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.

Cosey Fanni Tutti - Tutti (2019)

I've never really given much thought to who made the greatest contribution to the general Throbbing Gristle sound, beyond a feeling that it probably wasn't Porridge; although it would seem logical to assume that the ratio is comparable to how much I've enjoyed what the individual members have done since. What I've liked of Psychic TV has usually been down to the involvement of someone who wasn't in Throbbing Gristle, and I've never really understood what people saw in Coil. I still enjoy the first handful of Chris & Cosey albums up to a point, that point probably being 1985's Techno Primitiv, but Cosey Fanni Tutti's solo material has always been exceptional. I almost wore out the tape of Time to Tell when I first bought it as a single sided C60 issued by Flowmotion, and Tutti is similarly fannifuckingtastic. It turns out there was another one in 2008 which I didn't know about, something called COH Plays Cosey which I'm listening to on One'sTube right now, and I'm definitely seeing a pattern here.

Whilst I never really saw her as only Throbbing Gristle's trombonist, it seems significant that both Time to Tell and Tutti invoke the very best TG material without simply duplicating it, which isn't precisely true of what I've heard of the other three. Tutti is mostly rhythmic, with just enough splurging electronic weirdness to keep it biological, and nothing to pin the sonics down to any familiar boxes or machines; and it sounds a little like side one of Second Annual Report reborn inside The Matrix, or at least reborn inside The Matrix in a world where The Matrix wasn't a deeply stupid film starring the tall one from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. I'm assuming Gristle can't have been mostly Cosey Fanni Tutti with the other three stood around talking about cars and lawnmowers, so maybe it's that she understood what they were doing better than anyone else, or something, so her influence over the whole was the most profound.

Well, I don't suppose it matters beyond credit being given where it is due, and I think most of us have accepted that Cosey's contribution was significant by now. What seems more worthy of note is just how good this record is. It may even be the best thing she's ever done.

The Dentists - Heads and How to Read Them (1990)

The Dentists were the local big deal when I first moved to Kent, or at least they were the local big deal which didn't involve Billy Childish. Once they began to enjoy success further afield, local goth types of my acquaintance took to a degree of sneering, therefore requiring that I venture a little way outside my limited social comfort zone in order to hear the music of the Dentists and decide for myself, and once I did, I quickly realised that they were popular for a reason; the reason being that they were fucking great.

Later they apparently became associated with something called C86, which was something to do with an NME compilation tape and has been retroactively declared a movement, specifically a movement of mostly jangly sixties-inspired bands. I still don't quite see this, being as most of the C86 bands were - excepting Josef K and maybe two or three others - fucking atrocious. Never mind.

Anyway, I vaguely knew the Dentists, seeing as how they were local lads. I once spent a boozy afternoon around Mick Murphy's house; Mark Matthews put out the first ever fanzine to feature something I had drawn; and I knew Alun, their second drummer, fairly well. Indeed, I vaguely recall the grumbling amongst members of Apricot Brigade when Alun jumped ship to tap the skins for what was frankly a much better band - following Ian, the Dentists' original drummer, having been temporarily inconvenienced. Grousing accompanied the release of Down and Out in Paris and Chatham, the first record to feature Alun but I went out and bought it anyway, and actually it was a magnificent record.

Since then I've tended to regard the difference between those first two incarnations of the Dentists as a sort of Beatles-Stones thing, with softer, poppier songs giving away to something more raw, as characterised by You Took Me By Surprise - which I've only just noticed almost borrows from The Word by the Beatles; and listening to Heads and How to Read Them, I notice my Beatles then Stones equation doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Heads is a different beast to Some People, but is great for similar reasons, and is by no means a lesser record. For the uninitiated, the Dentists did that pure pop thing like a distant cousin to the Smiths but without the burden of Morrissey, having some of that breezy quality of the Monkees without it being some cheesy fresh-faced sales pitch - just consistently great songs with hidden depths and of such quality that the usual labels seem a bit pointless. This second album is notable for the peculiar key change - or whatever the technical term may be - during the chorus of House the Size of Mars, and the infectious waltz of Crocodile Tears, amongst other things.

