Jihad Jerry & the Evil Doers - Mine is Not a Holy War (2006)

Apparently an entire year crept past before I realised there was a vinyl reissue of the 2006 album, which in any case I hadn't actually got around to buying because I hadn't looked close enough to realise that it was more or less a lost Devo record.

Well, I got on board as soon as I could, I guess.

I assume the lads had come to regard Devo as pretty much over by 2006, hence the slight shift in aesthetic emphasis, although not so much of a shift as to have retained the album title for the reissue. Mine is Not a Holy War - as it's no longer known - could be viewed as the Devo record bridging the gap between 1990's Smooth Noodle Maps and Something For Everybody of 2010 on the grounds of featuring all other members of Devo and reviving a couple of songs from the early years. It's probably not as good as Something For Everybody - which was frankly astonishing - but it's better than Smooth Noodle Maps, and Smooth Noodle Maps was nevertheless a decent album bespoiled by generic eighties production which made it sound like Bon Jovi. Here we get more expensive sounding retreads of I Been Refused, Find Out, and I Need a Chick alongside material with which I'm entirely unfamiliar. Find Out is an improvement, I Need a Chick probably should have been left alone, and I'm still not sure what to make of I Been Refused. It's a decent rendering but the original demo version may be my all-time Devo favourite, so I'm still trying to work out what I think about the fresh coat of paint. The newer material is, for what it may be worth, dynamite.

It's a pretty great album despite my piddling fannish reservations, giving emphasis to Devo's bluesier roots and keeping absolutely true to the rubber pants wearing mutant spirit of de-evolution. Now that Devo really do seem to have become past tense - barring attempts to flog expensive books of pictures to the rest of us - I could probably stand to hear a whole lot more from Jerry.

Quougnpt - I Worship Inertia (2021)

One section of Papal Syrup, or at least one section of what I think is the first track - although I could be wrong - features some disc jockey failing to pronounce the name of the artist, or band, but probably artist. I can't pronounce it either, although it looks like kwoffn't to me, assuming that the p is silent and because the n looks like it should be h. I haven't been entirely sure what to make of previous Quougnpt releases, despite myself having now been sampled on at least two of them, but as I primed my Discman in readiness for the morning constitutional, it was either this or godspunk volume twenty-three; and because godspunk volume twenty-three appears to feature UNIT bravely taking a stand against the tyranny of labour unions - because you know those all-powerful labour unions have the entire western hemisphere by the bollocks right now, I chose this; and rather than making no fucking sense whatsoever, I've now played it four times today. Actually, it still makes no fucking sense whatsoever but I've been listening to the thing regardless.

I've thankfully managed to forget what sort of massively wanky name we used to have for this kind of thing - we here meaning everyone except me - not plunderphonics, but something in that direction. Anyway, I Worship Inertia is, I suppose, sound collage but with significant emphasis on spoken word, and particularly on juxtaposition of the spoken word to form a narrative which feels as though it should make sense but doesn't. It's the sort of thing which sounds quite easy if you have some sort of audio editing software on your PC, but is actually quite difficult to do well, or to do this well; and although the theme might arguably constitute gibbering random insanity, it feels as though the album is having a particularly weird dream and is mumbling to itself in its sleep. There's a sort of logic there. I'm sure you're waiting for me to mention Nurse With Wound, so here it is, and it doesn't really resemble Nurse With Wound so much as the Radio 4 afternoon play impersonating an album by the same; but different, possibly.

For something so heavily reliant upon stolen lines of dialogue, I'm impressed that I recognise only myself and Chris Morris, meaning I'm probably not quite so steeped in junk culture as I thought. Greatest moment so far, aside from there being a track called Wombat Arse, is probably:

I've made you a drawing of a giraffe fucking an elephant. Notice how his mustache looks just like mine.

If that doesn't convince, then you probably should have stopped reading three paragraphs ago.

Secure yrself a copy yonder

The Cravats - The Complete John Peel Sessions (2022)

Just when you think you have as much Cravats as anyone could ever possibly need, they prove you wrong wrong wrong, again! Wrongy McWrongface from the wrong side of Wrongtown - that's you!

I had every track here, or at least the album or single versions as vinyl, compact disc, download, wax cylinder, sheet music, and runic instructions carved on traditional Arizona sandstone. I didn't really need another double album, but it's four entire Peel sessions which - admittedly - I wasn't sure I'd heard, at least not all of them. I stopped the nice man and bought one, knowing I'd otherwise only spend the rest of my life wondering.

