Finitribe - Grossing 10K (1989)

I only quite recently found out that Chris Connelly was once a member of Finitribe, which I suppose dooms them to becoming a footnote in the history of Ministry; which is a shame because they were better than that, or at least had the potential. Connelly - for whom I generally have a lot of time, by the way - had jumped ship by the time they recorded this, their second album, and it's one I've always enjoyed whilst never quite being able to get a handle on.

For anyone who hasn't heard Grossing 10K, it really, really sounds like an eighties band who've just bought a sampler and can't leave the fucking thing alone. The way it was put together now feels a bit obvious and hokey, I suppose, at least in so much as that other people did this kind of thing without it seeming quite so brash and silly; but then again, maybe the cartoon aspect - samples from Road Runner, Muttley sniggering and so on - was part of the point. It's hard to tell, because the production is so ruthlessly clean and shiny that it could almost come from the demo buttons on whichever drum machine they were using - and it's one I'd say I've definitely heard before, that crushing kick and the crash of a snare suggesting certain angular haircuts. Digital piano tinkles, whale song is replayed on different keys, and the beat box is far too loud, apparently stuck on machine gun. It sounds as though someone was waiting for the invention of drum and bass.

I think the key to Finitribe is that they were never some industrial dance footnote, but rather were the Scottish Tackhead, or Crass with technology and better jokes, or something of the sort. The production is often a little too clean, but the record makes more sense where it dirties up a little, approaching something Mark Stewart could probably have worked with; but every so often, it all comes into focus and we hear an equivalent of the sunlight bursting through clouds effect, as with Built In Monster, which is just fucking majestic - the kind of heartbreaking pseudoclassical grandeur Foetus only manages every once in a blue moon.

Grossing 10K is a novelty album with a social conscience, silly, elegant, and chilling all at the same time; and if there's room for improvement in some respects, it still doesn't sound much like anything else.

Cosey Fanni Tutti - Tutti (2019)

I've never really given much thought to who made the greatest contribution to the general Throbbing Gristle sound, beyond a feeling that it probably wasn't Porridge; although it would seem logical to assume that the ratio is comparable to how much I've enjoyed what the individual members have done since. What I've liked of Psychic TV has usually been down to the involvement of someone who wasn't in Throbbing Gristle, and I've never really understood what people saw in Coil. I still enjoy the first handful of Chris & Cosey albums up to a point, that point probably being 1985's Techno Primitiv, but Cosey Fanni Tutti's solo material has always been exceptional. I almost wore out the tape of Time to Tell when I first bought it as a single sided C60 issued by Flowmotion, and Tutti is similarly fannifuckingtastic. It turns out there was another one in 2008 which I didn't know about, something called COH Plays Cosey which I'm listening to on One'sTube right now, and I'm definitely seeing a pattern here.

Whilst I never really saw her as only Throbbing Gristle's trombonist, it seems significant that both Time to Tell and Tutti invoke the very best TG material without simply duplicating it, which isn't precisely true of what I've heard of the other three. Tutti is mostly rhythmic, with just enough splurging electronic weirdness to keep it biological, and nothing to pin the sonics down to any familiar boxes or machines; and it sounds a little like side one of Second Annual Report reborn inside The Matrix, or at least reborn inside The Matrix in a world where The Matrix wasn't a deeply stupid film starring the tall one from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. I'm assuming Gristle can't have been mostly Cosey Fanni Tutti with the other three stood around talking about cars and lawnmowers, so maybe it's that she understood what they were doing better than anyone else, or something, so her influence over the whole was the most profound.

Well, I don't suppose it matters beyond credit being given where it is due, and I think most of us have accepted that Cosey's contribution was significant by now. What seems more worthy of note is just how good this record is. It may even be the best thing she's ever done.

The Dentists - Heads and How to Read Them (1990)

The Dentists were the local big deal when I first moved to Kent, or at least they were the local big deal which didn't involve Billy Childish. Once they began to enjoy success further afield, local goth types of my acquaintance took to a degree of sneering, therefore requiring that I venture a little way outside my limited social comfort zone in order to hear the music of the Dentists and decide for myself, and once I did, I quickly realised that they were popular for a reason; the reason being that they were fucking great.

Later they apparently became associated with something called C86, which was something to do with an NME compilation tape and has been retroactively declared a movement, specifically a movement of mostly jangly sixties-inspired bands. I still don't quite see this, being as most of the C86 bands were - excepting Josef K and maybe two or three others - fucking atrocious. Never mind.

