Northstar (2004)

 

As usual, I'm late to the show and since recording this debut album, one of them is dead while the other lives on despite having chopped off his own penis during a failed suicide attempt, so I think I'll pretend it's still 2004 for the next couple of paragraphs if that's okay with the rest of you.

Northstar were one of a couple of west-coast acts incorporated in the Wu-Tang's extended family alongside Royal Fam, Shyheim, Killarmy and all of those guys. I first noticed them stood heads above the rest on the Ghost Dog soundtrack, then making similarly outstanding showings on other Wu-related compilations. Suddenly, a mere quarter of a century later, I rushed out and bagged me their debut album and here we are.

More than anything, Northstar have always stood out thanks to Christ Bearer, one of those MCs you could never mistake for anyone else. There's a unique skip or twang to his delivery meaning he sounds like no-one else and you can't help but listen and be drawn in. It's the same deal as you get with Paris. Although rhythms and subjects may differ, it feels similarly urgent, even important. As a bicoastal fusion, this may seem like a bit of a novelty deal, but the blend works beautifully. Where the RZA produces, his beats are cleaner than usual, less cluttered, working well alongside other material, notably the magnificently cinematic Luv Allah from Armand van Helden. We have the sort of lyricism you'd expect from Wu-affiliates over a westerly version of the beats you'd anticipate, so maybe closer to the Alkaholiks than Westside Connection - not much gunplay but no backpacking either, and certainly no filler. It doesn't jump out of the player as an obvious classic album during the first couple of plays but after a week or so I'd rate this one as at least in the same ballpark as Tical or Supreme Clientele. Christ Bearer really seemed to be a unique voice, but Northstar would hold your attention even without his involvement. They should have been huge.

Mysterious Kitchens (1980)

 

More recently reissued on CD by Klang Galerie, Mysterious Kitchens was a Terse Tapes compilation cassette from way back in the depths of the Precambrian. Terse Tapes, as you will doubtless recall, was the Australian organ from which the mighty Severed Heads didst squirt forth. Featured artists include Pissy Relay Switches, the Nobodies, Wet Taxis, Mr + Mrs No Smoking Sign, Lamington Lady, Holiday Funn, and Mindless Delta Children amongst others. As you may have guessed from the fameproofing of the names in combination with this being a cassette from 1980, what we have are weird noises recorded on cheap equipment by a subs bench of about ten persons working in various combinations under different names. Mr + Mrs No Smoking Sign may be vaguely familiar as an early incarnation of the Severed Heads, which it is, although Tom Ellard and Garry Bradbury are each involved with half of the other named artists on Mysterious Kitchens so it's six of one, half dozen of the other, and Pissy Relay Switches actually sound closer to Clean or Ear Bitten. Standouts include the Nobodies, seemingly the only act failing to share its membership with anyone else from what I can tell, who fall marginally closer in sound to early Cabaret Voltaire or Devo, for want of a better comparison; also Garry Bradbury's Wet Taxis who notably managed something of a career beyond this compilation. Primitive rhythm boxes, cheap keyboards, tape loops, hiss, and one effects pedal between the lot of them accounts for the sound, generally speaking, although there's plenty of variation, with Tom Ellard's involvement betrayed by his luxurious Pre-Raphaelite melodies which sound gorgeous even when recorded on what may as well be one of those little plastic records you used to find in the back of your talking Action Man.

One for the kids there.

Mysterious Kitchens is rough as fuck but has a joyous peculiarity that elevates it way above the standard photocopied industrial collections of its day - closer in spirit to the Residents and their like than any of the Gristle bunch; and honestly it's a lot more fun and interesting than many of its more technologically adept successors.

+DOG+ - Rural Highway [After Hopper] (2025)

 

Even given the apparent limitations of noise, they continue to surprise. Here we have four tracks, two recorded live and two which sound as though they've been recorded live - live here implying someone in the audience with a tape recorder, so it has the ambience of something released on Broken Flag back in the day with none of the usual high definition clarity of oscillators suffering in some digital hellscape. The sound, as ever, is difficult to identify beyond the roar, aside from the element of workshop percussion, drums and cymbals going way beyond free jazz into the territory of someone hammering nails or taking a chisel to something on a lathe. This kind of noise has accrued such associations that one might assume something fucking appalling happened on this rural highway, but that's never what +DOG+ have been about, and being committed to a sort of pastoralism I have to conclude that this is presented as a different form of beauty. Not everything in nature is pretty or lends itself to sentiment, which isn't to say it's necessarily ugly either, and I suspect that may be what +DOG+ strive for unless I'm simply overthinking this one.