It's strange how easily one forgets just how massive and fundamental the Cravats were - still are, if we're going to split hairs. Everything here is ingrained within my skull to such a depth that I suspect the ridges running around the inside of my cranium bear a more than passing resemblance to the grooves found on at least one side of The Colossal Tunes Out; and yet these versions were played and recorded at just enough variance as to sound fresh, not unlike hearing everything for the first time - and in hearing it all for the first time, or experiencing an illusion of the same, you notice how - really - there was never anyone like the Cravats. It's a bomb going off in a jazz factory, wrenching metal slipping oiled tracks, honking sax skidding from the overhead walkway, everything that ever happened in a cubofuturist painting happening all at once, over and over with the Shend sounding as though he's losing it, and this time for real. This was never one of those grunting eighties bands with a horn section who insisted there had always been a dance element to their sound, even back when they were called the Snot Sandwiches. The Cravats sounded like the creation of the universe, or at least of a universe, a universe which divides into those who get the Cravats, and then the rest.

You may have told yourself that you have as much Cravats as anyone could ever possibly need, but you're wrong. You need this one too.

Jolthrower - The Last Sip (2021)

 

The relationship between light beverages and electronic, industrial, or otherwise futuristic forms of music is not well documented, possibly due to the slightly more pervasive influence of meth, cocaine, and space fags; but it's definitely a thing. Few will have forgotten Watford's Soft Drinks, who might be likened to a more violent version of Nitzer Ebb but for the songs being about Pepsi Cola, orange squash and the like. Now we have Jolthrower, a fount of hard electronic noise dedicated to Jolt Cola; or at least we had Jolthrower, the existence of which has been dependent on the availability of the recklessly refreshing non-alcoholic beverage which provides both its inspiration and reason for being.

Please don't tell me you've never heard of it.

I didn't believe it either, until I found a bottle for myself. It was five in the morning and I was on the way to work and there it was in amongst the inferior drinks at 7-Eleven. The label and logo - that distinctive red and yellow flash of lightning - was printed directly onto the glass of the bottle so it seemed like something special; and the joke my friends had made about all the sugar and twice the caffeine turned out not to be a joke after all, but a promise, a vow even, and there it was in those exact same words on the glass; and I'm here to tell you, should it need saying, that it didn't disappoint.

Unfortunately, the company has somehow had a sporadic relationship with its supply chain, going out of business from time to time, shutting down, then back up and running again; and so Jolthrower's Last Sip serves as a sort of requiem to the drink's most recent period of availability as well as a celebration.

Sonically we have only titles such as The Powerful Cola Compels Me or the pensive Trying Coke Zero to establish an obvious association between the drink and the noise, but it all makes sense, the more you listen; and yes, it's noise, seeing as I apparently didn't already mention that. Specifically, The Last Sip is a barrage of electronics recorded in a live setting, screaming feedback, distortion, sine wave chaos, loops, glitches and the like, and of all things it reminds me most of Throbbing Gristle's live recordings from back before Porridge grew himself a pair of baps - that peculiar combination of terror and excitement in this instance specifically evoking the caffeine rush of the world's most powerful cola. There's a dynamic here and the sound constantly changes and evolves, taking the listener on a journey, even if it's just to the local Dollar Store. If ever proof were needed as to how noise has evolved as an art form, how far it has come, then it's right here.

David Bowie - Toy (2000)

I wasn't going to bother on the grounds that I don't just automatically spunk up a wad of cash every time I see that the latest squeeze of the postmortem Bowie udder has yielded yet another boxed set of unreleased answering machine messages, this time issued as fifteen 8" picture discs depicting the master's kneecaps through the ages and yours for just fifty billion smackers, you fucking chump; but then the American government gave me a whole bunch of money and I thought, fuck it - I'll only regret it if I don't.

Toy, as everyone in the universe knows, was Bowie doing covers of songs first recorded by himself back when he was merely a calf. The selling point - aside from it being Bowie - seems to be how much fun you can tell they were having, despite which, the label were disinclined to release it at the time.

My initial impressions were that, firstly - it was better than I'd expected, and secondly - that despite being better than I expected there's not one song here which improves on the original version. I'm quite keen on Bowie's sixties crap, corny and overly mannered though at least some of it may be, and on close inspection I realise Toy mostly covers what I vaguely regard as the lesser tracks - I Dig Everything, Can't Help Thinking About Me and so on; on the other hand, the lad revisits The London Boys, and he does a great job, a powerful rendering which is almost there, except we're talking about The London Boys, the original of which is arguably one of the greatest things ever produced by western civilisation; so although middle aged Bowie produces as great a version as you'll hear, it will never be the original.