Anyway, I vaguely knew the Dentists, seeing as how they were local lads. I once spent a boozy afternoon around Mick Murphy's house; Mark Matthews put out the first ever fanzine to feature something I had drawn; and I knew Alun, their second drummer, fairly well. Indeed, I vaguely recall the grumbling amongst members of Apricot Brigade when Alun jumped ship to tap the skins for what was frankly a much better band - following Ian, the Dentists' original drummer, having been temporarily inconvenienced. Grousing accompanied the release of Down and Out in Paris and Chatham, the first record to feature Alun but I went out and bought it anyway, and actually it was a magnificent record.

Since then I've tended to regard the difference between those first two incarnations of the Dentists as a sort of Beatles-Stones thing, with softer, poppier songs giving away to something more raw, as characterised by You Took Me By Surprise - which I've only just noticed almost borrows from The Word by the Beatles; and listening to Heads and How to Read Them, I notice my Beatles then Stones equation doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Heads is a different beast to Some People, but is great for similar reasons, and is by no means a lesser record. For the uninitiated, the Dentists did that pure pop thing like a distant cousin to the Smiths but without the burden of Morrissey, having some of that breezy quality of the Monkees without it being some cheesy fresh-faced sales pitch - just consistently great songs with hidden depths and of such quality that the usual labels seem a bit pointless. This second album is notable for the peculiar key change - or whatever the technical term may be - during the chorus of House the Size of Mars, and the infectious waltz of Crocodile Tears, amongst other things.

There were a couple of later records, and whilst there's nothing specifically lacking in what I've heard of them, there seems to be a faint major label sheen, something suggesting some A&R twat may have been drooling over the possibility of selling the boys to all those Ravey Daveys who thought the first Stone Roses album was the greatest record of all time; when actually it was the wrong way round, and the Dentists were always the superior group, which goes for those Smiths comparisons too.

Einstürzende Neubauten - Fuenf Auf Der Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala (1987)

I'm not sure why I never noticed it before, but I'm beginning to think we've been wrong about Einstürzende Neubauten all this time, or at least I have. Simon Morris of the Ceramic Hobs, an approximately close personal friend with whom I often enjoy a round of golf and himself no stranger to an ear-splitting racket, recently opined that he regarded them as either shit, grossly overrated, or a combination of the two, without quite being able to put his finger on why; which intrigued me because, although very much a fan, I could see that he had a point somewhere in there, or at least a perspective. I bought the earlier albums when they came out, and yet despite having just described myself as very much a fan, it's somehow taken me thirty-two years to bother with this one and I'm not sure why.

The first person I knew to listen to Einstürzende Neubauten besides myself was a vaguely gothy art college girl who also liked Tom Waits and ended up singing in a jazz band. She would occasionally drift off into a reverie about Blixa Bargeld's cheekbones, a fixation which I came to associate with her slightly disturbing monologues about the pleasure taken in not eating much and being able to feel her own rib cage. I suppose that's art school for you. Bargeld of course ended up in Nick Cave's band, presenting a similarly unfortunate association. I'm not saying Cave is lacking talent, but I've never seen whatever it is that others apparently see in his music, possibly excepting The Mercy Seat which is as wonderful as the rest is a droning racket. All of which seems to characterise Einstürzende Neubauten as the noise band most likely to turn up on the soundtrack of a Neil fucking Gaiman adaptation; but there's a reasonable chance I'm talking bollocks here.

The realisation that comes to me after a week of listening to - and enjoying, I hasten to add - Fuenf Auf Der Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala, and the thing which leads me to think we've been wrong about Einstürzende Neubauten all this time, is that they're actually more traditional than you might realise. Clearly they take delight in the subtleties of sounds derived from non-musical instruments, so we're still some distance from the Spencer Davis Group, but the noises and scrapes and clangs tend to form something vaguely Brechtian, very theatrical and - I suppose - amounting to medieval serfs forced to scrape a lament together with whatever metal objects happen to be at hand. I probably shouldn't be so surprised. Drilling holes in the ICA was nothing if not theatrical. They pull faces and make noises, but it's still entertainment.

Here they cover the Grateful Dead's Morning Dew, and it sounds oddly like Even Better Than the Real Thing by U2, but better, and preferable to the original to my ears, although probably not so good as Devo's rendering. It doesn't sound even remotely out of place either.

Having come to this realisation, I dug out Halber Mensch and gave it a spin, and sure enough, beyond the fact that we're hearing some dude thumping plastic water bottles with a wrench, at heart it could be a late seventies Bowie album. I don't suggest this to be a bad thing, by the way, and it doesn't mean I enjoy Einstürzende Neubauten any less, but it's been eye-opening and explains the Cave association. Further objections should probably be ignored on the grounds that the worst aspect of anything will always be its stupid fucking fans.