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.

Gavin Friday - Ecce Homo (2024)

 

Somewhere in an alternate reality, spurred on by the success of his contribution to In Strict Tempo, Genesis P. Orridge formed a synthpop act with Dave Ball, went on to even greater things, and none of us had to spend any more time thinking about Psychic TV. It didn't happen but Gavin Friday and Dave Ball would have been at least as good, and now we have evidence to support such a claim. It's been forty years but better later than never.

I half expected a slightly more disturbing Soft Cell album, but the tone and mood remain consistent with Friday's work with Maurice Seezer; although no-one could possibly doubt that it's Dave Ball twiddling the proverbial knobs given his invoking John Barry, Serge Gainsbourg, or even Kurt Weill (probably) with the best of them. Gavin Friday always had one of the more powerful voices to emerge from whatever the fuck it was he emerged from - gorgeous, and darkly sexy whilst equally liable to scare the living shit out of us with songs one can easily imagine crooned by Sinatra somehow without any of the obvious contradictions getting in the way.

As with others of his - or our if I'm being honest - Friday's vintage, thoughts inevitable turn to change and what the hell happened, so yielding reflection on When the World was Young - chilling and poignant because I'm not sure what the hell happened either. Rather than pointing out how everything is now fucking stupid (which it is) he instead ruminates on what we got right and on what should be remembered - even in the ominous yet nevertheless uplifting Glitterstomp of Lady Esquire - without squirting generic rainbow juice over everything, case in point being the sublime Cabarotica, a memory of Soho in the early eighties. Avoiding music press as I've tended to do, I've never formed assumptions regarding the lad's sexuality because it makes no difference to me; and I enjoy the idea that it ultimately doesn't matter because I miss those years before we had to fill in forms, wear badges, and pass tests in order that adjacent arseholes - the social equivalent of useless upper management material - should feel validated. Just as significant an indication of the man's character is The Best Boys in Dublin, a moving tribute to Friday's beloved sausage dogs, and I'm not sure how much more you really need to know.

The loss of the late, great Dave Ball is an enduring source of sorrow and this masterpiece is both a fine memorial to himself, and a testament to Gavin Friday as an artistic colossus whose powers remain undiminished.

Sleaford Mods (2007)

 

As you hopefully realise, the Sleaford Mods were Jason Williamson and various other blokes as required for a good five years before Andrew Fearne got involved, and they - or I suppose he - recorded quite a lot of material prior to Austerity Dogs bothering the hit parade. Some of this early stuff has resurfaced on compilations and bootlegs but will most likely remain obscure due to the legality of clearing all those samples, of which there are many. Anyway, someone has at last done the right thing in issuing vinyl bootlegs of the first four as originally released on CDR, so we get to hear this stuff more or less as intended in terms of artwork, running order and so on - which I personally find less confusing than assemblages such as Retweeted, I'm Not a Mod - Fuck Off and others.

...and guess what?

Contrary to any faint expectation you may have of ropy demos from before someone got their shit together, it's fucking great!

Williamson rants, yells, croons, belches, cracks jokes and delivers one lyrical wedgie after another with the same relentless wit and bile with which you will be familiar. Presumably unsure as to whether anyone was even listening at this point, if anything, he seems to give even less of a shit about sparing anyone's feelings. The music is looped samples, blatantly stolen without any attempt to disguise sources, but with just enough crafting and editing to keep it from sounding like punky Philip Glass; and while we may have noticed the looping of riffs from the Jam, the Pistols, even the Who on Retweeted, the choice of wallpaper on this debut effort is such as to leave the whole feeling distinctly jazzy, albeit in a moody sense with bars lifted from Roni Size, Bernard Herrmann, Barry White and others; and there's even a sample-free acoustic guitar instrumental, just in case you think you had the thing all figured out - and it fits right in.

Should anyone have developed the wrong impression, Sleaford Mods is no shaky beginning, no finding of feet regardless of being a quite different animal to Austerity Dogs. It's a fully formed blast of inspired racket, opprobrium - and even crooning - and as vital a debut as Bollocks, Illmatic, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, or any others you care to mention.

Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction (1997)

 

I've generally given anything involving Al Jourgensen a medium to wide berth, my knee-jerk impression having been formed by his seemingly recording and releasing everything he does without any sort of filter whatsoever under a million different effortfully contentious personas, too many collaborations with famous friends, generally trying too hard to be a metal goblin and pulling scary faces at the camera while challenging us with philosophical conundrums on the level of going to church is shit RRRAAAARRRRGH!!! Life is too short for that much pantomime badassery.

Yet I have to admit that what he does well, he does very well - those Revolting Cocks singles, Acid Horse with Cabaret Voltaire, and of course Lard. I've heard a couple of Ministry albums, even owned one of them for about three days. All I recall is grunting and growling, everything jammed on eleven, and samples of evangelical types asking for money. It sounded like a parody, plus it's now 2026 and I'm bored thoroughly shitless with persons younger than myself* who really need to know whether or not this record is properly industrial so they can add it to their stupid fucking list. Well, Lard is 25% punk due to the involvement of Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys who were a punk band, and 75% industrial because of Al and the gang, so that's interesting isn't it, you fucking suckers.

I could listen to Biafra all day long. He cuts straight to the bone of the bullshit which makes our lives that much worse, and he's very, very funny, and that weird warble isn't like anything else in the pantheon; and so his involvement fills the bandwidth which, were it anything other than Lard, Al would probably have stuffed full of something annoying, or at least annoying to me. This allows me a greater opportunity to enjoy what Al and his pals actually do well. It's metal of some description, tight as fuck and paradoxically no fat, chopped into sharp edged steel blocks with swarf and grease all over the place, coming off the belt at twice any speed recommended by health and safety standards. The effect is akin to being stood on a traffic island with the constant vehicular roar forming an ocean of automotive noise for an hour, while Jello bounces around like the Mr. Rogers of hard, uncomfortable truths yodelling clues as to what you might like to think about should you ever get off the island alive.

I'm sure Al is one of the good guys but I really wish I liked a few of the others as much as I like this one.

*: Which is now admittedly nearly everyone.

Mozart Estate - Tower Block in a Jam Jar (2025)

 

If I'm in the habit of writing bollocks, what follows may be worse than usual on the grounds that Tower Block excavates and rerecords more or less an entire Go-Kart Mozart album with knobs on, namely Tearing Up the Album Charts from 2005 which, naturally, I somehow never picked up and haven't heard. Our boy felt that said album somewhat slipped under the radar and was thus deprived its due, which is obviously true in my case; so here we are again for the very first time.

Where Go-Kart Mozart was designed as a portastudio band - which makes perfect sense when you listen to the music - the Estate has a bigger budget with production values closer to Denim; so I guess the Estate is an automotive expansion rather than a feature of urban planning. You probably know what to expect here, which is what you get, and yet it's still weird and disconcerting because why would you do this?

Renovating the past for the sake of the future, is the answer given on the cover, which sort of makes sense. Tower Block in a Jam Jar isn't some beardy return to the rich songwriting traditions of Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, or Scott Walker so much as an unreconstructed defense of Micky Most and whoever wrote the lyrics to The Humphreys Are About for the Unigate television advert. It's nostalgia for all the stuff you've been trying to forget, and a reminder that while those who weren't there have come to view the seventies as David Bowie and Marc Bolan giggling as they apply glitter to each other's faces, it was mostly Barry Blue, Watney's Red Barrel, and getting your head kicked in on a Saturday night. It's nothing to do with current notions of cool. It's brown and orange with rounded corners because Chicory Tip existed whether you like it or not, which is kind of refreshing. Mozart Estate embrace and celebrate the grim, and I mean the showbiz smile so false that it hurts grim rather than the artistically grim, as most vividly embodied in the cheerfully harrowing A Lorra Laughs with Cilla. This album is weird, beautiful and horrible all at the same time, and is the opposite of everything the machine has been selling you for the past four decades.

Bolt Thrower - Realm of Chaos (1989)

 

I'm not sure it's even possible for me to be any further out of my depth than with this one. I hated metal, or what was then called metal, for most of my formative years. I hated the silly logos of chrome-plated skulls embellished with either Old English or piles of twigs. I hated the pantomime scary faces pulled on stage and record covers. I hated the lyrics endlessly referencing the dullest shite known to mankind - crap horror movies, Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & fucking Dragons. I hated the guitar solos. Napalm Death always sounded like a fucking racket to me, and while I was already listening to a lot of music which revelled in being a fucking racket, it was usually an interesting fucking racket, not just Motorhead played at 750mph with the Cookie Monster barking lyrically on the subject of Cthulhu over machine gun bass pedals. Despite hailing from Coventry, a city in which I have resided at various points, Bolt Thrower naturally passed me by.