Anyway, after a week or so of listening to the thing, I begin to get a feel for it. There are actually four tracks I've never heard before for reasons given in the first paragraph, and they're pretty great; and the rest of Toy slowly establishes its own identity as something other than slightly more expensive sounding versions of songs I remember from when I was little. So, it's nowhere near as good as Heathen, but it's probably better than Hours, and Hours isn't actually bad so why not, I suppose. That being said, the reason this seemed to cost so much is that it's the same album three fucking times spread over twelve sides of vinyl, the rest of the material being outtakes, demos, alternate versions and - ugh - remixes, none of which I'm likely to bother listening to a second time. The twelve proper tracks fit very nicely on a natty wee 10" double album with each disc in an overly informative sixties style inner sleeve suggesting we play these phonograph recordings with such and such a stylus etc. etc. - and it's all you need, and probably all Dave needed us to hear.

PBK & Nocturnal Emissions - Erosion of the Monolith (2022)

Mr. Ayers seems to have engaged in some particularly fruitful collaborations of late, and here's another one. This time he's trading drones, clangs and scraping sounds with Philip B. Klingler who has been recording as PBK for over three decades and is himself renowned for works executed in collaboration with other purveyors of unsettling noise. I'm not sure what I've heard of PBK, although I know I've heard a few things here and there, and although I'm entirely familiar with the work of Nocturnal Emissions, it's difficult to guess at who did what for Erosion of the Monolith. That said, it doesn't really matter, the important thing being what comes out of the speakers. What comes out of the speakers is, in this case, fairly difficult to describe. Drones are involved, and a distant atmospheric howl invokes a near physical space suggesting environmental recordings made on a planet which probably wasn't Earth. Foreground ripples, squeaks and rumbles drift in and out of the mix without resolving into anything found in nature, or at least terrestrial nature; and the whole is emotionally powerful, despite that we're driven to depths of feeling - something almost like nostalgia, funnily enough - for a place which exists only on this record, so far as anyone can tell; and somehow it doesn't sound quite like any other album of its kind, possibly aside from distantly reminding me of the late, great Andrew Cox's Methods.

The Who - Tommy (1969)

I realise I've done this the wrong way around, being entirely familiar with Ken Russell's 1975 movie while only just having heard the original due to the Who never having been fully on my radar; not that I ever had anything against them. I own a few singles, and still think of them as a mostly great singles band at least up until the second half of the seventies, but the albums always looked a bit messy with those faintly gimmicky titles. Listening to this, I find I miss Olly Reed's slightly flat, slightly forced singing at least as much as that of Ann-Margret, Tina Turner, Paul Nicholas, and even Jack Nicholson, so thankfully the quality of the material soon overpowers such reservations. I had assumed it would sound like a mere demo version of the Tommy with which I'm significantly more familiar, but it's really its own thing.

Tommy, as you will know unless you're very young or an idiot, is the tale of a deaf, dumb, and blind child who somehow excels at pinball, regains his senses as a fairly heavy handed metaphor for spiritual enlightenment, and ultimately acquires a cult following; and the story is told through song, hence the term rock opera. I'm sure I've seen Tommy credited as one of those many albums which was apparently the first concept album, but really, who gives a shit? Fuck off with your silly time signatures and your fake goblin ears.

I'm not actually sure how well the tale is conveyed as just music, given how well versed I am with the movie - which follows more or less the whole thing beat for beat - but it seems to communicate an emotional truth regardless, even if you're wondering why Tommy's mum - and indeed everyone else - sounds like Roger Daltrey. Against my expectation, it has quite a basic, jazzy production with very little reliance on effects, and the instrumentation is all kept beautifully clear and expressive, so much so that one would hardly think this bunch once had the reputation of being the loudest band in the world. Additionally, I've never been entirely convinced by Roger Daltrey's voice - there's nothing wrong with it, and that's what's wrong with it as someone or other said; and yet he's great here - the blustering rock bellow presumably being still to come.

Tommy includes some of Townsend's greatest, most powerful songs, in my opinion, here in a more vulnerable, raw emotional form than the version with the visuals and explosions; and although I still can't tell which version works the best, or even if there's a comparison to be made, the narrative seems arguably richer, more mutable, more open to variant interpretations in sound only. It's about enlightenment, but it's about abuse of power, and even about yesterday's underground becoming tomorrow's establishment - revolution and even enlightenment colonised and transformed into the new orthodoxy. The Who returned to that theme more than once, and it seems particularly fitting for the tail end of the sixties - and for right now, come to think of it.