn't cottoned on to Spinal Tap being a comedy. We already had Motorhead. We didn't need a version that was safe for consumption by fans of Psychic TV.

Of course, it has been said that Ministry's Twitch album was a significant influence on both Nine Inch Nails and everybody else, ever - although I've noticed this is said mostly in YouTube comments so I'm not sure if that counts, particularly as Twitch owes one hell of a debt to its producer Adrian Sherwood, as does much of the first Nine Inch Nails album; and the bottom line for me is that one of Jourgensen's four billion side projects was called Buck Satan and the 666 Shooters - I mean seriously?

How old was he at the time?

Twelve?

Okay Al, you're one scary guy and we're all terrified. You don't like going to church, but you do like to drink beer and watch bare breasts jiggling up and down. We get it now.

So maybe it isn't all the work of a gurning manchild pulling scary faces and saying ooga booga hail Satan to his mum, but mostly...

Big Sexy Land isn't terrible, but it's pretty damned average - distorted drum machine, noise, someone grunting the usual bad guy stuff in the hope of fostering tedious ambiguity regarding whether the song expresses condemnation or approval of death, murder, and stubbing your big toe; and the usual routinely shocking samples deployed in the usual way - tattoed penis tattooed penis tattatattatattatattatattoed penis, and I know it was 1986, but I was there too, and this sort of crap sounded balls-achingly obvious even then. The only element missing is the obligatory tribute to Charles Manson.

Perhaps through being no stranger to the business end of a drum machine, the problem is that I've done this sort of thing myself so I know how easy it is; but usually you return to your monsterpiece three days later and record something less predictable over it rather than slap it on an album and flog it to people.

To be honest, it's possibly not even the fact of Big Sexy Land being such a complete waste of time that bugs me so much as all those gibbering industrial rock baboons who seem to believe that Jourgensen invented bad-ass, plus paying three dollars for this at CD Exchange and still feeling like I've been diddled. I was expecting at least a few chuckles.

Nine Inch Nails - Hesitation Marks (2013)

Excepting remix albums and occasionally bewildering collaborations with lesser talents, Trent Reznor has never really put a foot significantly wrong to these ears, so I hoisted an excited eyebrow upon learning that he had not after all hung up his Nine Inch Nails costume for good. How To Destroy Angels had a lot going for them, but like supermarket's own brand cola, they just weren't quite the same. Fascinatingly enough, Hesitation Marks sounds very much a logical successor to Welcome Oblivion, particularly in its use of glitchy fragments of noise and pre-digital drum machine sounds resulting in something that could almost have come out in 1982 were it not quite so tidy.

I've always found this group - and I'm calling it a group for the sake of argument - more or less unique, and so much so as to make all those others with whom they are so often associated redundant. Listening to - for example - Ministry when you could have The Downward Spiral or With Teeth seems like choosing Green Day over the Sex Pistols, or Green Day over any group who aren't shite for that matter. Others may make similar moves with overdriven guitars, samplers and grunting noises, and it's certainly true that Reznor's songwriting is about as purple as it gets - not quite nobody understands me and it's not fair but not far short - and yet the way he puts it all together is genuinely inspired; although it's probably something fairly simple, a basic combination of imagination and actually meaning it, qualities I've never found conspicuously abundant on all of those Al Jourgensen records about being a bad boy who likes the devil and wants to do a poo on Jesus. Anyway, whatever is going on, Reznor still makes the rest sound like gurning industrial clowns; and still manages to turn out a record which could only be a Nine Inch Nails album without necessarily sounding like any of the previous seven - harrowing but catchy as some guy described them in Rolling Stone.

To narrow all that down to a single sentence, Hesitation Marks is the bestest best thing ever. It really makes me wonder why any of the others bother.