Nine Inch Nails - Tron: Ares (2025)

 

I wasn't going to bother given that this is the soundtrack to a Disney movie, and while I can't deny that the Trentster has proven himself a dab hand at movie soundtracks, they've rarely been the sort of thing I would listen to over and over. I never saw the first Tron movie because it sounded like a huge pile of wank, as does this one, plus it apparently stars the impressively unwatchable Jared Leto and to paraphrase Garry Bushell without even the slightest trace of irony, cyberpunk generally holds about as much interest for me as that Yoko Ono film about arses.

But it was there in the store, and the sheer novelty of buying a brand new CD by a band I like in a place of retail with a till and a cashier and all the trimmings proved overwhelming.

To be fair, my experience of Reznor's soundtrack work is limited to bits and pieces on early bootlegs. It's mostly approximately ambient and all very nice, and I know I enjoyed The Social Network without remembering anything about its soundtrack; but this is either something different, or at least if you squint it feels like a proper Nine Inch Nails album, or possibly one of the better remix jobbies - even though I'm not unreservedly wild about those either. It's full CD length and features just four tracks which count as songs and are thus part of the canon; then an indeterminate number of instrumentals, some stripped down from parts of the four songs, others seemingly autonomous but all serving to reiterate specific musical themes just as you would find in a movie soundtrack by John Barry, Akira Ifukube, or one of those guys; and the instrumentals more or less feel like songs but for the absence of vocals, pasted together from the same grinding sequencers, pensive rhythms, and wailing electronic threnodies.

Crucially it's tense as fuck while retaining a certain ruined beauty, like the very best of Nine Inch Nails - a sort of wrist-slashing orgasm combined with a punch in the face over and over and over until it sounds like the only music in the world; which is pleasing.

Still not going to bother with sodding Tron though. Nice try, Disney but nein danke.

Cosey Fanni Tutti - 2t2 (2025)

 

Here's another Cosey solo, not radically different to Tutti but representing further goodness mined from the same seam; although it brings new realisations, namely that on reflection I think I prefer her solo work to anything recorded with him indoors, or even with that other group. I'm not even sure why this should be, for clearly it's a relative. Another realisation is that both 2t2 and its predecessor seem sonically closer to the very first Chris & Cosey outings than to the later, which may be to do with either a reinvestment in gritty analogue sounds or the renewed spirit of adventure which comes with endeavours beyond a familiar configuration of people. A lot of it chugs along at some halfway point between Gristle and Moroder, as much a bubbling bass as a rhythm. With Wrangler and countless others, the last decade or so has seen a revival in what I'd hesitate to call sounds of the seventies, harking back to those early experiments with plug-in synths grinding away, and so it is with Cosey's work. In most cases, and certainly this one, it doesn't strike me as an exercise in nostalgia so much as a reflection of changing music technology thankfully losing its fixation with the new, instead favouring variety and malleability in terms of sound design.

Anyway, while solo Cosey makes great use of rhythm, it's a different emphasis to that favoured by hubby and is more exploratory, hence the continued delight in things which make a noise for their own sake - the cornet and even a harmonica on this album. I gather these pieces were composed for some kind of installation, which I can see given that they have the quality of soundtrack, a certain cinematic scale wherein even the atonal elements gain musicality by contrast with adjacent sounds. It suggests improvisation and random juxtaposition but for the fact that everything works and complements the whole, so maybe there's an element of selection. Whatever the case may be, it's at least as powerful as weather in its emotional impact - an album in which to lose yourself.

Shameful Ca$hin (2025)

 

Shameful Ca$hin began life as a conflation of the Girl Guided Missiles  - whom you may recall from here - and some former Cravats, specifically the formative line up of the same - although one of the four has strummed and bellowed in both groups. They got together for fun and for the joy of playing pubs. They didn't have a name and so for a while it was Cravats 2 or '77 Cravats for the sake of flyers, and because their repertoire incorporated Precinct, Shut Up, Pressure Sellers, Crash Barrier Dancer and others forged by that very first line up - alongside a few newies. The  Cravats hadn't existed as the Cravats for a couple of decades by that point so it didn't seem conspicuously cheeky until a reformed version coalesced with new material and someone from their label denounced the undertaking as a shameful cash in in the comments box of a live performance posted on YouTube. Legitimately peeved, the lads decided, We're having that! and thus was Shameful Ca$hin born.

