Blur - Modern Life is Rubbish (1993)

Forgive the fervour of a latecomer, but I've only just caught up with this one and it's been stuck to the turntable for about a month. I would have bought it at the time, being already well-disposed towards Blur and very much liking what they said about making this record, but I wasn't in the habit of listening to the radio at home, and whatever station they had on lock at work wasn't playing Blur, at least not until they were forced to when Boys and Girls sold by the shitload; so it passed me by because I had other records to buy and there's a limit to how many I'll pick up each month on the basis of band members hating the same stuff I hate. So with three decades having passed and me nearly one-hundred years old, it seemed like I might as well fill that gap between Leisure and The Great Escape...

I vaguely, and possibly erroneously, recall the English 1993 as being an interesting time, musically speaking - change very much in the air without yet having spunked away its promise on Britpop™ and Tony Blair jamming with the Gallagher brothers. The tail end of the eighties had given us, amongst other things, massive snare drums, Bros, Johnny Hates Jazz, pastel coloured triangles, Take That (unless they were a bit later, which they may well have been) and the idea that punk actually hadn't happened after all. I know there was plenty of good stuff going on elsewhere, but I'm talking about the mainstream, or at least the sort of thing I was obliged to listen to at work. Baggy had its moments, for sure, but it felt a little as though we were once again creeping back towards the alternative being lighting up a fat one and describing something as amaaaaaaazing, and I was getting a bit tired of all those sixties revivals when, as it turned out, they usually revived the bits which weren't much good. This was when I encountered Blur in some music paper, talking about punk rock and looking a little bit Sham 69, so obviously I was excited.

Modern Life is Rubbish doesn't sound how I thought it would and is actually better - probably a lot better given that it's the best album I think I've heard this year. The sixties can still be detected in Albarn's harmonies - part Ray Davies with just a trace of Lydon - and that twisty psychedelic phasing, but all delivered with a sharp edge and no fucker being so stupid as to suggest anything is amaaaaaaazing. So it sounds like something new even thirty years after the fact, and a long way from the sixties aesthetic as an affectation or impersonation - such as was delivered by that other lot. Even the title, purposefully and joyously juvenile, resists assimilation by the forces of consensus cool. It works because of the killer tunes - notably For Tomorrow, Advert, Oily Water, Villa Rosie, Resigned and fuck it the whole thing - and because, even if it isn't anything so stark as a return to year zero, neither is it about dribbling nostalgia. My guess would be that the point of the train set imagery just like when we was little is that it isn't pastel triangles or baggy dudes pretending to be stoned in a field. It's a big, bold negative which reminds us that, as Johnny once pointed out, destruction can be a positive act if it clears the way for something better.

Peter Hope & the Exploding Mind - 20 Speed Metal Death Threats (2023)

I'm generally sceptical of both downloads and CDRs because there are too many arseholes out there releasing five noise albums a week by such means and treating anyone who doesn't fall over themselves to bag the lot like some corporate tool who should probably stick to BTS*. Happily, there are exceptions to most rules, and in this case Peter Hope very much continues to be one of them. This you can tell by how much care and attention goes into these things - each short run CDR edition of the new download being lovingly put together with artwork, booklets and so on by the man himself as something which will remain a pleasing object even should all the zeroes and ones eventually turn to digital mush - which is where the download comes in handy. More significantly still, prolific though he certainly is, Peter Hope is always worth a listen. Not many can issue five or six full length albums a year to this sort of standard.

Anyway, getting to the point, here's another one, and if the back catalogue is perhaps a little too eclectic to allow for anything to be meaningfully singled out as his finest work, it might be this one. At least I've been playing it a lot. There are twelve tracks rather than twenty, and none of them constitute speed metal, but the title nevertheless makes intuitive sense if you're familiar with Hope's approach to his art where ideas and sounds are bolted together with the urgency of a Schwitter's assemblage - no obvious concessions to traditional aesthetics and yet seeming entirely faithful to the kind of blues which was played on a broken guitar under circumstances of grinding poverty. It's mostly electronic, although doesn't quite feel it, revelling as it does in its own dirt, crackle and distortion. This is nothing which would comfortably accommodate a barcode - in both the aesthetic and ideological sense - being genuine outsider music - not the cute version, but the untamed stuff which resists commodification or repackaging as a consumer accessory. This is a free-range noise which probably shouldn't exist given the focus groups and how many surveys we're bombarded with on a daily basis.

The Exploding Mind seems to represent a particular focus exemplified by Hope's work under that banner, although in practical terms also typically features collaborators. Mrs. Dink and Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists both feature on this album, despite which 20 Speed Metal Death Threats maintains its pace without sounding like the latest by various artists; and Warmonger - created with Phil Jones and stealing Requiem's malevolent synth-pulse from Killing Joke - is frankly a masterpiece.

Avail thineself of this long player yonder.

*: I had to look this up for the sake of making a contemporary reference rather than just invoking Rick Astley or someone else who is probably dead by now. If you don't know who BTS are, I honestly wouldn't worry about it.