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.

Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti (1975)

 

Excepting David Bowie and four Beatles albums inherited from childhood, my first broad appreciation of music was punk rock and the weirdy electronic noise which seemed to share its general spirit. I came to Led Zeppelin late, never having heard them on the radio and being naturally suspicious of anything embraced by the hairies with which I shared a school and a rural hometown, assuming it was probably all pretty much the same deal as Whitesnake; although I actually enjoyed Iron Maiden on the quiet, for whatever that may be worth. I finally popped my Led Zeppelin cherry, so to speak, in 1988, prior to which I hadn't knowingly heard so much as a note of their music. My friend and (at the time) downstairs neighbour Martin gave me this double album, having found a ratty looking copy in Oxfam or somewhere and taken it upon himself to repair the sleeve and clean up the two discs. He already owned the album but didn't like the idea of there being an unloved copy somewhere in the world.

'Thanks,' I probably said without obvious sincerity while not wishing to appear ungrateful, then listened to it mainly so I could at least tell him I'd done so before tactfully explaining that it really wasn't the sort of thing I enjoyed.

The first massive surprise was that it didn't sound anything like I'd expected. It sounded so raw and loud, yet without mere volume being a consideration, that it seemed like the band were hammering away right there in the corner of my damp bedsit. The second massive surprise was that I really, really liked what I was hearing. The emphasis was on the music and the interaction of those playing it. It had some of the raw energy of punk with bluesy touches, but not the sort of blues I'd come to associate with late night dullards, and while there was instrumental noodling aplenty, it all seemed to have a point - none of that widdly-widdly histrionic bollocks which always sounded like some twat trying hard to impress his mates. It didn't sound like anyone was wearing a cut off denim jacket with Judas Preist or Angle Witch tattooed on the back in leaky ballpoint; and above all, it didn't sound old, like a relic of times been and gone. Somehow it seemed marginally closer to David Bowie than all that other stuff.

More than three decades later, it still sounds fresh to me, still with that early morning sparkle of a clear blue sky, no fat, no stodge, no blubbery indulgence or congratulating ourselves at what bad boys we are; and for a group who pointedly stuck to albums in the expectation of you giving it your most serious attention, they're kind of populist with big, big tunes cranked out in heavy, heavy chords, and yet nothing which quite sounds like a run through of whatever anyone else had been doing. For something which was, at the very best, merely adjacent to prog rock, few of the songs truly follow any established structure, each going its own direction and taking whichever path seems to work.  So instead of fifteen grunting anthems to shagging while drunk in charge of a motorcycle, we have songs as soundtracks with instruments unheard on rock records of the time, the pensive neoclassical grandeur of Kashmir, blues for standing stones, the Biblical epic of In My Time of Dying, and even a spot of country. For one of those bands routinely described as the fathers of this, that and the other, they were almost entirely their own unique entity.

Severed Heads - Come Visit the Big Bigot (1986)

 

...or just The Big Bigot as was its initial Australian release. One thing I've taken from conversations with Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists, and which has stayed with me, is the importance of layering when mixing a record. Glenn had strong opinions on mixing, often insisting greater effect was to be had with certain sounds or instruments some way down in the mix, half heard and not always obvious on first listen. This, as I've found, gives the ear more to work with, achieving effects and juxtapositions which you just don't get with the bog standard mix which strives to leave everything on more or less equal footing in the overall sound, and which is usually the mix for which everyone else will settle. Part of this is simply paying attention to the treatment of the original sounds so as to avoid music from which you can identify the exact synth, drum machine or whatever within the first minute of listening - which is how Depeche Mode have always sounded to me, at least before the leather trousers.

Anyway, whatever the fuck it is I'm referring to has one of the most powerful demonstrations of its validity in the back catalogue of the Severed Heads, and particularly on this record, possibly their greatest to my ears, although it's a tough choice between this, Haul Ass, Rotund For Success, and er… probably seven or eight others.

The Big Bigot is, I suppose, synthpop by virtue of tunes, song structure, lyrics and so on, and these are songs which really tear your fucking heart out; yet it's often difficult to tell what the Severed Heads were doing that apparently no-one else has considered. Beyond the bass, the rhythm, the pensive yet arrestingly cheery melody, there's all sorts of sampled or looped clutter in the mix gurgling away, and yet none of it sounds arbitrary. Somehow the whole always blends into something so beautifully arranged as to suggest old masters more than abstract expressionism, as it probably should. It's that deal with a tornado blowing through a scrap yard to assemble a jumbo jet, and I can only assume that an approach similar to that described by Glenn Wallis must be responsible. It feels as though random elements have worked together to carve out songs equivalent to Plato's perfect solids, compositions existing in the subatomic underpinnings of the universe channelled and brought into being by Tom Ellard and occasional pals. There's nothing here to remind you of anyone else or how anyone else works, nor anything that anyone else has been able to duplicate. I've been listening to this record for more than thirty years and I didn't even realise there's a Clapton cover on side two.

So what does it sound like, given that the above is probably less than helpful as descriptions go. Confidence! sounds like being trapped in the head of a terminally lovesick teenager with a near death experience for a chorus. Harold & Cindy Hospital begins as big band for malicious elephants and ends up getting Raptured in the evangelical sense. Legion is the most terrifying song you've ever heard that doesn't involve either distorted guitars or metal types pulling faces - it really feels like it's coming for you. I don't know, and I'm not even sure what the songs are about, but there's something Biblical going on in this unnerving euphoria threaded through with something weird and dark, almost old testament, without having delivered any of the cues which might usually lead to such conclusions. It shouldn't work, but it does, and it's genuinely glorious. If Legion doesn't bring a lump to your throat at the very least, are you even alive?

Nitzer Ebb - Showtime (1990)

 

The further we travel, the stranger they seem with the accumulation of hindsight; or if not strange - at least not how the Residents were strange - then not very much like what they seemed to be at the time. Beyond the sounds coming from boxes with plugs rather than boxes with strings, I suppose it comes down to mostly haircuts and graphics which kept Nitzer Ebb in the same corner of the record store as Borghesia and all those other marching up and down bands. Maybe there's a certain shared attitude expressed as a love of frowning, but such characteristics arguably extend the arbitrary field to everyone else from here to Led Zeppelin - although Showtime shares more common ground with Physical Graffiti than with whatever the hell Borghesia did, for what that may be worth.

