The Very Things - Mr. Arc-Eye (Under a Cellophane Sky) (2024)

 

With hindsight it's difficult to miss that the Very Things really were the absolute pinnacle of something or other and surely deserved a  more strident crack of the whip, having very clearly defined themselves as distinct from the Cravats despite being more or less the same band. We had some great singles, two cracking albums - or one and a half depending on your mileage - then a sudden frosty silence broken only by the sound of One Little Indian shovelling every last penny into the chuffing Sugarcubes - regarding which I'm still feeling short-changed to this day. The posthumous missing album was interesting but didn't really feel like a missing album so much as some stuff that happened to be laying around. I was long resigned to that being our lot, and then this monster appears.

I'm not sure quite where Mr. Arc-Eye sits in the canon, or would have sat, and my first guess was that it followed fairly closely on the heels of Motortown in terms of recording. Recent smoke signals seem to suggest it's actually an entirely new album, which seems just as likely for, while consistent as what they did next, it also has a distinctly timeless sound. It's as sharply dressed as Let's Go Out with one meticulously glossy shoe still in the jazz dive - two in the morning by the sound of it - smoke everywhere. The horn section and driving bass invoke Motown without sounding like nostalgia, specifically the dark, dirty, raw Motown of the sixties when the label set vocal groups to the sort of instrumentation that gave the Stooges a run for their money. This may even be what Clock DVA were aiming for on Advantage, so maybe imagine a more muscular, more effortless Clock DVA if they all had jobs - down a coalmine, most likely. The most unexpected aspect of this record is how it blends the two very different strands revealed when Rob and the Shend went their separate ways - the driving soul of Hit the Roof or Vivarama with the growling motorbike beat of GrimeTime. It probably shouldn't have come together with quite such grace, but these men knew what they were doing.

I'm possibly lost in the moment here, but this may even be the greatest work by any of those involved, which is quite a boast considering the back catalogue in its entirety; and certainly Mr. Arc-Eye contains some of the Shend's most powerful vocal performances. I realise there's not much point harbouring a grudge thirty years after the fact, but I really would have appreciated something like this more than the oh so fucking quiet song.

VX - Minutes to Go-Go (2024)

I'm only familiar with VX as Peter Hope's pianist - figuratively speaking, the man who tickled the ivories on the excellent Kilo Price for Dead Shapes which you may possibly remember from here. His own, mostly instrumental, material - overlooking the possible absence of sounds deriving from anything much that might count as an instrument - while similarly raw and initially abrasive, is a whole different kettle of fish. It's noise in so much as there's little common ground shared with Herman's Hermits, but while my closest point of reference is probably the work of +DOG+, Minutes to Go-Go feels intensively sculptured, even structured without quite turning into an Art of Noise record. Amongst the electronic crunches, overdriven circuits, gated slabs of feedback and the like, we find remnants of what may once have been vocals, percussion instruments, and other sound sources warped and looped into shapes which seem to emerge and gain greater prominence with each listen, until you no longer notice quite what a racket it is, instead hearing something that might almost be - I don't know - a film soundtrack perhaps. It seems different to the involuntary admiration of fire extinguishers we sometimes experience at the end of an afternoon trudging around some gallery, because I don't think there's such a pronounced random element here. These patterns are surely more than shapes perceived in the ear of the beholder. Listen enough times and you'll find yourself transported to filthy truck stops in cyberspace, the medina in Marrakech, the inside of your own head, and other alien territories. Minutes to Go-Go is one hell of a trip.

Apply within.

Flipmode Squad - The Imperial (1998)

This one took a long time. While happy to acknowledge the mighty power of Busta Rhymes' tonsils, I was never much of a fan. I'm not sure why beyond that I found him a bit demanding on the ears, where I've tended to find verbal acrobats of similar thrust mostly entertaining; although it probably didn't help that there was some laboured deeper meaning to the name Flipmode which I've mercifully forgotten - some of that motivational poster philosophising that rap tends to do when it takes itself too seriously for the wrong reasons. On the other hand, I've always held Rah Digga in high regard, and her Dirty Harriet is a fantastic record; and she's part of Busta's Flipmode Squad so it seemed I should at least give it a listen. Unfortunately, once I got home I realised the cheap copy I'd found in the racks of CD Exchange was the clean version - because I keep forgetting to check to make sure my purchases have a parental advisory sticker meaning I won't have to provide my own swearing. Given that the whole point of rap is the fucking words, even the naughty ones, the clean version will always be a complete waste of time, regardless of the album. I tried, but it sounded peculiar, and musically it wasn't quite grabbing me either.

