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.