They've freely admitted to starting out with sequencers because they couldn't be arsed learning guitar, and so inevitably first took to the stage as a sort of council estate version of DAF, more violent than hypnotic. As their sound developed, the mania remained the constant, and so the second album moved away from music sounding quite so obviously like the machinery from which it had been generated, bass deepening to a subsonic pseudo-organic rumble contrasting with the factory noise. Showtime went a step further, bringing in sounds and rhythms which seemed more in keeping with jazz and blues records, still stomping away but as a hybrid, like a sound trying to escape its own limitations. The reason none of this struck anyone as peculiar is, I presume, because the smoky menace and basement grind were there all along, but initially limited to Doug's harrowing vocal forever on the point of losing control.

Showtime seemed to slip past the post without much notice at the time, but you can tell it was the album before the one that sounded like Queen and the progression makes perfect sense. It lurches and growls with rockabilly intensity as the music fights itself, the swing and the drunken sway straining against electronics as precise and deadly as ECT; and the crazy thing is this wasn't even their best album, not by some way.

I actually wrote this about a month ago. The timing is just tragic coincidence.

Ringo Starr - Ringo the 4th (1977)

 

While did the reviewer even listen to the record customarily serves as the feeble defense of those who wouldn't recognise good music without the application of some sort of response conditioned by electrodes and positive reinforcement, no cliché is ever entirely without some moment at which it briefly applies with thermonuclear conviction, and that's what the fuck we have here. Google searches for this album will summon the same shitty review rephrased over and over and over amounting to another hilariously terrible failure by the guy who made tea for John, Paul, and George, even more worthless than the previous album, and that was bollocks…

I don't know what people really ever expected from Ringo given that he wasn't actually John, Paul, or George disguised with sunglasses and a fake hooter, so the routine criticism of his having  yet again failed to record either Band on the Run or Mind Games seems extraordinarily redundant and even unfair. This one is alternately either a dinosaur-rock artefact or Ringo climbing aboard the booty-shaking bandwagon with all the grace of a rhinoceros mounting a swan, and I'm sure there are others out there if you can be arsed to look.

Anyway, as the title implies, it's Starr's fourth solo album, excluding two covers collections released while he was still a Beatle, and honestly a significant improvement on Ringo's Rotogravure which had followed the warmed over Beatlisms just a little too far down the trail into easy listening territory, possibly hoping guest spots from famous friends might compensate for any shortfall. Ringo the 4th, once you're able to hear past its failure to chart - which I realise doubtless spoils it for many - is accordingly more upfront and strident, borrowing from both Motown and disco, most likely because that was what was happening at clubs and parties, and our man was spending a lot of time at clubs and parties due to his being Ringo. It's not hard to understand.

Without calling in favours from McCartney, Clapton, or any of the usual suspects, the record at least doesn't feel like an ex-Beatle holding on for dear life, and if it fails to work as the greatest album ever recorded, it fails on its own terms. It's mainstream, but not really MOR, and efficiently rather than over-produced. You already know what Ringo sounds like, and that's how he sounds here, so unless you were expecting Bauhaus then there shouldn't be a problem. It rocks in the right places and features a good quota of cracking tunes; it chugs in the right places; as Ringo's disco album I'm not convinced it isn't actually better than Bowie's disco album; and there's something genuinely warm and soulful in these songs, if you can just make the effort to get the fuck over yourself.

Andy Bolus of Evil Moisture told me about visiting his friend Roro Perrot Vomir. They were listening to this record and Andy asked why Ringo had a woman sat on his shoulders on the cover.

Because he's Ringo, Roro replied. He can do what the fuck he likes. This album was Ringo doing what the fuck he likes, and whatever you hear probably says more about you than it does about himself.

Finitribe - Noise, Lust and Fun (1988)

 

Advanced apologies for the spelling but I just can't see Finitribe as two words. Anyway, having had my nuts quite literally blown off by Electrolux, which was on one of those Funky Alternatives records, I immediately ran to my local high street record retailer and made purchase of Finitribe's Grossing 10K. Apparently this was the one I should have bought, which I didn't because I had no idea that it existed until fairly recently. Therefore D'oh!

While Grossing 10K is largely great, it sounds like the Art of Noise had they not been formed by members of Cambridge University's Important Music Faculty now that I've heard its predecessor. This one is a lot more free-range and bubbles with the sound of people trying things out to see what happens rather than trying what someone else already did to see if it sounds the same. The easiest and probably laziest comparison to make is with formative Tackhead, at least rhythmically, but with pseudo-classical touches and bits of cabaret contributing to a whole which sounds more tribal than anything. Annie Anxiety is on here, along with the legendary Jess Hopkins of the Iron Brotherhood and, so I presume, Chris Connelly before all that industrial metal stuff, so it seems a potent mix of talents which proves at least as weirdly fascinating as you would hope. There's plenty of sampling, but not enough to plant toes on common ground shared with the aforementioned Art of Noise, and a lot of it works very well as soundtrack music with tribal grooves rumbling on beneath some fucking beautiful and powerfully emotive piano. Another year later and everyone would be pulling on their combat boots and pretending to be futuristic robots, but this is an insight into what you could do with this kind of tech before the usual cultural feedback loops swamped all originality and sense of adventure.

Missy Elliott - The Cookbook (2005)

 

Excepting Tinchy Stryder and those who came in sideways from either garage or hanging out with Calvin Harris, I've generally thought of rap-rave hybrids as an abomination based on Missy's reasonable but disappointing So Addictive and Puffy's rave album - which was ill-advised even by his standards. It feels like good ideas retooled for a shitty weekend in Blackpool, music for Jersey Shore-based ennatainment sponges, and so I picked this up out of a sense of loyalty more than anything because how bad could it be?

