Hole - Live Through This (1994)

According to a bloke on the internet, fresh evidence has recently come to light regarding Courtney Love's supposed assassination of Kurt Cobain, the widely venerated singer man of Nirvana and the Linda McCartney of Hole. I'm not sure what this supposed evidence might be because at the time I was busy watching paint dry and found it impossible to tear myself away, but the important thing was nevertheless of such quality as to inspire a bunch of blokes on a popular social networking site to express their views, which is nice because as you know blokes on popular social networking sites tend to keep their views to themselves as a rule. One of them daringly opined that Kurdt Cobain was the voice of a generation, which works providing you discount the great majority of yoots present within that same generation who never gave two shits about the guy, you know, like anyone who ever bought a Tupac CD. If he was the voice of a generation, was he really ever saying anything beyond I want my mummy? Whilst There There is often hailed as a great album, and the success of singles like I Got A Pain In My Stummick and I Hurt My Finger surprised everyone, were they really good enough to justify the proposition that Kurtd Cobain, the Lady Diana Spencer of Grunge, died for our sins?

I would say not, and would further deny his being anything besides a modest talent - not even a member of the best Seattle band, that being Tad. He had a pretty face and was able to articulate a vague sense of whining dissatisfaction with modern life that could stand for almost anything from I done a poo in my pants to my dad sucks without alienating those who knew their period of rebellion would last just long enough to get them through college; and of course there were those natty little tunes, the plaid shirt Beatles with a fuzzbox; and onto this canvas was projected whatever people needed at the time, which unfortunately turned out to be a sort of rock Jesus for the mumbling and disgruntled when he shot himself and the legend turned all Sidney Vicious for a while. More annoying than Kurt's unexpected sainthood was that the elevation of such human sacrifices tends to require the parallel canonisation of a devil, which turned out to be Courtney Love probably because she had a massive gob and was a woman.

I can't speak for Love's actual character, my understanding of it being based on a media image that I'm not inclined to trust. Perhaps it is true that Kurtd Cobain, the innocent Queen of Hearts of Rock was led astray by another one of those crazy mad period women, forced to take heroin because she had told him it was just some sweeties or something, and that this terrible titty-witch didst rob us of a noble soul who would otherwise have remained stood to this day upon a high mesa with his hair blowing majestically in the wind like someone hunky from The Lord of the Rings, his beautiful spirit free and untramelled, whatever that means, but I seriously doubt it.

Conspiracy theory even stretches to suggest that the mighty Cobain wrote most of this album. I'll concede that there may be parallels, notably the preponderance of milk as a theme, but it's nothing that can't be accounted for by Kurdt having told her indoors all about his great day at the studio with the guys whilst she was washing the dishes, making him some chips, or ironing his lumberjack shirt ready for the pop concert. Furthermore, if Cobain was really capable of writing songs this good, you would think he might have kept one or two for inclusion on his own records.

Courtney Love may indeed be the world's most enormous cockmongler for all I know, but I rest my judgement on her music being as it exists independent of any supposed media harridanry, and particularly as the rest looks like the usual stuff where it's funny when Keith Richards pulls that crap, but a chick, man - that be fucked up.

Live Through This is probably one of the greatest rock albums of all time, in my view - a record so good that when I first bought a copy it took me about six months before I finally managed to turn it over and listen to the second side. Lyrically, it's both deeply affecting and chilling in suggesting the horrors of a less than ideal upbringing or the more unpleasant corners of human sexual politics without spelling everything out which, I would cautiously suggest, grants Live Through This an appeal beyond the Riot Grrrl audience, something more trailer home than student bar. It's the sound of the shittiest day you've ever had, but with tunes. As an album, it's so good that there's almost no point writing about it, aside from to remind people of its being good, and that Courtney Love's media presence should generally be regarded as a separate, possibly unrelated entity. I've nothing against Nirvana beyond believing them to have been somewhat overrated for a band who recorded a song about how they only wanted the really cool people listening to their music, but this is as good as they could have sounded had they been something other than an Iron Maiden tribute act.

Alanis Morissette - The Collection (2005)

Inevitably we come to Alanis Morissette, the one-woman empowering tampon advert meeting all your daily Nirvana requirements for readers of Cosmopolitan and viewers of Desperate Housewives alike, the beef curtain Cobain you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite, singing her way through the self-help section with just enough grunge to appear tasteful, and of course the woman who brought us Ironic.

Ha ha.