Inevitably, the new numbers began to crowd out the resurrected material until there was enough for an album - a proper album on two sides of vinyl like nature intended, just as it was in the good old days, or at least the marginally less fucking stupid days. I've known Martin, guitarist and vocalist, for many years. He played me this album at his flat when I dropped by back in 2024. I was blown away. It was melodic, powerfully muscular, distinctly shirty without getting so angry as to lose the plot. It felt like hearing the Stranglers or Sham 69 for the first time and I was excited to learn they were planning a vinyl release.

Nothing seemed to happen for a while and then it appeared on Bandcamp. I downloaded and listened once but couldn't quite square what I heard sat at my PC with what I'd heard at Martin's place; but now that the vinyl has appeared I realise this may be something to do with either MP3 files or just the superior sound of music blasting from proper speakers. In keeping with the Girl Guided Missiles having been one of the few bands to form due to musical differences, as the legend has it, Shameful Ca$hin are musically all over the place, and yet so tight and so confident that it takes a while for the ears to register abrupt segues into tangential detours such as country and western. It's because this is what bands used to do rather than simply churning out a dozen versions of the same song, lest we've somehow forgotten Led Zeppelin's brief dalliance with reggae. The thing you notice, the first thing that hits you is the sheer driven power of the music - a motorbike beat even if that isn't exactly what they're playing. There are touches of the Who, the Clash, the Dolls, the Stones, others you may not even recognise, and Nowhere Fast could have been the greatest song Eddie & the Hot Rods never got around to recording, hitting you in the chest with the same apocalyptic pathos as Beginning of the End; but the album is nevertheless very much its own thing, distinguished more by its differences than whatever comparisons might be made. This is particularly true lyrically because, let's not deny it, none of us are getting any younger, and Shameful Ca$hin speak to me as a person of equivalent vintage in addressing that which troubles them without giving too much of a shit about appealing to anyone but themselves, which is as it should be. Thus they skewer pretty much everything that's wrong with the world right now, not least that it didn't used to be quite so fucking ridiculous back when we were all in short trousers; and they do it with wit, cracking tunes, and air-punching hooks.

Just when you think it's all over, this comes along. I'm not claiming that the Shameful Ca$hin album rocks more than anything has rocked before, but it's certainly in the running.

Get it here before they're all gone.

The LOX - Filthy America… It's Beautiful (2016)

 

I've been waiting twenty-five years for a follow up to We Are The Streets so it was kind of embarrassing to discover that there was one and it came out nearly a decade ago. This sort of thing becomes unfortunately bewildering once you're past fifty.

Anyway, it's not like there's been a shortage of LOX material given all three of them having churned out a succession of mostly incredible solo albums, each one invariably featuring the other two, notably After Taxes and A Gangster and a Gentleman which are both up there with Streets to my ears; but there's a certain grisly magic you only get in full with the three of them on an equal footing - the only three-man group where all of 'em is the strongest, as it says on here. Fifteen years after the previous group effort, the favoured sound hasn't really changed so much as expanded with the times. We still have the familiar glacial New York beats, and the inevitably sterling contribution of DJ Premier, but there are a couple which border on trap, notably Secure the Bag featuring Gucci Mane, without quite going the full sweaty distance to sound like they turned up on the album by accident. Mostly the beats stay minimal, grooves more than tunes but expertly tooled so even the moody minimalism sounds cinematic on What Else You Need to Know and others; and the beats stay minimal because that's really all you need. Few rap groups have even one guy who can weave a saga with the level of detail you get on this album, and the LOX have three. You could strip it all down to acapella and it might lose some of the force but it would still kick your ass. This is one of those that taps right into the core of rap, and what rap has always been. It's not always pretty and yet it remains both majestic and magnificent from start to finish. It was worth the wait.