It seems I'd missed a couple of albums in the wake of So Addictive during which she apparently got her shit together with a few overdue reminders of where rap came from. So by the time we get to this one we're back in business against all my expectations, which is one hell of a relief. At first it sounds like an exercise in nostalgia with contemporary (as of twenty years ago) touches, but it spreads and grows and becomes very much its own thing. The old school affectations are upfront with guest spots from Slick Rick among other less obvious choices, borrowing Apache from the Incredible Bongo Band via Sugarhill, and backtracking the rave element to the bass music spawned by Planet Rock, saving ecstacy references from referring entirely to things other than the experience of being very, very, very happy about something; so the whole is more of an homage than doing a Showaddywaddy in rap terms. The production sparkles with feeling in keeping with the culinary metaphors for music as soul food with the usually ubiquitous Timbaland taking a back seat, leaving the left field squelch and crunk to the Neptunes and others, notably Rich Harrison who is still chucking a drum kit down a fire escape and somehow turning it into the funkiest fucking thing on Earth*; a dynamic which is powerfully echoed on Bad Man, also featuring Vybez Cartel and which feels like getting caught in the world's worst hailstorm, but with timpanis and kettle drums instead of wee lumps of ice. Even with all this technological overload, much of The Cookbook excels in its simplicity, reminding us that rap can be just a rock hard beat with lyrics and the occasional hoot of a horn section.

The Cookbook is more or less a perfect album, one of those that feels like it does you good as you listen; and being as she hasn't released much since, maybe Missy thought so too, possibly realising she'd never be able to top this; also meaning I get to be down with the yoots dem by writing about the latest album from, even though it came out two decades ago. Missy always had a fantastic voice and things to be said, should that need stating, and here's where she said them best.

*: I say still because I've only just heard this album, although to be fair Rich Harrison spent much of 2005 chucking a drum kit down a fire escape and somehow turning it into the funkiest fucking thing on Earth.

Jethro Tull - Benefit (1970)

Having already grimaced at length on the subject of my tenuous relationship with Jethro Tull back in 2021, I'll add only that my current working theory is that you're probably safe with anything recorded prior to 1973, beyond which it begins to feel like school at the weekend. Benefit, picked up cheap out of curiosity mainly because it was there, seems to support this theory. It arguably lacks the manic energy of This Was, and those Open University maths modules were beginning to make themselves felt in the composition, but it hasn't yet turned into something with which to beat listeners over the head. They had spent a lot of time on tour in the US with Led Zeppelin and the like, and the influence of this excursion is felt in songs turning out extra-English. We still have something of the influence of jazz, blues, folk and the rest, with everything blended so finely as to have become its own flavour with occasional Renaissance frills taking us outside the usual 4/4 expectations and a mix that serves to remind that it wasn't always about sheer volume. It's an unmistakably English sound with few traces of Chuck Berry, and not just English, but specifically the rural English of haystacks, birdsong, hedgerows, woolly jumpers in the pissing rain, and pubs which have been in business at least since the crusades. Even if it gets a mention, there's not much trace of London Town to be found, and it leaves me feeling weirdly nostalgic for my childhood which felt very much like this album in some respects.

Everything you hear on this record would be developed further into ever more ornate conventions until the element of soul had been reduced to an equation which only worked because Ian was right there in front of the microphone telling you how important it was and so insisting you shut up and pay attention; but on Benefit it's still fresh, sparkling in both sun and rain, reviving the spirit and reminding us of what matters in this life.

Remember Englishness? Having moved to the US some fifteen years ago, it's not anything to which I give much thought, but fuck - it's wonderful to experience music so honest, so free of artifice, with such a good heart, that reminds me of how England felt without needing to push down on anyone, without any weird parochial agenda, without some fat skinhead twat from Surrey (off the top of my head) fog-horning on about this week's scapegoat.

Given previously stated reservations about this lot, it's lovely to discover I was wrong.

Pete Hope - Wrong Blues (2025)

 

It's rare that I get an album first time I hear it, and usually it takes three or four plays to make sense, often more. I'm still trying to connect with that final Shellac album, for example. Wrong Blues however is one of those rare exceptions, sounding reasonably incredible the very first time it travelled up the old school wires and into my brain. I'm not even sure exactly why. The sound is minimal and arguably rough as fuck with mains hum, hiss, and mild distortion contributing to the ambience as much as any of the instruments - if they are instruments. Some tracks are just a voice, but here and there we get what might be a guitar or might just as easily be broken strings stretched across an old tin bath, and there's a kick drum which sounds like a hobnail boot against a box of rusty tools. There are electronics of the screwdriver in the radio variety and sparing use of rudimentary effects, in case anyone is worried, but mostly it could have been recorded - possibly on a mono portable tape recorder with a condenser mic - at more or less any point since 1960. None of this is an affectation, so far as I can tell. It's why the music works, and I'm reminded of Billy Childish insisting that all you really need is a microphone plugged into something that records sound, and if what you're doing is any good, then you'll need nothing more.

With such a basic sound, the emotive force here is carried by the voice, no stranger to booze, ciggies or grinding hardship I would guess, with even incidental half-heard sounds of metal objects rattling around delivering the soul punch you'd expect of a well rehearsed horn section. It's the sound of those old blues musicians before anyone coaxed them into fancy studios, and - at the other extreme - if you can handle Einstürzende Neubauten or SPK back when they were an atrocious fucking noise, Wrong Blues doesn't sound like either, but the mood is of equivalent density and you'll probably enjoy this too. Should anyone have forgotten, the blues isn't pharmaceutical television advertising featuring smiling eldsters jamming in the park, it's what comes out when life hits you right in the fucking face over and over and over, and it's captured right here should any bright young things need a reminder.

My personal favourites are Toxic Blues, Hope in Hell, Hello My Little Maniac and Flask Blues, most of which benefit from a supporting din that stands in for whatever more traditional sound you might have anticipated, but Wrong Blues really needs to be heard in its entirety for the full benefit, not least for the red raw vocal litany. This is what music sounded like before it was repackaged and sold back to us as product.

Outstanding.

Get it here straight from the source.

In the Nursery - When Cherished Dreams Come True (1983)

Here's another one to which my pocket money didn't quite stretch at the time, despite how much I loved Witness, the single which came out the following year and ended up on just about every compilation I taped for anyone for at least the next five. Of all the groups to fall victim to ill-fitting characterisation, In the Nursery must surely rank among the highest, having started off as one of those Joy Division bands before evolving into one of those Laibach bands, then neo-classical, martial industrial, and so on and so forth, because someone somewhere will just have heard Elgar for the first time and decided that Sir Edward was himself a martial industrial pioneer. Cherished Dreams dates from their time as one of those Joy Division bands, although for what it's worth it reminds me of A Certain Ratio if it reminds me of anyone, or even Adrian Borland's Sound on Mystery in particular.