Ironic, as Ed Byrne, the wry Irish-themed chipmunk and professional comedy game show contestant observed, is a song without any ironic content, although you might regard that as itself ironic which would suggest that Alanis Morissette is actually fucking with us and knows more than she's saying. Whilst Byrne's routine undoubtedly comprises some of the most hilariously wry observations ever made by a stand up comedian, it's not entirely true, and he might have done better just telling his little jokes, prettily fluttering his eyelashes, and flicking his lush Celtic locks over one shoulder like the lady in the shampoo advert. Whilst certain situations described in the song Ironic may indeed be more properly characterised as simple bad luck, it seems safe to say that most of them would be considered ironic given a wider context. Rain on one's wedding day for example, whilst not in and of itself ironic, might be regarded as such after many weeks without rain, and it doesn't take hugely inventive leaps of imagination to frame the other examples given as having some potential irony. However, Alanis Morissette's job is to get over a certain level of meaning in a snappy three-minute pop song, not refute the existence of a Deity on a fucking message board, and if you can't quite see what she was getting at in Ironic, then you're probably an idiot. Little Richard's Tutti Frutti might equally well be considered gibberish in so much as the lyrics would doubtless be judged insubstantial were they to be submitted as a thesis as part of a doctorate in behavioural studies, but I suspect anyone with half a brain will understand what he was talking about.

Let's start again.

Whilst some criticisms made of the Morissette may well be justified, I find it hard to get around the double standards here - a variation on the rock classic of how Keith Richards snorting marijuanas out of a teenage vagina and then writing a song about it be some painful, frowning, manly shit and telling it like it is and that, whilst Courtney Love - or whoever else you care to mention with the same XX chromosomal configuration - must by definition be some crazy incoherent period lady castrating them menfolks on the way to the nuthouse; and I suspect Morissette's supposed loony menstrual no talent harridan credentials can be blamed upon her singing songs whilst failing to pop them out for the lads. Elsewhere we find related slings and arrows predicated on the notion that people who either read self-help literature, live in Portland, or who occasionally wish their boyfriend were less of a twat should not be allowed to listen to music because their problems aren't as artistic as that talentless hat-wearing wanker out of The Libertines eating heroin sandwiches.

It's all about the music, man, as these Mojo reading bumfaced cockmonglers themselves keep telling us over and over, and frankly Alanis Morissette scores quite well in that department. Not only does she have a reasonably amazing voice - expressive with a good range - but she knows how to knock out a tune, and understands the dynamics of putting a bit of music together. So it's all fairly self-involved, but really no more so than Nine Inch Nails, or probably about half of the music already in your collection; and whilst we're here I'm surprised how much of this actually reminds me of Trent Reznor's work, sort of a female Trent Reznor but grown-up and with a few vaguely folky, vaguely stadium trip hop touches chucked in for the sake of contrast. I'm not saying it's the most mind-blowing music ever recorded, but I really do feel the Morissette deserves significantly less sniggering from the cheap seats, not least because it's mostly hur hur hur chicks can't rock, man.

Nevertheless, excepting a hugely ill-advised Cole Porter cover to which her voice is entirely unsuited, and Mercy which is apparently from a prayer cycle or summink and thus steers a bit too close to Sting's Amazonian Experience for comfort, this is a surprisingly great set of songs. The almost absurdly powerful Thank You is still probably one of my top ten from whichever decade that was; and the big singles mostly sound even better than I remember; and Crazy rescues the Seal song from its mackerel-guzzling flipper clapping origins; and Uninvited almost turns into Led Zeppelin's Kashmir without anyone slipping in puddles of patchouli oil and breaking their neck.

Ironic will probably forever remain at best a guilty pleasure in public imagination thanks to the Ed Byrnes of the world - although it is admittedly entertaining when keyboard warriors cite it as evidence of the supposed American inability to grasp irony, given that Alanis Morissette isn't actually American - but fuck it, regardless of whatever received wisdom you may be labouring under, this is some damn good stuff.