To take a massively self-indulgent digression in furtherance of my point, some years ago I made a wood frame to cover our garden pond so as to protect the plants and fish from raccoons at night, because nothing fucks up your garden pond like a raccoon. I made the frame by bending wood into a kidney shape and covering it with wire mesh. The frame has done well over the years but is now in such a state as to oblige me to construct a replacement. One problem I didn't foresee is a wooden structure built at one end, a sort of open-ended box which rests in and covers the water where there's no protective mesh and so allows frogs and toads to come and go, built deep enough to prevent raccoons reaching in and yanking out the plants, as they tend to do. This box structure, being partially submerged some of the time, had rotted free of where it was attached to the frame.

Bear with me. I'm getting there.

I took the structure out, this assemblage of rusted screws, algae, and wood eaten away by fish, snails, and insects. It was junk, but I'd put a lot of work into screwing and gluing the thing together and I couldn't quite bring myself to chuck it out. On close inspection I found the decay fascinating, quite beautiful in its own way, and so decided it was art. It's not quite a Dadaist readymade because I made the thing, but it comes close in spirit. I've churned out a great many paintings over the course of my existence, and even a few sculptures back in my twenties - or assemblages which I called sculptures - and it occurred to me that this belonged with them more than it belonged in the garbage. It's 13" x 10" x 4", made of wood, screws, and organic matter, and vaguely resembles a model of some primitive neolithic dwelling. The form speaks to me, although I'm not sure that what it says is worth writing down, and any future archaeologist digging it out from wherever it ends up will have no fucking clue why I assembled the thing and may even conclude that it's art. I'm not planning on exhibiting it, selling it, or even telling anyone about it beyond this paragraph, but there it is. I put it together and natural processes did the rest.

Returning to the point, whatever it is I see in this piece - which is how I'd refer to it if I took myself even more seriously - seems akin to what I hear in +DOG+, and particularly in this album  referencing the art of Edward Hopper. It's neither a flower nor a beautiful sunset. It's noise and decay and relics which have lost natural purpose over time, or patterns in bark, or a storm, or things found under rocks before we've given them meaning and declared them beautiful or otherwise. The noise, the howl, and the sonic scream is a celebration, not a herald of destruction, and this is in the ear of the beholder, just as it has always been. As a celebration, there's something very liberating about this noise, almost refreshing, even if not everyone is going to hear it.

We now return you to your normal programme.

Buy from Love Earth Music.

Laibach (1985)

 

Laibach's first album has recently been reissued in a box with all sorts of fancy extra stuff. Typically I finally found a decent quality copy that I could afford, or almost afford, about a month before anyone said anything about a reissue, but never mind. The pleasure of bagging this one is undiminished. While I can appreciate their more recent work, engaging with capitalism and consumerism using the same methods with which they once dissected totalitarian ideology (amongst other things) I still feel it steers too close to the wacky cover versions of the later Residents, at least for my tastes; and although Milan Fras growling be yourself brings me great pleasure, I remain drawn to the mystery of the earlier material from before the wall came down. I remain drawn to it because it's incredibly fucking powerful and I'm still trying to figure it out and whether or not this says anything unfortunate about me.

Thankfully, my recent reading of Alexei Monroe's Interrogation Machine has answered pretty much any question I had, additionally confirming that my questions inevitably arose as a result of not having been born in Slovenia and being largely ignorant of its history. Laibach are surprisingly straightforward once it's explained, as is their preference for ambiguity even where the ambiguity leads to disturbing conclusions such as maybe they really mean it; but this isn't a discussion which is served by reduction to soundbites or disclaimers so you'll just have to read the book if you care that much.

Laibach's initial musical campaign reveals common ground with Test Dept, 23 Skidoo and the like, founded in intense rhythms and the sort of manipulation of sound heard before anyone could afford a sampler. Rekapitulacija 1980-84, issued the same year, better represents their first formative steps, with this debut as an arguably transitional album - still with someone playing a bass guitar amid various electroacoustic sounds, but they're moving towards neoclassical bombast of the kind which inspired a thousand other marching up and down bands, few of whom managed anything more than a dubious karaoke turn. Laibach here recapitulate the sound and imagery of totalitarian power according to its own strengths, its ability to reach down to our most primal selves and grab them by the metaphorical bollocks, because this approach is arguably more effective - and less insulting to its audience - than mere parody, or Billy Bragg bravely punching a Nazi with one fist while giving us a comradely thumbs up with the other. Crucial to this is what is said, and whether this repetition of noise and light actively says anything at all, because much of the totalitarian rhetoric is stripped of its meaning, leaving no identification of scapegoats (a popular theme with ideological types), nor even anything more coherent than a nebulous hymn to some kind of progress couched in retrograde terms combining early modernism with the folk art so beloved of authoritarian regimes. Should anyone still be bothered by how any of this fits together, or unduly bothered, I'll close with an excerpt from Françoise Thom's Newspeak: The Language of Soviet Communism as quoted in the aforementioned Interrogation Machine.