The confusion possibly stems from their interest in aesthetics as art in the formal sense, hailing as they do from an era where your fave bands would usually turn you on to what they'd been reading or some overlooked detail in the history of painting or film - I mean as distinct from just rocking out and so inspiring you towards the purchase of recordings by other artists who also rock out. Given their extended legacy of soundtrack work and film scores, combined with a strong visual - or at least poetic aesthetic - it should be clear that this is art, and as art it is very much its own thing in the sense of those associated with modernism being very much their own respective things; or to put it in less nebulous terms, if you can imagine Spandau Ballet with content rather than just style, then maybe that's what I'm getting at.

These six tracks are songs in the traditional sense, brought together by means of an experimental approach utilising whatever best approximates whichever theme they're going for - powerful emotive bass, military rhythms, horns, heroic crooning, funky guitar, and even what is almost certainly a Roland DR55 invoking a timeless sense of scale with surprisingly little. It sounds like the labour of love I strongly suspect it to be, meticulously sculpted rather than offered as here's some stuff we done innit; and the apparently silk-screen printed gatefold cover seems likewise true to the integrity of their aesthetic over commercial considerations.

When Cherished Dreams Come True is probably overdue a reissue but in the meantime I'll get onto tracking down their other records which I couldn't afford at the time.

The Best of New York Haunted part one (2025)

As younger readers may recall - assuming they even exist - I don't really do downloads, and if I do, I tend to burn a CDR of the thing so I can listen to it without having to buy something which may facilitate listening for about three months before breaking down because I failed to neosync the datawrap - even though no-one alive actually knows what that means. I therefore have a strong preference for physical media.

Unfortunately, almost everything released by New York Haunted seems to be fucking fantastic, which is inconvenient for me because the label is mostly, almost exclusively about the downloads, and my CDR burner is knackered. Naturally I snapped up this token material exception during the seven or eight seconds of it being available, however long it was. New York Haunted is still all about the downloads, but hopefully this represents a testing of the water.

The Best of New York Haunted is a short, snappy album produced as bespoke vinyl by some new operation called Elastic Stage who specialise in this sort of thing. If it's a lathe cut, it's the best sounding lathe cut I've heard, but I'm not sure it is given production values equivalent to something for which you would pay full price in a store. The four tracks assembled here were apparently the label's most downloaded at time of release, and given the part one suffix I'm hoping this is going to be a regular thing.

If it means anything, these four come from downloads by Club Mayz, Kuvera B x Dylab, Nachtwald, and Demented Machine, all providing variants on the dark, dirty techno for which the label is known - mixing desk thick with grease, everything in the fucking red and held together with duct tape, kick drum more like assault with a rubber mallet lacking the decency to even observe the tradition of four to the floor. It combines euphoria with anxiety in a sort of primal horror you can dance to and is the very embodiment of dystopian. I don't know. You run out of words for this sort of thing, although if it helps the music is beautifully fitted to the artwork - AI generated cyborgs crumbling and rotting, humanity reduced to trypophobia triggering consumer tech, and probably the first time I've ever seen AI used to generate art that isn't the usual pile of wank. This is what acid does these days, and I doubt anyone at the desk back in 1987 could have predicted it. I'd say grab one but it seems to have already come and gone, so just be aware.

Extra points to Nachtwald for a track named Learn From History You Idiots. 

The Game - Jesus Piece (2012)

The Game had squirted out an entire stack of great albums by this point, not one dud amongst them, but I always had the feeling they should have been better. The problem was in the whole, with only the verbiage exposing any obvious weakness, and not in the acrobatics or even the delivery. It was the obsession with making a classic album, which is fine because no-one sets out to make a stinker, but the endless references to Ready to Die, Illmatic, Reasonable Doubt and others in terms of legendary discs which might shuffle aside to make room for this one became a bit exhausting, and he only got away with it because he sounded aspirational rather than arrogant. The endless references to records by other people became off-putting, despite the initial novelty. I once sat down with the first album and started on a list of every fan-pleasing reference made to someone else's work. I seem to remember getting to fifty or sixty before the end of the first track, at which juncture the exercise struck me as a complete waste of time. If it was a lovely day, it was a lovely day like Bill Withers. If he'd bought a brand new combine harvester you just knew he'd spent the best part of a morning searching for something to rhyme with Wurzels, because that what it be like.

Jesus Piece is his fifth album, apparently a concept jobbie exploring religious themes and how they relate to this shitty world in which we find ourselves, which I'd argue runs through most of the Game's music, although here it's more direct because we don't have to wade through references to Nas, Biggie, Jay-Z and the rest; and this greater focus, denuded of all crowd pleasing waffle, reveals a  strong lyricist delivering heartbreaking home truths with an emotional investment comparable to Ghostface. I don't know if he's ever broken down in tears on stage, but he's one of the few who could probably get away with it.

Musically, it's likewise on point, with no evidence of whatever deficit may or may not have kept previous albums from quite getting there. Being 2012, there's a lot of that post-trap sound, whatever the fuck you call it - the thing that sounds like waveforms copied and pasted from track to track on a screen which will eventually emerge from someone's shitty phone - but it has an organic groove, like headachey rainbow breakfast cereal somehow cooked up without recourse to artificial ingredients; and the sound is like something vast and distant which inhabits a cathedral more than just the usual reverb wacked up too high. Even with the earthier monologues, it's sunny and soulful music for scorching weather and wide blue skies despite the pathos, the lines drenched in sorrow, regret, or the recognition of insurmountable odds. The majority of rap albums usually leave you feeling one of two or three things, while Jesus Piece delivers every available emotion all at once regardless of contradictions - and the title track in particular is a Mona Lisa moment in rap terms. It may have taken him time to build up momentum, but I'd say this one probably does rank alongside Ready to Die, Illmatic, and the rest.