Caution Magnetic - Fairground In My Head (2024)

 

It always feels a bit weird writing about the work of someone you know, though I try to limit myself to just that which actively inspires me to write something, as does this. I've known Eddy, the man behind Caution Magnetic for at least three decades and have always enjoyed his music to a greater or lesser extent, and there's a possibility that this may be his best work - at least that I've heard - so here we are. That said, I had an initial problem in being more familiar with Eddy honking away on the sousaphone somewhere to the left of a vocalist, so it took me about a week to hear beyond a voice to which I'm mostly accustomed as a vehicle for raucous observations from the other side of a pub table.

Anyway, having realised Fairground needs to be heard over speakers rather than headphones, I got there. Fairground comprises twelve songs, possibly recorded on a computer but not sounding like it, and with influences so broad that it's difficult to really pin it down to a style beyond that it reminds me of living in London. The opening track, In Heaven, starts on a sort of Belgian New Beat footing before turning Duane Eddy, and each track brings something new to the table, soulful horns and all sorts, before rallying around a general sound - bits of twang, driving beats, and even touches of dub, meaning the kind you used to hear all the time in the eighties. Once the bass takes to doing that thing against a backdrop of guitars echoing away into a distant noise, I suddenly realise I'm thinking of Jah Wobble more than anyone else, although Fairground is rockier than most of his stuff; which in turn gives me a handle on Eddy's voice which, if not quite in the Roger Daltrey mode, is perhaps comparable to Wobble with a bit more oomph, and certainly more range.

I'm not going to take a guess as to what any of the songs are about as it would feel a bit cheeky, but it's a ponderous blend of happy, sad, breezy, and all those other emotions, often at the same time which, backed by music recorded with proper welly (if that's what I mean) leaves one with an impression amounting to The The if they spent more time in the pub, less in the library. I think that's what I meant to say. It's honestly fucking good anyway, beautifully crafted and without anything obliging me to wear a smile that hurts in the name of diplomacy.

Pierre Schaeffer & Pierre Henry - Symphonie pour un Homme Seul (1950)

 

If the names are unfamilar, then you'd probably do better to get the background details from someone other than me; but briefly, Schaeffer was an early pioneer of electronic music, meaning mainly electronically reproduced music, working with natural musical and non-musical sounds treated or otherwise altered during playback on either turntable or magnetic tape - a format still very much in its infancy when he was working. This has subsequently defined him as heir to the noise experiments of Luigi Russolo and ancestral to the likes of Nurse With Wound, along with others with whom the common factors are so tenuous as to hardly be worth mentioning*; which is mostly just pattern recognition given that Schaeffer himself was firmly in the classical tradition. His interest lay in the abstraction of natural sounds from their sources, and his experiments in orchestrating these sounds as pieces of music were working towards a new way of hearing. Ultimately he regarded much of his life's work as a failure, from which I presume he imagined musique concrète might, through the agency of improvised juxtaposition, spontaneously arrange itself into something with the depth and resonance of Bach, albeit on its own terms. Consequently, he was scathing of many of those following in his footsteps, including Stockhausen whose work he presumably regarded as expanding on that which he himself had dismissed as a dead end.

Symphonie pour un Homme Seul is a concerto performed on turntables and mixers by Schaeffer and his student, Pierre Henry, with sounds derived from records, I assume including one-off acetates of prepared sounds - treated musical notes, vocalisation, snatches of song, metallic clangs slowed down, played in reverse or by manual rotation; and yes, it does indeed sound like early Nurse With Wound, if you were waiting for that particular reference. It's hard to see how he hoped to get towards Bach from here, but that isn't a problem for me. As is often the case with music of such inscrutable structure, its preservation is possibly essential to its appreciation in that it makes more sense with each playback, eventually accruing a familiarity which might even be interpreted as purpose. At the risk of becoming Alan Partridge weighing in on what Sir John Geilgud should have done instead, I'd suggest Schaeffer's dissatisfaction came from overthinking both his methodology and his expectations regarding outcome through himself being too deeply attached to the classical tradition. He was waiting for music which never arrived and heard only noise, but I'd argue that the minimum requirement for sound to warrant classification as music is that it has a repeatable psychological or emotional effect on the listener, which Symphonie pour un Homme Seul does, particularly once familiarity has reduced the initial novelty of what you're hearing.

