Gary Numan - Strange Charm (1986)

 

Rather than merely slipping through the cracks, as tended to happen with Numan's later albums of the decade, I'm not sure this one ever quite made it up through the cracks in the first place. The man himself describes its recording as something of a nightmare amounting to an expensive sounding album reduced to rummaging down the back of the cushions for change. It failed to make much of a dent in either the charts or the lives of anyone who wasn't already tuned in, and so tends to have been generally forgotten even in the recent revival of Numan's fortunes.

Nevertheless it caught me at exactly the right time and place. I was near terminally jobless and accordingly skint, living in a dusty bedsit on a diet of tinned peas, beer, fags, and comic books. I bought records here and there, mostly from the bargain bin if they had anything - which they usually didn't - and this was a quid with only the inner sleeve. I listened to it on a crappy radiogram the bloke from the corner shop had been chucking out, and for better or worse it said a lot more to me about my life than did Morrissey calling for the hanging of a demographic so far beyond my own existence as to be irrelevant. In Praying to the Aliens, Numan reported:

It was a hard album to finish. The career problems created a dreadful atmosphere to write in because it felt like everything I was doing was for nothing... I knew I wanted a dark and dreamy sound for Strange Charm. However, I didn't quite know in which direction I wanted to take my songwriting. I was also running out of things to write about. There were quite a few arguments and the studio atmosphere was unusually tense and bad-tempered.

You can sort of tell, and the record sounds like the work of a man who had painted himself into a corner, which worked for me because this was also what I seemed to have done by that point.

Musically speaking, Numan has never concealed his influences and so we had the Japan album, the Trevor Horn album, the Robert Palmer album to make but three admittedly lazy comparisons. I never quite worked out where Strange Charm might fit in this respect unless it was the Attrition album, sharing a certain mood and sounds with Smiling, At the Hypogonder Club; but it works because said mood - numb desperation concealing emotional turmoil, panic, and general confusion - raises it far above any of the stuff that bothers me about being able to recognise a specific drum machine or anything someone else already did for a wider audience. It's the lyrics and the voice, if you want to call them lyrics, plaintive expressions of longing and regret stripped down to a chilling economy delivered with that voice which, regardless of routine criticisms that tend to miss the point, carries the intent with a sincerity that hurts

This is love.

This is pain disguised as a dream.

It's simple, nothing necessarily profound, and unlikely to convert anyone with tastes aligned to specific haircuts, but this helped me feel a little less like topping myself at the time, as do the other tracks on the record with the possible exception of The Need which seems incongruously jaunty alongside My Breathing, The Sleeproom, and the rest. Should Garrington himself be reading this, which I appreciate is extremely unlikely - dude, it was a long time ago, and you should feel good about this record.

Bladder Flask - One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met & Everybody Thought I Was Whistling (1981)

 

Reading Nick Soulsby's excellent Viva Negativa! The Noise of Art and Nothing covering the elusive, bewildering and intermittent existence of the New Blockaders, I'm reminded of the association with this album and additionally flabbergasted to discover I put a few of these people out on one of my own tapes back in the day during the two hours of their identifying as Citipati. I had no idea, which is doubtless a consequence of the strategic anonymity practiced by those involved.

I would have bought this at the time, and even had the Recloose Organisation flyer blutacked to my bedroom wall in preference to the usual posters of Bucks Fizz, Noel Edmonds, Kevin Keegan and so on, but pocket money was tight and the paper round wasn't paying a whole lot. I'm not really a fan of the sound made by the New Blockaders but I like the ideas, and in any case this predates the antimusic by probably a couple of months. Dada racket is as good a term as any, as snippets of cut-up and/or found sound spew arbitrarily forth from our speakers and the compositional technique of Un Chien Andalou is referenced in the sleeve notes. We're on the same side of town as Nurse With Wound, and the weird, perhaps fascinating thing, is that somehow it doesn't sound anything like Stapleton's doing. The focus is different, mood occasionally slips through in the juxtaposition of abused instruments and records spun backwards by hand; also the fact of the Rupenus brothers having no fear of the completely fucking ridiculous - so there's a slapstick undercurrent here, which is both funny and disconcerting depending on what other cacophony it happens to be competing with.

I've heard a million tapes composed by similar means with a similar aesthetic over the last few decades, and somehow Bladder Flask pisses over most of them, if you'll pardon the image and not-quite-a-pun. There's a unique wit here, and the production suggesting presentation in a music hall rather than some guy's bedroom brings a sense of weird gravity which makes whatever the hell is happening seem all the weirder. What with the Adventures of Twizzle, Citipati, Metgumbnerbone, Zoviet France, and the Hafler Trio, there was clearly something in the water of early-eighties Newcastle, and Bladder Flask were on their backs, right beneath the tap, mouths open wide; or maybe they were just whistling.