Front 242 - Pulse (2003)

I loves me some Front 242, and I've been missing them ever since Tyranny (For You), which didn't sound that amazing in its day, but improved with plenty of repeat listening, somehow taking on the quality of a timeless classic in comparison to those two later albums named after phone numbers. Not that either 05:22:09:12 Off or 06:21:03:11 Up Evil were necessarily terrible, but aside from Serial Killers Don't Kill Their Girlfriend, I can't think of a decent track on either, and to be honest I can't even remember if I've heard 06:21:03:11 Up Evil or not. They sounded like - ugh, excuse my fucking French - dance remix albums, endless noodling around with tracks that should have been left aside from one of those crappy Alain I drink beer and I'm like really dangerous 'n' shit Jourgensen projects, silk purses turned to sow's ears as the engineer yawns, looks at his watch, and tries again for the millionth time with the snare sent through yet another effect in search of something that will stop the music sounding shit. It seemed a sorry end, not least once they began turning up to photo shoots in sweat pants and baseball caps with a rapper in tow, and not one of the good ones either. It all seemed a far cry from Official Version which, for me, remains one of the greatest electronic albums ever recorded.

Anyway, somehow I missed the more recent reunion and release of new material in the form of Pulse, but I'm here now. My expectations were low, as only seems natural, but happily I was way off the mark. Musically speaking, Front 242 were always more complex than just music for skinheads in aviator goggles marching up and down, often displaying a pseudo-classical compositional complexity, at least in comparison with all those po-faced Work! Obey! bands named after chemical manufacturing conglomerates; and it was never anything so simple as a sweaty man barking something suspiciously Nietzschean over a sequencer.

Their sheer range is amply demonstrated on Pulse which works its way through all of the variant moods which made Official Version such a momentous album, and adds some new flavours to the mix. Most surprising of all, at least to me, is the lengthy Seq666 - raw, thudding techno of the kind so beloved by disco biscuit consumers, which resembles genuine techno, and still sounds entirely like Front 242 rather than some saggy old industrial has-been trying desperately to hitch his grunting schtick to a more contemporary bandwagon because hey, it's a drum machine - how hard can it be?

Seq666 is seemingly to Pulse as W.Y.H.I.W.Y.G. was to Official Version and is as such followed by slower more contemplative pieces  hinting towards everything from jazz to church music, all held together with dynamics now suggesting Nine Inch Nails but which were originated right here - specifically those unique touches which could only have arisen from Daniel Bresanutti and Patrick Codenys - a certain attention to detail with the sounds employed, how they change and interact, a sense of precision with regard to tone and composition quite unlike the blunt instrument approach of most EBM types. Incredibly, Pulse was perhaps not only a return to form, but possibly their finest work. It's good to have them back, or at least it was in 2003 if you see what I mean.

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.

UGK - Ridin' Dirty (1996)

Many centuries ago, just before I discovered the internet and the joy of buying stuff from it, and a few years into most London record stores getting into the concept of selling mainly just the latest George Michael or Adequate Furry Animals shite - and very little else - I stumbled across a second-hand place in Camberwell, apparently mere days after someone's mum had cleared out his entire rap collection, thus meaning such an influx of golden nuggets as to cause my eyes to quite literally pop out on stalks. There on the racks was just about every rap disc upon I had cogitated over the previous couple of years, all cheap, and probably a good suitcase worth of stuff. Amongst these were four discs by UGK: the notorious Banned EP - boasting what is probably the most astonishingly and amusingly offensive rap number of all time, the sort of thing which makes Eazy-E sound like J-Live rapping about lettuce; and the first three albums, of which this is the third. Somehow, I hadn't heard too much by UGK, but I understood them to be essential listening, and I'd liked what I knew of them from their guesting on tracks by Jay-Z, C-Murder, and others. Anyway, they didn't disappoint.

I'm not sure UGK ever recorded exactly what you would call a classic album, but on the other hand I don't think they ever made a bad one; and Ridin' Dirty feels like some sort of aural landmark, epitomising the third coast sound at its height before the influence of crunk levelled everything out, reducing something previously too big and diverse for categorisation to a bloke with gold teeth telling you about his car. For those of you who've just joined us, southern rap has never really been any one thing, and has as such always sounded - to me at least - a little broader, more adventurous than forms originated elsewhere in the States, the west-coast g-funk, or one of those headachey New York types exorting us all to wave our hands in the air over sixty flavours of Roland cowbell. Like the south itself, southern rap makes its own rules.

Ridin' Dirty is produced by N.O. Joe, a name perhaps more famously associated with Scarface and Rap-A-Lot Records, and as such establishes a clear link between the bluesy-gospel roots of its practitioners - gumbo funk, as the aforementioned N.O. Joe termed it, evoking jazzy film noir soundtracks jammed out at three in the morning in smoky clubs, wah-wah guitar and soft stabs of electric piano over a deep, warm bass, all slowed down to the pace of the Gulf Coast heat. More than anything else I can think of, Ridin' Dirty is roughly what it sounds like living in Texas, hot, dry, slow, and with quite a lot of death around. It's not only a profoundly soulful listening experience, it's also quietly terrifying, as - I suspect - are many of the darker blues records once you get past the patter. UGK were gangsta rap in the truest sense, that being something entirely consistent with Chuck D's view of rap as being the black CNN. It'll probably be a while before the genre throws up anything quite so classy as UGK again, so this is as good a place as any to get yourself edumacated.

Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou - The Vodoun Effect (2008)

My experience of African culture - at least my direct experience - is fairly and perhaps sadly limited. William Bennett of seminal power electronics group Whitehouse has recently taken to recording African inspired confrontational music as Cut Hands. Some have pointed out that this may represent overcompensation for albums titled New Britain and those idiotic statements about gangs of National Front skinheads being an inspiring sight, or whatever stupid crap it was he came out with in the name of annoying liberals; but even if Cut Hands really is something other than William Bennett sitting next to one on the bus, I'd argue that it doesn't really help given its use of Africa as just another set of scary things waved in your face.

On the other hand, my eyes were well and truly opened when the British Museum had a rummage through its basement and put together its African galleries a few years back - African galleries as distinct from the crowd-pleasing and already fairly well publicised Egyptian collection. Even aside from it being the land from which we all originally came, Africa - it turns out - was never really quite the land of black people living in huts, moaning about elephants, and not much else as portrayed in post-colonial entertainment; but the image persists because the place is enormous, poorly understood by outsiders, and for every shovel of sand excavated in Egypt, a mere teaspoon's worth of archaeological investigation is undertaken in the name of the rest of the continent. It therefore came as a surprise to view Africa in terms of its archaeology and realise that it was never a land of cartoon savages, but rather was home to a great number of civilised and quite sophisticated societies with a lot more going on than we had at the time, at least until the Romans showed up and taught us how to use toilet paper. For one particularly striking example, as Janaki Lenin writes:

Farmers of the rainforests of Nigeria, Africa constructed an extensive network of earthen walls and moats. Astonishingly, in some places, the walls are twenty metres high and the moats twenty metres deep. What makes this even more remarkable is that Sungbo's Eredo - meaning Sungbo's Ditch - is thought to have been built around 1150AD on the orders of a childless matriarch, Bilikisu Sungbo (although the dates don't add up, locals believe that she is none other than the Queen of Sheba). The fortifications span 160km encompassing an area of 1400km2, the size of Delhi. Nearby Benin City has even more spectacular walls and trenches, extending 16,000km and covering an area of 6,500km2. This is thought to be the single largest archaeological phenomenon on the planet, an enterprise larger than the Egyptian pyramids. The zooarchaeologist, Juliet Clutton-Brock, believes they may be evidence of man's earliest elaborate defense of crops against elephants.

So, to swing back around in the general direction of the point, whilst I find African culture potentially fascinating, there's a hell of a lot of it and it's difficult to know where to start. Tsotsi was a great film; and I've never quite understood the appeal of Fela Kuti or that psychotically happy music they always seemed to use to advertise sporting events televised by the BBC; and that's about as far as I've got, until now.

To briefly fly off after another indirectly related train of thought, it could be argued that African art has had a profound influence on first world culture, at least depending on how much importance you place on the stuff hanging in our own art galleries. The influence of Picasso on contemporary art has been of undeniable significance, and of course Picasso would have remained just some randy Spanish bloke with the face of a plumber had he failed to notice that European painting was looking a bit saggy around the buttocks, and that those exciting angular wooden masks were just what the witch doctor ordered.