Martha & the Muffins - Metro Music (1980)

If they are remembered at all, I suspect Martha & the Muffins have been reduced mainly to a question in a pub trivia quiz with vague suggestions of a time when new wave was angular, quirky, and wore a skinny tie; although to be fair, it was four fucking decades ago. Like everyone, I thought Echo Beach was great, but retained impressions beyond the token hit single thanks to my record collecting pal at school who obsessively snapped up subsequent singles by anyone whose debut smash had already found its way into his heart, particularly if coloured vinyl was involved. So I dutifully borrowed and taped the five or six which came after Echo Beach along with the b-sides because - who knows? - just in case, and life went on.

Recently going through old tapes - all of which still play just fine, thank you very much - listening to Saigon again, not having heard it in maybe thirty years or more, was like being punched in the face. The song chugs along on its tidy wee new wave beat, keyboard wistfully keening away in the background, and then we come to the end of the verse and that riff is like going over the humpback of a rollercoaster just as the amphetamine hits. I was aware of there having been an album or two and had vague memories of studying the sleeves in record stores, specifically HMV in Coventry. It seemed like further investigation was long overdue.

The production is slightly flat, underscoring the illusion of the tidy little college band in shiny shoes playing their songs for you, but this only means it takes longer for the magic to work its way through; and the more you listen, the more it seems like the Muffins were at least a Canadian equivalent of the Talking Heads, probably more jagged than they sound here but nevertheless something which conveniently coincided with the mainstream more than played up to it. We're not quite talking Devo, but we're definitely not talking Huey Lewis and the fucking News. Behind the radio friendly mix, the instrumentation is pretty wild, peppering all manner of structural somersaults with blasts of jazzy noise, and offsetting squeals of the unexpected against metronomic repetition of a kind which would doubtless have beardy old men wetting themselves had it been originated in Düsseldorf in the seventies. I suspect this band were not served well by their own billing which seemed to miss everything that made them worth hearing, and surely the Peter Saville sleeve should have been a clue.

50 Cent - Get Rich or Die Tryin' (2003)

Now that I'm more than one-hundred years old, the majority of the music I own will be, by definition, stuff which I haven't listened to in a while, because even listening to an average five or six albums a day, there will inevitably be records which have settled, so to speak. Usually this means I get to rediscover these misplaced waxings and enjoy them all over again, and sometimes I discover qualities I didn't even notice on previous occasions and enjoy them all the more, but every so often there's an exception. The last time I tried to listen to Curtis - 50 Cent's third album, of which I had no memory and had forgotten I owned - it was hard work getting through the thing, which at least explained why I'd barely played it, and left me with the impression that he probably wasn't worth bothering with beyond that classic debut, Get Rich or Die Tryin' - with no g at the end because that's how tough guys speak, see.

Time hasn't done this one any favours either. In Da Club and 21 Questions still sound okay, I guess, and I assume the rest was once provided by how new and different it seemed at the time - now devalued in currency thanks to everything since sounding more or less like this: rap for the airwaves or the shitty little speaker on your wanky phone with da club relegated to a subject, just a hook. 50 Cent half raps, half sings, as his critics have so often pointed out, but it's more that he speaks a tune while the beats just kind of shimmer and chug in the background. Strip the vocal from a few of these and it would be anyone's guess where or who they were pitched at.

Lyrically he places himself as the third of a holy trinity behind Nas and Jay-Z, just as certain presidents will tell you what a great job they're doing which, I feel, lacks objectivity and is therefore an unreliable quantifier of worth; and 50 Cent, or Fiddy as I've no doubt hyper-talented NME writers of the day knew him, isn't terrible, but beyond the vague novelty of his speaking tunes, I have a tough time thinking of anyone less lyrical until we get to early nineties garage MCs. This is one of those guys who isn't above repeating a word at the end of two consecutive lines and so rhyming it with itself; which would be okay, except an entire album of I've shot tons of blokes in the face and the cops didn't do nuffink because I am really, really hard and that and nothing else is kind of witless; and a token track for the ladies amounting to how pet, you can suck my dick if you like doesn't really bring thematic variety. I loves me some ign'ant as much as anyone, but even rap's most celebrated cavemen can usually work a moral into the body count, something from which we might learn, or something cinematic at least - an angle which distinguishes it from being the same fucking thing over and over in a monotone with notes. Fiddy's delivery is possibly calculated to suggest the detachment of a killer—excuse me, I mean a killa, but it makes him sound like he's zonked out on dope, which is perhaps why this one was a lot more fun for him than for me.

Chris & Cosey - Techno Primitiv (1984)

Comparing the respective careers of the four Throbbing Gristlers after they parted ways, I realise Gristle itself could be pretty much summarised as Chris & Cosey with Porridge providing a picture of a chair for the album cover, then telling you 'Hermann Göring sat on that chair,' with that lurid smile which lets you know you've been Porridged good and proper. It's strange how this only seems obvious - at least to me - with a couple of decades of hindsight. I'd guess the music of Chris & Cosey mostly sounded happy, doubtless as a result of having left a band which included Porridge, although it didn't seem so at the time. It seemed more like they'd divided into the polar opposites of weirdy stuff with pierced nobs on the one hand, and nursery rhyme proto-techno on the other; but having noticed that 2018's Tutti is almost pure Gristle with more polish, yet without sounding like a trip down memory lane, this is the rabbit hole I've chosen today.

I'm not sure if Techno Primitiv was exactly the last good thing for me, but as I still can't remember what Pagan Tango sounds like, it was the last to make an impression, following which my attention span wandered off somewhere else. The couple hit the ground running with 1981's Heartbeat, released the same year as the split and sounding like they were at least fucking trying. More records followed and a sound developed with some sense of direction, meaning we never quite bought the same album twice while allowing for occasional flashes of tangential brilliance - the Elemental 7 soundtrack or collaborations with Konstruktivists and the Eurhythmics for example. However, we shouldn't underestimate how different these records seemed to what had gone before. Without Porridge providing some vaguely sinister subtext - and I honestly don't know how much else - the music became its own subject in so much as that it lacked an overt message. These were studio experiments in building a groove and seeing where it led, with Cosey's vocalisations more about mood than anything. Technically, the electronics were always a couple of years ahead of everyone else, usually meaning there was enough going on to keep it from sounding like all those plug it in and press a button cybernauts who came later. So considering the improvisational nature of the composition, and that Chris & Cosey albums had a diary quality of what we've been working on since the last thing hereby presented for your consideration, there's no obvious singularity of vision or focus to sharpen a record into the sort of point you might get with other artists. Practically this meant what sounded to me like diminishing returns, more and more nursery rhymes, bass patterns which may as well have been the Birdie Song, Cosey sounding slightly bored, and albums suggesting the work of people titting about in the studio because they have nothing better to do.