Coming back to the thing a couple of years later, mainly because I'm replacing all the clean versions purchased by accident with the real thing as a point of principal, it begins to make more sense. I get the impression Flipmode were simply a bunch of guys whom Busta considered promising and so deserved the exposure. No-one quite lyrical enough to earn living legend status, but no weak links in the chain either. It's quite a minimal album, musically speaking, at least compared to most of the rest of what was going on in 1998, which I gather is because it's an album as an album - a simple showcase rather than some grand concept (although grand concept rap albums have mostly been averagely shitty concept), thus obliging us to focus on the microphone activity as much as we would at an open mic night full of unknowns. So there isn't even any conspicuous turntable action, just looped beats, and nothing to distract from the main event; and with this in mind - it's undeniably solid. Of course, it's street stories, grandstanding, the usual jokes and complaints woven from individual voices, but original individual voices with more kinship to what should probably be considered underground than most of what you used to read about in The Source. Busta grows on you, and Digga is great as ever, but the others also shine, notably Baby Sham who, as the youngest member - so I would guess - reminds me a little of 57th Dynasty's Lil' Monsta, particularly on the confessional cross-generational dialogue of Do For Self.

It's not a perfect album, and I could live without quite so many skits, but at heart it's a shitload stronger than first impressions may imply.

Final - I Am the Dirt Under Your Fingernails (2002)

I first encountered Final back in the eighties when we both turned up on the same compilation tape. I got into Godflesh a bit late in the day - late nineties or thereabouts - and at least another decade had passed before I made the connection, that both were the work of the same individual, namely Justin Broadrick. This made a lot of sense despite Final and Godflesh sounding very different to each other. I Am the Dirt Under Your Fingernails also sounds significantly different to what I'd heard of Final back in the eighties, but then a fair bit of time has passed and this shares the same concrete-density as much of Broadrick's other work.

I detect what may have been feedback, but otherwise it's anyone's guess where these sounds originated. Mine would be that whatever it is we have here was recorded on traditional tape then slowed to a sludge-crawl to the point where even the shrillest of screams is reduced to a bass rumble hung precipitously on the edge of hearing, even the slightest variation in tape speed stretched to tonal craters in what is very much a sonic landscape; and the occasional flicker of drop-out may even be spaghettified gaps between molecules of ferric oxide. Anal Probe, who issued the compilation where I first heard Final, had a photocopied catalogue listing destroyed music amongst the vague genres in which they specialised, and I'm fairly sure that's what we have here.

That said, whatever the first thing to hit you may be when you listen to this disc, discordant racket somehow doesn't figure. Minutes passed before I noticed I'd been listening to this thing very much as music rather than merely engaging noise. The notes we've been left with are long and mournful, evoking mist, rain, and vast spaces from which life has moved on. The best description I can come up with - and which occurred to me as I was listening - was if the first SPK album felt like listening to Elgar. There's something monolithic here, something carved in stone and so weathered as to be barely recognisable, something which has left behind a sense of loss as big as the world.

Hope + VX - Kilo Price for Dead Shapes (2024)

As my Peter Hope albums multiply to the point of requiring their own shelf, here's another which somehow manages to sound like a new direction despite delivering a blast of familiar intensity with weapons from the same sonic arsenal. The distortion is, as ever, incredible, hinting at things recorded on the condenser mics of mono portable cassette recorders blowing the transistors on an ancient fuzz box someone found in the outside toilet; and yet despite this wall of audio dirt, everything remains somehow sufficiently clear and distinct for a groove. I should probably make an effort to avoid the usual comparisons with Suicide, Chrome and the like, although it may be worth mentioning that you could probably stick it at the bluesier end of the Sleaford Mods spectrum without too many objections. It doesn't really sound like Hope's Exploding Mind, or his work with Fujiyama or David Harrow, but it inhabits the same universe.

This time it's one Neil Whitehead, recording as VX, providing the contrast with, I would guess, loops of the sort of drum kit you only ever encountered in village halls when you were a teenager - all the crash and clang of the cutlery drawer - and a shitload of distorted bass guitar hogging the rest of the bandwidth, and I suspect multitracked in a few instances; so it's possibly comparable to an angrier We Be Echo - specifically the current bass heavy version - or if We Be Echo had the impact of Motorhead, it would feel something like this. The fact of there still being someone alive who would produce a record that sounds like this gives me some hope for the future of the human race.