There were a couple of later records, and whilst there's nothing specifically lacking in what I've heard of them, there seems to be a faint major label sheen, something suggesting some A&R twat may have been drooling over the possibility of selling the boys to all those Ravey Daveys who thought the first Stone Roses album was the greatest record of all time; when actually it was the wrong way round, and the Dentists were always the superior group, which goes for those Smiths comparisons too.

Einstürzende Neubauten - Fuenf Auf Der Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala (1987)

I'm not sure why I never noticed it before, but I'm beginning to think we've been wrong about Einstürzende Neubauten all this time, or at least I have. Simon Morris of the Ceramic Hobs, an approximately close personal friend with whom I often enjoy a round of golf and himself no stranger to an ear-splitting racket, recently opined that he regarded them as either shit, grossly overrated, or a combination of the two, without quite being able to put his finger on why; which intrigued me because, although very much a fan, I could see that he had a point somewhere in there, or at least a perspective. I bought the earlier albums when they came out, and yet despite having just described myself as very much a fan, it's somehow taken me thirty-two years to bother with this one and I'm not sure why.

The first person I knew to listen to Einstürzende Neubauten besides myself was a vaguely gothy art college girl who also liked Tom Waits and ended up singing in a jazz band. She would occasionally drift off into a reverie about Blixa Bargeld's cheekbones, a fixation which I came to associate with her slightly disturbing monologues about the pleasure taken in not eating much and being able to feel her own rib cage. I suppose that's art school for you. Bargeld of course ended up in Nick Cave's band, presenting a similarly unfortunate association. I'm not saying Cave is lacking talent, but I've never seen whatever it is that others apparently see in his music, possibly excepting The Mercy Seat which is as wonderful as the rest is a droning racket. All of which seems to characterise Einstürzende Neubauten as the noise band most likely to turn up on the soundtrack of a Neil fucking Gaiman adaptation; but there's a reasonable chance I'm talking bollocks here.

The realisation that comes to me after a week of listening to - and enjoying, I hasten to add - Fuenf Auf Der Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala, and the thing which leads me to think we've been wrong about Einstürzende Neubauten all this time, is that they're actually more traditional than you might realise. Clearly they take delight in the subtleties of sounds derived from non-musical instruments, so we're still some distance from the Spencer Davis Group, but the noises and scrapes and clangs tend to form something vaguely Brechtian, very theatrical and - I suppose - amounting to medieval serfs forced to scrape a lament together with whatever metal objects happen to be at hand. I probably shouldn't be so surprised. Drilling holes in the ICA was nothing if not theatrical. They pull faces and make noises, but it's still entertainment.

Here they cover the Grateful Dead's Morning Dew, and it sounds oddly like Even Better Than the Real Thing by U2, but better, and preferable to the original to my ears, although probably not so good as Devo's rendering. It doesn't sound even remotely out of place either.

Having come to this realisation, I dug out Halber Mensch and gave it a spin, and sure enough, beyond the fact that we're hearing some dude thumping plastic water bottles with a wrench, at heart it could be a late seventies Bowie album. I don't suggest this to be a bad thing, by the way, and it doesn't mean I enjoy Einstürzende Neubauten any less, but it's been eye-opening and explains the Cave association. Further objections should probably be ignored on the grounds that the worst aspect of anything will always be its stupid fucking fans.

Hero of a Hundred Fights (1999)

I'm backtracking from their EP, The Cold, the Remote, to this earlier recording, a full length album but this time lacking anything referencing the writings of Lawrence Miles. I was somehow under the illusion of the name having come from a role playing game, but it's actually a characteristically nebulous painting by J.M.W. Turner, and this information still doesn't provide much of a clue as to what the hell is going on here.

Hero of a Hundred Fights sound like free jazz melded in a transporter accident with Shellac, so obviously it makes perfect sense that the later work should be produced by Albini; but meanwhile in 1999, there was this album, just a beautiful recording so clear it feels as though we're there in the room, and not even any effects to speak of beyond natural valve amp distortion and the sound of a man screaming his throat out. The music, even at its most discordant, has the soft, injured beauty of a wound after it has healed and the pain has subsided to a dull warmth, all tied up in the staccato mathematical knots of a structure which seems to have involved one hell of a lot of algebra. There's not much to say about this one because the music has already said everything, even if it's in an unfamiliar language.