SPK - Auto-da-Fé (1983)

 

The late Simon Morris described them as industrial chancers which, if consistent with his habit of poo-pooing whatever you like on the grounds of your liking it, probably wasn't entirely without substance. As a close personal friend of the noise-stars, my favourite SPK story is of Graeme Revell signing a ten-album deal with Elektra, spunking the money away on a massive sampler, delivering Machine Age Voodoo, then recording the other nine albums in less than a week to such a standard that SPK were released from the contract. If true, I assume those nine missing albums sounded like their hopefully sarcastic But Can You Dance To It? except not as good. Still, when they got it right, they really fucking nailed it as demonstrated by the first side of this compilation.

The first side assembles tracks from the early singles and EPs recorded without much of a budget or significant interest from anyone who wasn't in the band; and they sound like nothing else released as SPK, not even Leichenschrei. If influenced by a good few of the usual suspects - Faust, Neu and so on - you still wouldn't mistake them for anyone before or since. We have harsh electronic squeaks and farts overloading the speakers while somehow sounding quite minimal, ninety-mile an hour pounding rhythms, lots of screaming and ranting, and the unexpected embellishment of angular new wave guitar. So it's a fucking racket, but it's a weirdly infectious fucking racket in places, like someone fed the Banshees into a blender; and crucially it sounds nothing like Gristle. I always had my doubts about Germanik, a title suggesting scary faces pulled while overly-earnest schoolboys scream Achtung and Die Englander Schweinhund because Hitler innit, but I assume one of them spoke German and the title is meant in the sense later employed by Laibach as a portmanteau of German and manic. Anyway, these six short blasts of punk noise will astonish you no matter how vast your rekord kollection may be, and no kobweb shalt remain inviolate.

By way of contrast, side two feels somewhat like here's the other stuff we've been mucking around with, opening with an earlier version of Metall Field, spelled with the Welsh ll for some reason, which is a'ight but not a patch on the version from the Peel session. Then we have Walking on Dead Steps which is one of those naughty bondage-synthesiser songs with Grez counting in German and from which Depeche Commode implausibly decanted an entire leather-underpants-clad career. Finally we come to A Heart That Breaks in No Time or Place which combines moody poetry with rude words and some nice trumpet work, but again feels like pissing around in a studio in hope of something happening. Nothing on the second side is actively bad, but it sounds weak after Retard, Slogun and the others, amounting to a full album which adheres to the long dead maxim about seven inch singles with lousy b-sides. The important thing to remember is that side one is akin to sticking your head into a cement mixer, then somehow fitting the cement mixer into a microwave oven and pressing go.

The Best of Schoolly D (1990)

 

I assume we all remember Schoolly D as the guy generally credited with inventing gangsta rap, and while there's a thin line to be drawn because nobody could possibly mistake The Message - to name but one - for Oops Upside Your Head, it's doubtful that NWA, Compton's Most Wanted, Ice-T and others would have sounded quite as they did without the influence of this guy, both in subject matter and its delivery; but as with almost everything, history gets in the way meaning gangsta rap has become a misleading description at best. Even if he's pulling a face, these records are mainly about good times with a liberal seasoning of reality, simply meaning that gangs, shags, and getting off one's tits on illegal substances are an inevitable part of the equation - which is refreshing in the wake of all those rap records about how you could go to college, or at least help an old lady across the road and refrain from being such a Negative Neddy*. Positivity doesn't have to be an inherently bad thing, but we're drowning in it right now and it doesn't seem to be helping.

In addition to being a whole shitload more fun than you may have been led to believe through overexposure to the 50 Cent back catalogue, these singles (plus a couple of early album tracks) may not sound quite as expected. Hip-hop moves on like no other genre, sonically speaking, filling as it goes an ever expanding circus tent with the latest incarnations of old school, as though all that went before is known, done, all over, and at best just a helpful footnote to where we are now. The twelve tracks included here are mostly just a guy rapping over a drum machine with scratching - grooves not tunes, and not even much in the way of sampling. It's minimal when you look at the credits, but it sure doesn't sound that way. I still vividly remember getting to piss about with my first proper eighties drum machine - a Yamaha RX15 owned by Steve McGarrigle, and one of the first to use samples. It seemed amazing what you could do with the thing, and even more amazing what came out of the speakers despite such memories having since been tarnished by all the shitty futuristic haircut acts of the decade hammering that thing into the ground. The difference is that whatever they're using on this stuff - and it's something very similar - still sounds as powerful and fresh and exciting as I remember, like the world's funkiest bailiff kicking in your front door - somehow in a good way. I suspect this may be thanks to DJ Code Money who additionally fills the remaining space with a tapestry of the finest scratching you'll hear, riffs, parps, squeaks, burps and scribbles forming a powerfully atmospheric embellishment to the microphone without ever quite committing to a tune. It's rare to hear music which seems to do so little and yet sounds so fucking massive that it would kill you in an instant if it fell on you.