Yet when they're good, they're great - moody and sensuous like a cyber-age Serge Gainsbourg, hypnotic with some mathematically ornate rhythm track taking centre stage within a vast sonic space windswept by half-heard melodies, noises, groans, sighs - all captured in digital hyperclarity so sharp that it's almost weird. Techno Primitiv has a few of those tracks which never quite worked, I felt, due to an incongruously chirpy quality - He's an Arabian for example, but then you hit the pseudo-tribal panorama of Do or Die and all is forgiven; and even the more uptempo tracks, the almost songs, have a certain frisson of the forbidden which elevates them above the frosty jangle of Christmas muzak. Above all, this one still sounds like an album regardless of whatever themes it may carry remaining ambiguous. It sounds like possibilities, like effort made beyond sticking a skull on the cover and giving the kids what they want. So credit where it's due, and all that.

Analog Brothers - Pimp to Eat (2000)

While this one looked a lot like Kool Keith and Ice-T ripping the piss out of the RZA's Bobby Digital, it's proven near impossible to find anything substantial in support of the proposition and even the line about how everyone knows digital blows sounds more like good old fashioned technological fundamentalism. Whoever the target may have been - and I suspect it's more likely suckers as a demographic rather than any specific member of the Wu-Tang Clan - it shares an attitude with much of Kool Keith's back catalogue, namely the suggestion of it being better than everyone else, and knowing itself to be better than everyone else. If this quality is hardly exclusive to Keith in rap terms, he goes one fuck of a lot further than most in proving his point, and so it is with Pimp to Eat.

The Analog Brothers are, or possibly were, mostly lesser known names within Ice-T's Rhyme Syndicate, plus the man himself trading as Ice Oscillator, with er… Keith Korg as the only one who wasn't already in the gang; yet it feels like part of Keith's body of work more than anything, making use of that brooding Diesel Truckers sound - up front beatbox with growling bass and not too much else to clutter the sound; and the full complement of Analog Brothers working with the same lyrical firehose, an uncensored fountain of bewildering surrealism and profanity that's as much challenge as proclamation:

More flow than the average Joe, get off the stamina, Peein' off the top of the Empire State Building, urinate on pedestrians, Walkin' past West 4th Street lesbians, 28th Street flashin' drivin' Dodge dashin' free man, Sport Superman underoos with a six-pack of O'Douls, Move in spark-plugs, come aboard walkin' butt naked with gloves, Throwin feces at celebrities at the Billboard Awards, Make Jerry Springer jump on my balls...

I quote that as a single block so it reads closer to the cumulative effect of listening to this stuff for an hour or so. It approaches information overload, mostly with fucking weird information, that which you may not even want to know - such as that O'Douls is alcohol-free lager, for one example. We're a long way from In da Club, as is probably clear from the cover showing the Brothers picking out their favourite brands of breakfast cereal. In case it isn't obvious from the above, this is pretty much a work of genius, existing at a tangent to the rest of the rap universe at roughly the same angle as the Residents and Flaming Carrot comics to their own respective mediaspheres. We should probably be glad this wasn't a direct potshot taken at anyone specific because I'm not sure many would survive such a blast of concentrated weirdness.

Whitehouse - Erector (1981)

 

It's hard to know where to start with Whitehouse because they pretty much defy analysis, so what follows will probably be just as useless as the rest. They promised the most violently repulsive records ever made, and that's what they delivered. Left with nowhere else to go, their harshest critics - of which there have been many - usually argue that actually, they really mean it and are therefore Nazis, and it's all just cheap shock tactics, despite that it logically can't be both of those. Brexit may have happened because William Bennett couldn't settle down to playing jagged guitar for Essential Logic, but I'm not convinced that it's an argument worth having, at least not when our collective cup already runneth over with social evils without calling noise weirdos up before the House Committee to explain what the fuck they were thinking.

Whatever may have been said about transgressive art - if we really must use that term - in the years since this appeared, I feel it may be more useful to consider when it came out, which I'll attempt by describing what it meant to me. I would have been sixteen or seventeen and I was already listening to Throbbing Gristle and a few others of their association. I read about Whitehouse in issue four of Flowmotion fanzine and was immediately fascinated because I'd never heard of them and yet they seemed to be a big deal. I'd never heard of them because the records were difficult to get hold of, being stocked by very few physical stores, and the music papers wouldn't touch them with a barge pole. This was mostly, so I gather, about the imagery - death, murder, sadism, sexual perversion, Nazism, serial killers, war criminals, extremes; but where Gristle presented some of these as documentation of civilisation falling apart at the seams, Whitehouse sounded like a celebration in wilfully eschewing the excuses, explanations, or get out of jail free cards helpfully provided by those who quite liked reading about themselves in the NME.

Anyway, I feel I was somewhat primed for this material through familiarity with Dadaism and a few of the Surrealist painters - Hans Bellmer being the obvious one; and then Erector came in the mail. As with Second Annual Report, my first reaction was genuine revulsion to the point of experiencing an actual cold sweat as I listened. I spent a day thinking I needed to send the thing back, but was paralysed by the terrible realisation that Whitehouse now had my home address. I don't know what I thought they were likely to do. Another day passed and I decided that I would do better to just not think about it for a while, which turned out to be the best option.