Nevertheless, not even repetition or the knowledge of this having been recorded seventy-five years ago can fully dim the unpredictable succession of clipped and amplified sounds, not even as they seem to form relationships and associations with one another, so Symphonie still sounds startling in all respects that matter, and greatly rewards immersive listening. As for weirdy music in general, this is arguably where it really got started and I honestly don't know that this particular failed experiment has been bettered.

*: Fat Boy Slim? Oh just fuck off.

Wreckless Eric & the Hitsville House Band - 12 O'Clock Stereo (2014)

 

I seem to remember having formed the impression of AmERICa representing some kind of comeback, which is patently rubbish because this one came out the previous year. Anyway, I'm all caught up now and am duly embarrassed by previous misunderstandings derived from not bothering with the homework. Talking of homework this, as with others, comes with extensive sleeve notes detailing its recording and how it all came about. Ordinarily this might be surplus to requirements but Eric's testimony is always interesting, usually surprising, and a different business to reading about how Puff Daddy came to choose that particular sound. Here we read of his drive to get a live band together and subsequently finding a drummer and a bassist with dispiriting day jobs playing in a rockabilly themed exhibit at Euro-Disney, and the saga of buying an eight-track recorder the BBC were getting rid of, a behemoth weighing as much as a Mini Cooper - it says here - and the subsequent difficulties of getting it across the channel, into France, and into his home with the help of the village schoolteacher necessitating the removal of a couple of doors and a bannister. The point of my paraphrasing all this is that there was clearly a lot of hard labour went into this album, and hard labour of the sweaty kind. You can kind of hear it in the sound. It's not a record that just casually popped into existence when the wind happened to blow a certain way through a rainbow.

Eric, these days reputedly ambivalent to the Wreckless prefix, has endured long enough to have become unique by some definition, definitely not just another pub rock bloke who won't go home. He's never had the voice of someone who should be in a band, as your school pals might once have told you, but it hits the notes and swings effortless from rage to pathos to caustic wit to wrist-slashing heartbreak without pausing for breath, sometimes in the space of a single line, and all without trying to resell itself as poetry. It's the contrast of light and dark that always gets me, and his range spans a greater width than most. Witness the jaunty chug of Kilburn Lane at odds with its own lyrics wherein a man kicks his wife in the kidneys and life is but piss, rain and misery, with the music only tuning into the current of grinding reality as the chords terminate each verse. It feels as life often feels because of the conflict, moods thrown into sharp contrast by their opposites, those opposites themselves given form in the earthy acrobatic wit of lyrics often so extreme as to seem like parody but always firmly rooted in something which feels like it could have happened to you.

The contrast works across the full span of the album from one song to the next with one number chucking up in the gutter after a kicking followed by odes to women who may or may not have married extraterrestrials: The Guitar-Shaped Swimming Pool; the opening bars of The Marginal promising that the circus is in town; and breezy open-top Cadillac cruising tunes about wanting to kill people you don't like - which might have worked better for Morrissey if he didn't always sound like Morrissey. 12 O'Clock Stereo is not any one thing as a record. It's everything, and all life is here.

Despite having shelled out for a fancy eight-track, technical issues led to the album being mixed in mono, or rather two mono tracks, one left and one right - each at twelve o'clock on the dials in mixing terms; but it suits the music perfectly, decanting each song into a timelessly direct and beat driven sound. It was good enough for the Beatles, and if this doesn't sound like the Beatles it has that same presence of songs carved from the ether, grounded and fundamental, like music that was always waiting to happen.

Some times I feel I write something which gets to the essence of a record, and sometimes it comes out as something which I'm aware is probably bollocks, because the best music is for listening more than it's for writing about, and 12 O'Clock Stereo fits this bill. So in summary: just fucking listen, because he may honestly be our greatest living songwriter and we should appreciate the guy's work while he's still bashing them out.