Confronted by the terror of nothingness which ideology brings, man instinctively seeks refuge under the wing of some tyrant, unaware that in so doing he is handing himself over to the very thing he fears. Compared with sheer nothingness, tyranny always looks like the lesser evil.

Just keep thinking about it, if you're still not sure. I'd argue that Laibach create true art of tremendous intellectual and emotional force in summary of both the essence and the sheer scale of the problems of civilisation, and if you still get them confused with Skrewdriver or Ayn Rand or any other ideology driven shitbag, then you're almost certainly contributing to that problem. I'm not saying that this record will scare some sense into you, but it's probably a good place to start.

Sleaford Mods - The Mekon (2008)

 

I make vague efforts towards not writing the same thing week after week, and I know I covered their first one not so long ago, but Jesus this, their second album, has really got its hooks in. Everything that sounded like it was going somewhere and had probably arrived on the debut outing here comes into focus so sharp it'll have your eye out. My expectations may have been reduced by it being named after Dan Dare's cartoon enemy, but as I approach the Ozempic years, I realise I'd forgotten how the Mekon once served as the go to synonym for the absolute worst fucker you could have the misfortune to encounter. At least this was so in the West Midlands of the seventies, and I assume elsewhere. The Mekon was anyone awful beyond description - your boss, someone's shitty kid, a hated relative - and I don't remember any stronger condemnation; and this came back to me as I listened to the title track at the end of side one, a shrapnel blast of wrath over the stuff described as Liveable Shit in more recent times, weighted down with a loop of Pretty Vacant, which remains terrifying all these years later and somehow sounds even angrier here than it did back then.

We're off to a flawless start with a Rotten sample and Jason bellowing toilet over and over as we build up to Armitage Shanks, which lyrically feels like early Viz comic pushed to a harrowing extreme. Another day in the gutter, darling. Forget about it...

As with the first one, we're mostly dealing with looped samples, although there's layering, some structural work here and there - so a belated hats off to Simon Claridge, whoever he may be. Thought has gone into this so it's never just a record of loops, and the aforementioned Armitage Shanks may even have borrowed a full instrumental for all I can tell. The Sex Pistols, Nas and the Who notwithstanding, I don't immediately recognise too many of the sources and nothing gets in the way of The Mekon feeling very much in the vein of a sixties beat album in its entirety, with jazzy undertones which might be smoky were they not so fucking angry. The first version of Jobseeker builds on the Yardbirds' For Your Love to great effect and I think I prefer this version, at least once I've got past reminders of all the fun I had at Tile Hill job centre. There are plenty of memories here, mostly the kind ground into the brain like the vintage gunge around a neglected overflow - pubs with red flock wallpaper and the stench of Rothmans or JPS hitting you in the face upon entrance, synthetic carpet tiles underfoot before staggering out into halogen daylight with the manic urgency of excessive booze, a violently embittered version of the swagger promised by Oasis but nowhere near so dumb or blunted. The worst of times were the best we could manage or expect.

Then we come to Trixie with another loop which somehow improves on its source, and some of the grimmest, most depressing shit ever committed to wax; and it suddenly makes sense that the Sleaford Mods have always enjoyed a certain popularity in noise circles. It's not just the element of two blokes stood on a stage with a laptop. Trixie could be Consumer Electronics but for the repeated riff from Submission. The Mekon also makes some sense of Sleaford Mods as the English Mobb Deep - grimy as fuck, cold and relentless as daily existence, and very much rooted in its own soil.

Howl in the Typewriter - Primalore (2026)

 

If you enjoy sentences like, 'Take your cunt-looking face and shove it into your dad's syphilitic arsehole,' that is a fine line between entertainment and insanity. This is but one of many statements delivered by Primalore like prison kitchen slops down those waste chutes on either side of your head. In fact it's a direct quote from track thirteen, identified on the cover as Spilling Processed Peas, although the album is just over an hour of continuous pseudo-narrative barrage without breaks, without pause for breath, and its division into individual tracks seems arbitrary. Elsewhere, Frailty Assessment Area teaches us that:

The sunset's air pollution melts ovary morning celebrations in breast wax and hot labia solvents splashing in dusty socks at cocktail parties of ass-kicking mind-wanking faith denominating a thermoviscous cooling snail in the head from the pre-fright ungulates of mutilated spastics in buried bodies seeping concrete the tourist trap entangled with incomer fashion chasers splitting the G, a coop noob move up north, even if such drink decorations exist there.