Erector is a long fucking way from the seductively weird science-fiction sounds of Throbbing Gristle sticking their bagpipes through a flange pedal just like Pink Floyd would have done. Everything you hear seems designed for maximum physiological discomfort - think the sine wave whine of a dentist's drill rather than SPK's abstract expressionist wall of distortion; so we have VCOs tuned down to unsettling ticks or impersonating medical technology, blocks of white noise, traces of musique concrete resembling the sounds half-heard from a hospital bed, bubbling feedback low in the mix, and William Bennett screaming his lungs out with such fury that it's impossible to pick out words beyond a few phrases and the repetition of horrible titles; and it's all dry as fuck, no reverb, no echo, no concession to mood or soundtrack. The vocal isn't even consistent with the heavy metal tendencies of singers who growl to let you know they be baaad. Screams alternate with incongruously pathetic non-vocal noises, or the intonation of certain words veer off into the utterances of dunces, all punctuated by feedback from some weedy metallic noise which sounds like Mr. Bennett tapping the mic stand with a spoon. Everything grates, or is unpleasant in some way. It doesn't brood and isn't cool. It has no stance. It doesn't make sense. As promised, it's violently repulsive even before we get to the track titles and wonder whether we really want to grab that dictionary to look up the two we've never even heard of.

So, no. Erector by Whitehouse is not for everyone.

These days I don't listen to this album much because, joking aside, I prefer music; and yet the more I notice it either ignored or otherwise dismissed for the usual reasons, the more I'm glad that it exists, and the more I feel inclined to stand by this fucking repulsive racket because it's honest by some definition, and it will never be bought or conscripted to a putrid cause, and even after all these years, Erector still sounds like nothing else.

Cover art censored so as to prevent spread of devil worship, Communism and extra-marital relations.

Das Synthetische Mischgewebe - Neunundvierzig Entgleisungen (2008)

Back when I was still at school and trying to get my weirdy music tape label off the ground without the help of funding, interest, or even Letraset, I was briefly in correspondence with Guido Hübner of Das Synthetische Mischgewebe. His letter opens, rather endearingly, with you must excuse me in advance that I doesn't can write you so many like you, doubtless referring to my tendency to address seven or eight  handwritten pages of complete bollocks to justifiably bewildered strangers. This implies that I wrote to him first, although I have no recollection of this. I gather, from what he wrote, that I'd proposed an exchange of art - something visual for his magazine or possibly something musical for one of my tapes. It never happened, which almost certainly means I sent him one of my collages and he decided it was shite, which was probably fair.

Anyway, if nothing else, this meant the name stayed with me, and over the years I noticed that he seemed to be doing better with his thing than I'd done with mine, and yet only now have I finally heard his work. Even given that I had no expectation of what it would sound like, it's come as a surprise and one hell of a puzzle.

This is a double ten inch disc of - I don't know what, perhaps the sound of an installation, music in its own right, or something else entirely. Sonically, it seems to be related to that laptop glitch stuff which may or may not still be doing the rounds, although it's less predictable, less easily quantified than most of what I've heard in that genre. Blips, clicks, squeals, and other fragments of sound emerge from mostly silent grooves in such a fashion as to suggest the arbitrary pops and surface noise of the vinyl should be considered as integral. Some of the sound appears treated, although the occasionally metallic quality may simply be part of the initial digitisation process, where other sounds may be more or less natural, notably instances of what sound like a condensing microphone rubbed across fabric; and there's very little repetition, or indeed anything which might lend familiarity to whatever the hell it is that we're hearing. In other words, Neunundvierzig Entgleisungen is probably about as obtuse as you can get without turning into the New Blockaders, and that's its charm - at least for me - namely that it obliges the listener to put in work.

After listening to this thing for more than a week, it has come to remind me of the music of Pierre Schaeffer in the absence of almost any other comparison, although the sounds are so abstracted from their respective sources as to suggest where Schaeffer was heading more than what he did, and it isn't musique concrète. Nor does it seem to be anti-art in the sense of the aforementioned New Blockaders, but rather attempts to [pauses to push spectacles further up bridge of nose] forge a new sonic language from the ground up. It seems to have things in common with certain abstract expressionist artists - although probably not Pollock - or even with Yves Tanguy or Joan Miró. Rooting around online I learn that Hübner applies a certain visual sensibility to his work, so that's what I'm going with; and if I'm way off target, it's nevertheless been a pleasurable aural and psychological workout.

Paris - Pistol Politics (2015)

Having spent the last six months backtracking through the work of Paris one disc at a time, I've noticed both the complete absence of duds, and the fact that he's grown angrier and somehow more formidable with age. Pistol Politics is the one before the most recent album, 2020's blistering Safe Space Invader, and if it represents the lad stepping down to the release of a new one every five years - the first since 2008's Acid Reflex - it's the only aspect that's been stepped down; and this is a fucking double CD, would you believe? Never mind just rap music, you can count the number of double CDs that haven't been a complete waste of time on the testicles of one scrotal sack, and yet Pistol Politics remains fully caffeinated right to end of track twenty-seven on the second disc with not a moment wasted.

As you may be aware, Paris is a black man with things to say, and things you should probably hear regardless. You may recall certain rappers banging on about their music being edumacational back in the day, usually meaning endless bland repetition of the knowledge-wisdom-understanding mantra without truly saying anything, but Paris delivers on that ideal. You learn stuff from listening to his work. Facts I've picked up from this one, for example, being that America leads the world in just three respects - incarceration of its own people, defence spending, and grown folks who believe angels are real. There's a lot of truth that hurts here, but there's something liberating about even the shittiest news imparted in such terms.

I vaguely recall Paris once casually dismissed as also ran by one of those hairdresser magazines - Vibe, or whichever one it was - presumably meaning he'd failed to go platinum through a major label, with some half-assed analysis suggesting listeners were unable to square the hardline Black Panther politics with fat-ass street level g-funk. Of course, it depends what you call success, and never mind that he seems to have done just fine releasing artistically uncompromised material through his own label, the message delivered as funky as fuck populism being exactly why it works. It's street level communication rather than an academic treatise delivered as slogans. It's so street level that E40, the Eastsidaz and Westside Connection's WC guest on a couple of numbers proving that the common ground is a lot more expansive than purists may have realised; and sonically it spans pretty much the gamut of black music, additionally serving as a reminder of who came up with most of it - rock, blues, hip-hop, jazz, soul, p-funk, weirdy electronics, boom bap, often all jammed together on the same track, and even with a few cuts which wouldn't seem out of place on a Bill Withers album. Imagine a Public Enemy record you could slap on at a party without everyone pulling faces, or Tupac actually having done the stuff for which he's routinely credited.