The same process has of course informed the evolution of rock and roll, and quite a lot of the music we listen to - with the possible exceptions of Beethoven, ELO, and all those Death In June bands - most of which can, roughly speaking, be traced back through rhythm and blues to traditional forms originated in Africa; and so in this collection of songs by Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou from Benin in West Africa, I suppose it's fair to say I had an expectation of hearing the pure form of something or other, or, to paraphrase Nocturnal Emissions, what the music sounded like before they got hold of it, they being the agents of the spectacle. To be fair, I had that expectation because I'd already heard a little bit of it when Kevin Harrison posted a YouTube clip of Mi Ni Non Kpo on his facebook page, and I was so impressed that I ran straight to my nearest internet and snapped up a copy of this collection. Interestingly enough, this is not actually your strictly traditional African music in so much as Orchestre Poly-Rythmo were quite happy to reclaim some of that which had evolved from the original template on foreign shores, incorporating all sorts of bits and pieces from jazz, blues, soul, funk and all those other genres which have since come to carry unfortunate associations with overly-earnest middle aged white men. Yet even with the discernible influence of James Brown amongst others, there's an absolutely unique magic to these songs. Without actually sounding exactly like anything I've heard before, this nevertheless feels like a sort of ur-music, a pure seam of the stuff in raw form in which one may discern traces of almost everything else ever - Led Zeppelin, 23 Skidoo, Motown, Can, LCD Soundsystem, even acid house - it's all here, somehow. In fact it's quite tough to think of music which owes no debt to the greater whole from which this clearly derives; and if this claim were not in itself sufficiently preposterous, it might also be worth noting that most of these songs were recorded by sticking a microphone in front of the band and pressing whichever resulting recordings sounded okay as seven inch singles. The recording values suggest early soul records, or Billy Childish, or even Steve Albini, and there's real power in that sound, the sort of thing that might be lost in a better equipped studio, or even one with a roof.

So to summarise, William Bennett likes to pull scary faces, Africa is probably more interesting than you realise, elephants are serious business, Picasso was the Paul Simon of his day, and this CD is like a better version of every record you've ever heard. After 1,076 words of scrabbling around like I've dropped my contact lenses, the review probably isn't too likely to cohere into linear sense at this juncture, so the point worth remembering is probably that The Vodoun Effect isn't quite like anything I've heard before, and is of such robust and honest constitution that it actually feels like it's doing you good as you listen. The rhythms are fantastically inventive, the instruments don't always do what would be expected of them were they playing some more familiar form, and the whole thing leaves you in a frankly amazing mood without doing any of that pathologically happy stuff favoured by other, better publicised African recording artists.

Sleaford Mods - Austerity Dogs (2013)

It seems that in certain quarters there is a generally held view of Sleaford Mods as being the next big thing, perhaps suggested by a recent write-up in Mojo or some magazine of that sort. This seems unusual in so much as somehow I've heard of them prior to the predicted enmassivisation, and that they're fucking great, in contrast to the general trend of the last few hundred next big things being mostly toss, Neutral Milk Hotel for example - Neutral Toss Hotel would have been more like it...

Already the usual suspects are queueing up to forge the definitive summary of the Sleaford Mods sound resembling a fusion of John Cooper-Clarke and the Wu-Tang Clan, which it doesn't; or The Fall, which fails to get any closer, as is usually true of almost every band ever described as sounding like The Fall; or they're punk hop, whatever the fuck that's supposed to be. I'm not sure if anyone has yet suggested Suicide fronted by Pitman on the grounds of blue-collar rude words spat out in an East Midlands accent; or Nocturnal Emissions circa Songs of Love and Revolution mashed up with Skinnyman; or Swans covering Splodgenessabounds because it's an amusing image and not much worse than any other description, but if not, you can have those for free.

Sleaford Mods build songs up from raw loops of what sound like someone's rehearsal tapes captured on a mono-portable cassette player in 1978, and a sort of Tourette's attack of lyrics that really capture the feel of turning up for agency work at a Parcel Force depot at 6AM on a freezing Monday morning only to be told the failed Footballer's Wife from said agency was too busy painting her nails to send your papers through to the gate; and so you're screwed once again. Specifically, Austerity Dogs sounds to me exactly like life in England just before I escaped, at least life for the belching majority who somehow failed to end up in their dream jobs once they left school. Sleaford Mods are not only the opposite of  anything you will ever see on The X-Factor, one voice of the underwaged and supposedly unemployable silent masses against which the British Government has recently declared out and out war, but they're one of those once in a lifetime bands - depending on your definition of what constitutes a band - of such fierce and comic honesty that almost anything stood next to them will inevitably end up seeming affected, ridiculous, and divorced from reality.

The only phone on the road is chlamydia-ridden phlegm stained,
where the fuckers sell processed peas as weed.
It's cold when I look out my window.
Another local pub burned down to the ground.
I hated those fucking Motown nights anyway.
It's Jive Bunny meets Lucy fucking Pinder...
...on ice!

To be honest, Austerity Dogs is so good as to make all efforts to write about it completely pointless - simple, powerful music and brilliant words, and I just can't stop listening to the fucker. As with the cold leftovers of last night's kebab hastily consumed on the way to work in the hope of staving off a hangover, it may not be pretty but it's undeniably nourishing.

Available from Norman Records and probably some other places.