Nurse With Wound - Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979)

My first Nurse With Wound was Insect & Individual Silenced, thanks mainly to a school coach trip down to that London and the wonderful Virgin Megastore, as was. Otherwise their work - as described by John Gill in Sounds in terms by which I knew I needed to hear it - eluded our local record shops and by extension me. We had a record shop in my tiny market town for about six months, and I recall Geoff, who ran the place, shaking his head and wondering why anyone would name an album Homotopy to Marie while my sniggering contemporaries browsed Def Leppard without actually buying anything, which is presumably why Geoff went out of business. About a decade later I had the first three on CD, including Chance Meeting, but I didn't have a CD player, didn't really plan to buy one, and ended up giving them away.

It's therefore taken me one fuck of a long time to finally hear this, and I'm sort of shocked to discover that it doesn't sound anything like I expected - although this is of course exactly what one should expect from Nurse With Wound. Steve Stapleton has said something about how he regards Homotopy to Marie as the first real Nurse recording, so this was himself pissing about with his pals, technically speaking, and was similarly distant from the insanity of Insect & Individual Silenced, for what that may be worth. The biggest surprise - although it probably shouldn't be - for me, has been how much Chance Meeting sounds like a relative of Faust and other krautrock predecessors* routinely ignored by history of industrial music podcasts put together by edgy fourteen-year olds with pierced eyebrows. Almost all of the sounds on this record are generated by actual musical instruments, albeit by unorthodox means - someone playing the piano with his arse, droning harmonium, and even a long-haired guitar solo. It's all improvised, of course, and I seem to recall reading that none of those involved had so much as picked up a musical instrument before getting this on tape.

It's a racket, as you would expect, but I've always felt Nurse With Wound made more sense as heirs to Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, and Max Ernst than to even Yoko Ono's sonic experiments; and in this context, as firmly established by both Stapleton's cover art and the title deriving from Les Chants de Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont, they work for me - at least in so much as the art of Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst works for me. As with the very best music of this admittedly general type, it established the terms by which the listener experiences it, meaning there's probably not much point comparing it to Out of the Blue by the Electric fucking Light Orchestra; and while there have been a few weirdos doing this kind of thing, with the possible exception of Richard Rupenus, no-one really seems to do it quite so well as Nurse With Wound. Alan Trench of Temple Music, amongst others, said Steve Stapleton remains one of the few people he's met whom he would describe as a genius, which I honestly think is fair.

It lives in neither the rock venue nor the art gallery as we know it today, because like the landscapes of de Chirico and the rest, this Chance Meeting takes place in some psychological realm, one which may not even have existed before the needle first encountered the groove; and, should I have failed to communicate as much, it's also a lot of fun to listen to, albeit weird, angular, confusing fun.

*: I've also been surprised by how sonically close it sits to the first Konstruktivists album - clearly a case of shared influences. Steve Stapleton and Glenn Wallis were friends, although Glenn was never particularly a fan of Nurse With Wound.
 

David Bowie - Reality (2003)

This one came out during those forty or so years when I was looking the other way, and if we're to be honest, so were most of you lot. Excepting a few inconsequential squares in polo neck sweaters working for hospital radio, people with hearing jumped ship around the time of Let's Dance - to make an admittedly massive generalisation - because why the fuck wouldn't you? Some of us came to regret the decision, while others were too busy with everything else that has happened during the last four decades; and besides, we were tired of yet another true return to form sounding like more of the approximate same, and there's not much point getting upset about it. Anyway, I eventually saw the error of my ways and so I went back, overcome by curiosity, and it was all better than I remembered, even if the ironically titled Never Let Me Down remains difficult to love; but Reality is the one which had me kicking myself, because it might even be his greatest album - if such an accolade is even meaningful.

The drums pound just as they did on Heroes, and all that excess of instrumentation weaves away in the background, almost unnoticed until you can't shift the fucker from your internal jukebox; and yes, he churned out a couple of actual good 'uns prior to Reality, but this was the one where it sounded like he meant it, and it sounded like he was enjoying himself, and it sounded particularly like he'd stopped caring about what anyone else might think. This is the one, moreso than the final two, where I suddenly remembered how exciting it used to be to come home with a new Bowie album, which was back in the days when I still had school on Monday. The new Bowie album always did a whole shitload of stuff you hadn't expected - by which I don't mean cod reggae with Tina Turner on the chorus - and it was new and exciting and you'd feel connected to something you couldn't even describe.

I still don't know what the hell this album is about, beyond the obviously insubstantial quality of modern life, and yet it affects me deeply. She'll Drive the Big Car in particular tears my heart out every time and I'm not even sure why, except that it felt like Dave understood something profound but bigger than words and difficult to squash into a song, something good, and he was doing his best to share it around.

You know that writing about music is a waste of time, right?