As I write this, it's MLK Day here in Americaland, and somehow also the day of the presidential inauguration of the selfless multimillionaire who wants only to make America great again, even though he apparently couldn't fucking manage it first time; but listening to Paris helps, because truth is always louder and more enduring than bullshit.

The The - Ensoulment (2024)

I have a sort of knee-jerk suspicion of artists I enjoyed in my early twenties getting back in the booth all these years later, but, leaving aside that no-one wants a Flock of Seagulls reunion album, I should probably be suspicious of my suspicion as a hang-on from the punk rock programming which, for example, dictated that the Rolling Stones were fit for the knacker's yard by 1977; and while there was much fun to be had in upsetting the older generation, Miss You was unfortunately a fucking great record. In fact, even Emotional Rescue was a cracker and the revisionism now seems quaint given that they'd only been going a couple of decades; and Matt Johnson's The The are now cautiously approaching their half-century.

More crucially, The The sound as vital as ever - keeping in mind that even their early records had the quality of an extended world weary sigh set to a pounding bass drum. No-one, so far as I'm aware, ever complained about Johnny Cash or B.B. King failing to retire, and The The was never about upsetting the older generation. If it was about upsetting anyone, it was Johnson's own generation, and his focus has remained fixed even if the man himself has clocked up a few more years; and given the current state of the societal shitshow, it's amusing that you could probably characterise Ensoulment as upsetting the younger generation, at least based on the garbage to which so many of them are seen to subscribe on social media. Lyrically, Ensoulment is on target and at least as caustic as Fatima Mansions at their most blistering. Musically, it's the familiar organic blend of rock, soul, jazz, blues, country, and all the rest without fully sounding like any of them, or like the sort of worthy soundtrack to which spritely eldsters beatifically nod their heads in television commercials for prescription medication. It's pleasant but innocuous on first spin, and by the third or fourth, you can't stop playing the thing and your wife comes in from the other room to ask what you're listening to, and possibly to remind you to take your pill.

Did we ever suspect any of these people would be doing anything this good in the distant future, a quarter of the way into the next century? I had no idea myself.

Snoop Dogg - Missionary (2024)

I don't know if anyone could have foreseen a new Snoop album on Death Row given at least a couple of decades of exhausting bullshit from the label's previous owner. It's probably not such a surprise that the aforementioned former owner filed for bankruptcy in 2006 and the label has been changing hands ever since, existing mainly for the sake of collecting royalties on former glories. It could have been different - cut those losses, maybe put some effort into promoting Rage's album, maybe make something of having Kurupt, Above the Law and Crooked I on the books rather than wasting all that time on pot shots launched at former employees; but no, so never mind. Not only do we have brand new Snoop on Death Row - because he bought the label - but it's produced by Dr. Dre.

I somehow lost track of Snoop, the most recent one I own being Ego Trippin' which came out in (cough) 2008 because apparently I haven't had my finger on anything resembling a pulse for some time. I don't know that he's ever done a bad album, but the last few I heard didn't particularly grab me in a major way - nothing I regret buying, but sometimes you have to be in the right mood. So I'm hearing Missionary as a comeback by virtue of my having failed to notice the hundred or so albums he's squeezed out since I've been living in the same country. Musically it's more traditional than Dre's Compton, taking the perfectionist excess in an entirely different direction so it's almost like big band music of the sixties through a hip-hop filter, a big, brassy sound built from an entire orchestra's worth of high-definition instrumentation conveying the full range of jazzy moods. It wouldn't work were it not conducted with such an expert hand, and so the blend of John Barry scale with street level lyricism and all the funky electronics you would hope for, is honestly breathtaking. Also, Snoop himself is more lyrical than I've heard him in a while - which admittedly may be my failing to pay attention - but here he reminds us why we've heard of him in the first place, beyond his sharing a cell with Martha Stewart or mugging to the camera during the Olympics. Even 50 Cent sounds decent on this record.

First the bee population of the UK is proven to be on the increase, then Snoop releases a new album on Death Row, and I'm taking both of these as signs. Perhaps things are looking up at long fucking last, despite some unusually shitty elephants in the room.

New Order - Power, Corruption and Lies (1983)

As I explained back in 2022, myself and my little group of pals were Joy Division obsessives up until this came out, or at least I was. I'm not sure whether the other two kept going. Blue Monday was fucking terrific and then somehow I became distracted and forgot to buy this, despite all that was promised by the associated Peel session. Years passed and I heard the occasional thing on the radio, but not much that grabbed me as had Ceremony and Everything's Gone Green, and I liked True Faith well enough but it sounded like an impersonation of New Order to my ears. I bought this album, almost certainly because it was in a bargain bin, but have no idea as to where, when, or even whether I actually listened to it. Surprised to find it in my collection a couple of years ago, I gave it a spin and recognised only the tracks they had already recorded for Peel. It's bollocks, and very, very boring, I decided, as you may possibly recall.

Well, I've given it another shot and have to conclude I was either wrong, or listening far too hard, or with the wrong ears. It's not a patch on the glacial intensity of Movement, which I still hold to be the finest thing ever committed to wax by any of those involved, but I realise had I not heard anything by any of those involved before this one, I probably would have given it more of a chance. The production is efficient, but inevitably leaves the songs sounding like a top of the range demo compared to what Martin Hannett did, and even compared to the efforts of whoever produced the Peel session for that matter. Also, having presumably laid the ghost of Joy Division to rest on the first one, this was a band giving it another go and finding their feet all over again, hence the slightly schizophrenic mix of material - almost like the work of two different groups, a much happier version of Joy Division, and some New York disco act who couldn't leave their sequencer alone, thus obliging the bass player to impersonate a lead guitarist on half of the tracks.

So it's an odd one, a transitional affair, I suppose, but there's a pleasantly breezy quality to it, possibly informed by the giddy delirium of a brand new day knowing you won't have to play songs where Nazi war atrocities serve as a metaphor for feeling a bit glum because your bird just found out you've been knobbing Sharon from the chippy; and I've honestly always preferred Bernard Sumner's vocal to that of his predecessor, even when he can't quite reach the note, or the lyric sounds like it needed more work.

This time last year, or possibly the year before that, I'd developed the impression of post-Movement New Order as arguably the most boring band in the world. It's strangely comforting to know that I can reach my age and still be wrong about something.