Level 42 - Level Best (1989)

Having bought this, I realise that I've never knowingly met one other person who ever liked Level 42, such has been my social circle. I therefore have a possibly false impression of them as existing somewhere on the Sting-Lighthouse Family spectrum, something beige and tasteful which Alan Partridge would have in his car, and of course there was that album which came with a free pair of driving gloves…

The Wikipedia page refers to jazz funk and something called sophisti-pop, but I don't care. The hits wormed their way into my consciousness before I had time to form any of the usual objections based on the presumed existence of anything called sophisti-pop, and those selfsame tunes have stayed there ever since; and yes, weirdly there were enough of them for a greatest hits album. There are six or seven on here which I don't recognise, which still leaves more than just The Sun Goes Down and that other one.

As you may recall, it's all very smooth and sounds fairly expensive, but all that ostentatiously complicated slap bass, jazzy electric piano, and pitch perfect vocal harmony is dynamic rather than just tasteful for the sake of it, with all those extra notes working the sort of profoundly emotive melodic power you usually only get with a symphony orchestra, depending on what it's playing. In other words, at least with the likes of It's Over, Leaving Me Now, or The Sun Goes Down, the thing wrenches your heart right out of your chest before you've even had chance to admire the razor crease in its chinos or the expertise with which that cocktail was mixed. I'm not kidding. The way those notes fit together in the chorus of It's Over is genuinely fucking astonishing to me, enough to bring a tear to the eye even when you haven't actually split up with anyone, or noticed the line which appears to run:

Don't look for me around this town,
'Cause I will be so far away, you'll never find me anywhere,
And I won't take no souvenirs,
No perfume, no pictures, no brassiere…

Thankfully that isn't what he's singing.

There's some degree of cheese, I suppose - the token song about a flying saucer encounter, and of course the massively futuristic Micro Kid whom older listeners will recall as having had megathoughts, whatever those were, and Hot Water is built upon that chuggy rhythm which I assume has since been made illegal because no-one does it these days; none of which seems to matter because this lot somehow made all that shit sound amazing - not so much the Shriekback of the golf course as Kool & the Gang with a rocket up their arse.

The Grid - Electric Head (1990)

The Grid somehow passed me by, which is strange with hindsight. I loved both Soft Cell and Dave Ball's extricurricular activities, the solo album, Decoder, English Boy on the Love Ranch, and even those fake house compilations put out by Psychic TV - which were almost the Grid, give or take some small change. I sort of liked what I heard of the Grid, but was otherwise distracted that year and it felt a little like progressive house; and I suppose I like some progressive house, technically speaking, but it always made me think of certain individuals who spent the best part of the eighties pretending to be Front 242, reinventing themselves with backwards baseball caps when the rave scene happened despite previously having avoided house music like the plague. At the risk of sounding sniffy, if your club experience was mostly confusion and the dance floor given a wide, wide berth, it usually shows in whatever you were trying to pass off as your - cough cough - ravemaster megamix.

Coming clean here, the above paragraph probably contains clues as to why I missed out on a few things that I might have enjoyed had I given them a fair crack of the whip; but better thirty years late than never, I guess. First impressions of Electric Head suggested my initial prejudices had been partially justified in that it sounds sort of as I expected it to sound - like something I could have done myself; but the more I've listened, the more I've realised my judgement is based on it failing to do something it never set out to do in the first place. The Grid weren't, so far as I'm able to tell, thinking house music or techno or rave or whatever. They were just making the music they felt like making, regardless of where it sat in relation to any existing scene, or to anyone else, and the strongest connection to anything else is probably back to Jack the Tab. Are You Receiving could almost be a 242 outtake, but otherwise there's one fuck of a lot of Soft Cell DNA in these beats and basslines, and particularly in the flourishes of cornet, the soulful touches, and Norris' sparsely applied vocals occasionally threatening to do an Almond. So it's just electronic dance music, instrumental pop or whatever on its own terms, and the opening paragraph is merely evidence of my own tendency to overthink things which, on close inspection, are actually very simple.

Sometimes I really wonder what the fuck is wrong with me.

Jake the Flake (1998)

I'm not sure whether we're still whining about rap artists supposedly glorifying violence or whether that was just a nineties deal with older white men who preferred their world music socially responsible and preferably well behaved. In any case, Jake ticks one fuck of a lot of those naughty, naughty boxes because - as you may notice if you look closely - he was telling it like it is, or was but almost certainly still is. It's no good asking people what sort of problems they have in their lives if you disregard the answers you don't like.

Anyway, Jake is from Flint, Michigan and has been a member of the Dayton Family at various points during his career. I don't know much about Flint beyond what I've learned from Dayton Family records, but I gather it was a tough place to live even before anyone noticed the water was poisoned but decided it would probably be okay because it was mostly working class black people holding the shitty end of the stick. Jake the Flake's debut is mostly concerned with what you had to do to get by in Flint back in the nineties, so it's kind of brutal if you're unaccustomed to such stories, but it's also absolutely real and therefore should be heard.

The mid-west sound of the time seemed to draw from west coast influences but with a harder, electronic edge - not quite Front 242, but maybe something from the next studio along with more emphasis on gospel, soul and end-of-the-line blues, and of course the rat-a-tat delivery which seems to distinguish the region from elsewhere on the rap map. This is a hard album, and powerful, and there's not much being glorified, although neither does our man give a shit about apologising for anything; and just like the Flint water crisis, as the evening news is my witness, we still haven't learned a fucking thing nearly a quarter century later.

Megatonewelle - Mirfield Pads (2022)

This is Paul Tone, who was associated with both Smell & Quim and Swing Jugend way back in the dawn of time; and I actually had the impression that Megatonewelle was Paul in collaboration with someone else, except I can no longer find the facebook message stating the case, apparently having dreamed that part; so I've no idea, beyond that Neil Campbell contributes to Crystal Airfield, the last of the four tracks.

Well, whoever it is, it's not at all what I expected given the lad's resume. Initial impressions deposited the phrase like a cross between Tangerine Dream and Throbbing Gristle into my head, but I'm trying to get out of the habit of reviews amounting to this sounds like a cross between the Swans and Splodgenessabounds or similar because it's lazy and rarely helpful. Spacious washes of sound combined with busy sequencer invoke the sort of ethereal scale one might associate with new age efforts, but this does something slightly different, hence my subconscious having been reminded of Gristle's abrasive chug. The chug is particularly compelling on the first track, Barry N. Malzberg, named after a science-fiction author I'm not aware of having read, but who John Clute describes as powerful but gloomy, a voice in the wilderness, speaking in wisecracks, which seems to fit.

The twenty-three minute Crystal Airfield on the other hand verges on krautrock with its motorik rhythm and soaring e-bow guitar, assuming it is e-bow I'm hearing.

For all I know, we may be experiencing a glut of this sort of thing right now, but being no longer fully cognisant with what's going down with the kids on the streets, I have to say it's been a long time since I heard anything like this, specifically anything which strikes me as being like a cross between Tangerine Dream and Throbbing Gristle, although neither does it really sound entirely like an exercise in nostalgia. Mirfield Pads is dreamlike, pensive, spacious, and moving. It also sounds a little bit expensive, which makes a pleasant change from the usual.