As you might imagine, it's difficult to get your head around this one, or it would be if the noise allowed you just a couple of seconds in which to ask, what the fuck was that?!? which it doesn't.

The music is a cut-up soundtrack of DIY synthpop chopped into fragments, most shorter than a second, of which some passages may repeat but I've been thus far too disorientated to tell. I think the point of the music is mainly so we can call it music because it's probably a better fit than anything else. First impressions are of a distant, more scatological cousin to Nigel Ayers' recent spoken word efforts, The Pre-War Noise Encryption Standard and Excavations in Substation. As with Ayers' narratives, Primalore almost makes sense but never quite gets there, leaving the listener forever struggling to catch up. The voice draws us into an ever-shifting unreal environment because we feel it should make sense, or should at least try walking in a straight line for longer than a minute; and yet much of the monologue may seem weirdly familiar but for the proverbial leg bone being inexplicably connected to the analgesic cyclotron bone.

However, where Ayers' hallucinogenic narrative is at least as soothing as the mad stuff that goes through your head when you're unwell and consequently delirious, this is closer to the information overload of Consumer Electronics, albeit without being quite so harrowing. Conversely, Stan Batcow's delivery is often surprisingly amiable, almost conversational, regardless of the onslaught and despite the rapid fire battery of bizarre, jarring images. It sounds conversational in places.

The text comes from Primalore Four, a magazine produced by Mark Reeve and Dr. Adolf Steg (real name - Dr. Adolf Steg), a copy of which is currently going on eBay for ₤24.50 unless you live in Americaland, as I do. Retooled as what I suppose could be termed a fulminating book, I suspect information overload is the method of delivery more than the point in itself. It's not so much that meaning is scrambled and reduced to noise as that there's too much meaning, the ultimate thrust of which perhaps leaks through during the aforementioned Frailty Assessment Area:

Everything must be perfect down the years, so destroy all art, culture and music, blow up this fucking useless planet and remove us from existence. What has the human race really achieved? We have fucked up a beautiful planet and spent billions going to a dead moon as the two percent on the bottom rung of society cause so much harm to the rest, the good people of this world.

If I've given an impression of Primalore as an unlistenable racket, which it may well be to many, that isn't my intention. Rather it's a sort of primal scream, or howl, I suppose; and whatever the hell it's saying, it's hard to keep from getting swept along in its sheer bloody-minded dedication to doing whatever it's doing, and it leaves the listener strangely energised or invigorated in a glow of recovery such as might normally be encountered after a gut-wrenching hangover or a dose of the most powerful laxatives known to man, and also some women. I don't know what it is, or even that I like it, but it impresses the living shit out of me and I don't know why.

Procure thineself a copy yonder.

In the Nursery - Twins (1986)

 

That whole thing which everyone now seems happy to clumsily label industrial music was once distinguished by an eclectic willingness to engage in experimentation while moving ever forward, as distinct from remaking the same record over and over - at least in the eighties as it sounded to my ears. Prefiguring Forrest Gump's figurative box of Milk Tray, you just never knew what you was gunna git next, and In the Nursery seem a particularly powerful example of this.

Soundtrack music, like industrial, has become a much overused term, more often than not referring to something with weird noises drifting through oceans of reverb with no obvious interest in forming songs. In the Nursery, on the other hand, developed a sound structured closely to the classical and narrative tendencies of actual film soundtracks where moods are built then subsumed by broader themes, so it's no great surprise that they graduated to film scores - here meaning the genuine article rather than curmudgeonly noises bubbling away during some blurred super 8mm nightmare.

Twins seems to be where it began, give or take some small change, although it's a logical progression from Sonority, and I obviously need to track down a copy of Temper, also from 1985. Classical elements invoke Elgar - strings here rather than samples - combined with meticulously beaten rhythms of martial cadence maintaining a certain remove from rock origins; and each element performs according to the needs of the sound rather than traditional rock hierarchy, so vocals fill a function more in line with the operatic than with Chuck Berry as part of the whole rather than just the foreground. It's often pensive or melancholy with bursts of triumphant conclusion and even the occasional splash of sunlight - plenty of drama rather than happy because it's grown up music. Twins is akin to watching a film in emotional terms, and they were just getting warmed up at this point. The charm of this album isn't immediate but grows with each play as you acclimate to what they were doing, and as it becomes apparent that no-one else was really doing anything quite like it at the time. Once again I curse that I was always skint back in the day in combination with never once coming across a copy of Twins in a record store without already having spunked away my pocket money on something else.