Who the hell were these people and what happened to them?

Cabaret Voltaire - Groovy, Laidback and Nasty (1991)

'Micro-phonies sounds about right,' quipped my one time friend Paul, 'because they're phonies!' The thrust of his satire - cleverly recycling the same actual joke made by the band in the title of what was then their latest album - was that Cabaret Voltaire had sold out in producing a queer gayboy disco record which may as well have had Boy George singing on it etc. etc.

Drum machines?

Bum machines, more like!

Hopefully he exploded when this one came out.

To be fair, the sight of Stephen Mallinder doing the butterfly in a hoodie with a big sporty stopwatch swinging from his neck in the video for Hypnotised is somehow massively comical, and very much suggestive of an album trying far too hard, which is why I've only just bought this. How bad could it be? I asked myself, repeating a question which seems to have informed quite a few of my musical purchases of late.

Obviously it doesn't really sound like a Cabaret Voltaire album, even though it is; but in their defence, the next logical question would be what does a Cabaret Voltaire album actually sound like? I suppose the answer depends on which one you're listening to, and it probably would have been just as weird had they dug out an old copy of Voice of America, analysed how it was recorded, and then impersonated their former selves like we apparently wanted them to. Groovy, Laidback and Nasty scores low for tapes of evangelical preachers, drums played through a flange pedal, or Mal doing that weird vocalising thing which never quite sounds like language so much as Sean Connery having a seizure.

Yushnar arwar sharwar nawurhar…

Groovy, Laidback and Nasty is house music, which doesn't have to be a problem, because 1) if anyone had earned the right to jump on the house music gravy train, it was Cabaret Voltaire, 2) I like house music, and 3) they do it very well.

This last point is what seals the deal, and which differentiates this from one of Porridge's hilarious attempts to get down with da mans dem, and specifically due to the involvement of persons such as Marshall Jefferson and Paris Brightledge; besides which Cabaret Voltaire always had some vague connection to northern soul and black music in general, particularly the sonic experimentation of dub producers. It's not like they ever had much of a through line from Led Zeppelin or Whitesnake; and when you stick the record on, it sounds fucking great - at least more convincing than all those fuckfaced baggy twats of the day, jangling away and insisting that there had always been a dance element to their dopey shuffling songs. Mal's vocal, if limited, is surprisingly conducive to what is basically soul, and the music very much inhabits its genre rather than standing outside waiting to be let in. You can already hear traces of Kirk's Sweet Exorcist beginning to emerge, so it's not even like Groovy fails to bring anything new to the table; and once again I wish somebody had told me all of this back in 1991.

Young Fathers - Cocoa Sugar (2018)

I loved the previous album, White Men are Black Men Too, so much that I couldn't imagine how they were ever going to follow it up; and predictably the first time I heard this it seemed underwhelming, a variation on the same sonic theme without whatever it was which made White Men sound so astonishing. In fact it seemed like they'd made a rap record with significantly less emphasis on the soulful vocals, which was odd because it sounded totally different the second time I gave it a spin to the extent that I can no longer even work out what nudged me towards that initial impression. What's more, I've now played it enough for Cocoa Sugar to sound at least as good as its predecessor, and what I took from that first hearing seems crazy with hindsight.

My guess as to the nature of the disparity is that Cocoa Sugar is a very different record to White Men, but the Young Fathers' sound is so distinctive, so immediately recognisable and unlike anything else - at least so far as I'm aware - that it takes time to recognise the variation. The sound is, roughly speaking, a sort of African gospel embellished with music made up from sounds found laying around on a laptop, non-musical glitches edited into something with both the musicality and rawness of early Motown. The difference is that where White Men had an additional touch of something resembling the influence of maybe Suicide, this one has a subtly different dynamic with more of a soulful vibe; all of which is frankly a fucking crap comparison, and one which doesn't stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever, but it's the best that I can do.

Cocoa Sugar is, after a couple of plays, at least as intense as the last one, and it's nice to have lived long enough to have heard this genuinely amazing group. Maybe that's all you really need to know.