As with many things I initially dislike, I eventually came to wonder whether I really disliked Bolt Thrower, and if so what it was that I found specifically annoying. It somehow took me three decades to overcome this one, but never mind. I had a listen to summat on YouTube and it gripped me with a Hadrian's Wall of the dirtiest, thickest guitar distortion you ever heard and drums pounding at the pace of a funeral.

'Yoink,' I yelped as I leapt from my seat, 'I must own this record!' I looked in a few of the usual online places and found that this, their first album, was long out of print and therefore prohibitively expensive if you could even find a copy. Another five years passed and suddenly there was a reissue sat in the racks of Hogwild Records. I got it home and was disconcerted to discover that  it sounded quite different to whatever I'd heard on YouTube, and that I'd actually made purchase of one of those Cookie Monster records I've been avoiding for more or less the entirety of my life.

Assuming I was mistakenly remembering something by the Melvins, or Eyehategod, or one of those other admittedly listenable bands, I gave Realm of Chaos a spin anyway. I couldn't figure the fucker out, so I gave it another spin. Why would anyone record this?, I asked myself, and kept playing it because I felt I should at least make the effort to understand. Eventually, probably inevitably, if it still didn't make sense, I could at least appreciate it as a mammoth slab of black vomiting from my speakers for forty minutes or so. The bass pedal came to sound more like a synth growl, and the wall of guitar drops chords like slabs of meat onto a mortuary floor, and even if I remained fully confused, it sounded like Bolt Thrower knew exactly what the fuck they were doing - which is probably all you need; although it possibly helps that there's a track called World Eater, which is the sort of title that predisposes me to enjoy whatever the hell it is before I've heard a note. Thankfully it wasn't zydeco.

So Realm of Chaos is what the first four Black Sabbath albums sound like after they've been through a black hole, or something - so vast it's not even possible to tell how big it really is and - on close inspection - just a few steps along the evolutionary ladder from the stuff I recognise as music. Yet this also is music, just a bit darker.

Sometimes it's nice to discover just how wrong you can be.

Foetus - Halt (2025)

 

So here it is, the final Foetus record and it sounds very much like a grand finale - a culmination of forms developed over the course of the previous nine studio albums, although admittedly the mutant disco of Deaf and Ache are represented in spirit more than actual sonics. The new Foetus album - whichever one it is this time - always expands on its predecessor, taking the ideas further, albeit occasionally in a different direction; and Halt is no exception, building on the symphonic excesses of Hide and Love while marking a more concerted reinvestment in the crime jazz heard on earlier records. I'm borrowing crime jazz from some online review I saw because it's amusingly descriptive and—no kiddies, this isn't fucking industrial music. Anyway, the big band is bigger and raging harder than ever, he's growling again, and we have that seasick sound which seems more or less unique to Mr. Thirlwell, here sonically underscoring the point of The World is Broken, for one example, which staggers along on what would be swagger but for its fatal failure to develop sea legs. We have excursions into both opera and a sort of nautical folk - another new deal which nevertheless makes perfect sense - but the set is dominated by what feels like a variation on soundtrack music, the huge orchestral scores of the Biblical epic. This seems appropriate given the theme of endings - both the Foetus mission and human civilisation if the world outside the window is any indication. He's really not fucking about this time.

Did he ever fuck about? I'm not convinced. All those songs about hot times in the old town may seem the opposite of telling it like it is, as Thirlwell does on Halt, but the intensity is the same firehose of imagery and loathing and we shouldn't mistake extremes of emphasis for some guy stood on a stage pulling scary faces because that's showbiz. Serious as cancer, as the saying has it.

This one may conceivably be his crowning achievement, and certainly for something which lavishes in and so subverts familiar musical traditions, it somehow doesn't sound like anything else; and where Halt might resemble Flow or Thaw or Nail or any of its predecessors, it does so but more and better with a thousand additional shades of grey bringing terrible depth to the shadows.

This man is honestly a fucking genius.