Time for a giant fuck-off sized bronze statue of the man in one of those parks, I'd say, should anyone from Philadelphia city council happen to be reading.

*: Turn that Frown Upside Down, You Miserable Fucker by Afrika Bambaataa & Positive Life Tabernacle being one example of the subgenre that I've just made up.

Konstruktivists - Dark Odyssey (2004)

 

This is one of those Konstruktivists albums that sort of fell through the cracks, at least relative to those you will have heard of, or stand a chance of having heard of. Konstruktivists were between labels at the time but persisted regardless with CDRs here and there as the internet slowly began to happen, meaning you can now bag this one from Bandcamp should you so desire, but that the total bandwidth is shared by fifty million useless wankers all screaming for your attention without any good reason to be doing so and the only way you're going to seek this out is if you already know about it. Anyway, I was never keen on CDRs and didn't really know what to make of this one in 2004. It sounded, as I recall, overly digital, very much something which happened on a screen. To be clear, it didn't sound bad but, as I say, something wasn't working for me*.

Anyway, twenty-two years later, not only am I delighted to discover a CDR that hasn't degraded into the usual beer coaster, but that whatever I didn't get about Dark Odyssey no longer seems to apply so probably I just didn't have the right ears; or else it was simply a grower. Generally speaking, it sounds closer to the krautrock than previous efforts, in so much as that there are mesmeric grooves aplenty rather than songs or any of that angry stuff with all the funny noises and shouting. The layered instrumentation which I apparently didn't appreciate last time is beautifully balanced with all manner of lavish melodies contributing to the whole rather than dominating centre stage. It has some of the high definition of Glennascaul but isn't quite so in your face. Given the Neu-adjacent rhythms, Dark Odyssey feels like a travelogue, music in constant motion, probably at night and maybe a little too relaxed to be at the wheel but thankfully there's no-one else on the road. It takes you somewhere, hence the title, I guess, and I'm glad to have got there in the end.

Isn't it about time one of you fuckers pressed this onto vinyl?

*: I was additionally a little phased to see that the cover art was a pen and ink drawing I'd done in 1991, over a decade earlier when I was a briefly a member of Konstruktivists. I didn't mind, and it was nice to see my art used for something, but the drawing simply wasn't anything special to my way of thinking.

Devo - Nitrous Nightmare (2026)

 

I loves me some Devo, but it's difficult to ignore that their posthumous archival releases now outnumber the formal studio albums. Said posthumous archival releases have mostly ranged from great to amazing but I'm beginning to wonder how much more of this stuff is yet to come, how much remains to be pressed on four, six, or eight sides of collectible splatter effect vinyl.

Nitrous Nightmare captures a 1975 live performance notable for Devo clearing the room of its generally indifferent and occasionally hostile audience, most of whom had expected moderate rockers playing sixties faves in preface to the happier sounds of the Sun Ra Arkestra. We've already heard the highlights on The Mongoloid Years but here's the set in full, complete with awkward silence in lieu of applause. The sleeve notes are fascinating for the sake of context, although the recording does little to capture the reputed tension. Aside from Hardore era songs played and recorded reasonably well, there's a lot of silence, an occasional joke cracked at the expense of an indifferent audience, and not a whole lot else besides a vague sense of confusion. The account describes a doubtless flared and hirsute gentleman from the audience expressing his concerns by snatching the microphone during Jocko Homo to answer Mark's question with the proposal that, You're not men, you're fucking assholes, which I'm sure was high drama on the night but you struggle to hear it on the recording. This leaves us with a lot of silence, some actual applause contrary to the claims, and versions of songs that sounded better on Hardcore Devo. Yay.

I'd say this would have made more sense as a bootleg cassette, or as a CD occupying the same ecosystem as a bootleg cassette; but of course it's also a CD so it's my fault for buying the double vinyl and no-one held a gun to my head. All the same, it's Devo so I don't regret the purchase in any sense but there's a limit to how many previously unreleased live recordings I need. I appreciate the guys still have to make a living and I certainly don't begrudge them doing so, but surely there's still some studio material right down in the bottom of that barrel - maybe that which was recorded as the Wipeouters or Dove*, or even more solo Jerry. Nitrous Nightmare isn't a bad album by any description, but regardless of whatever happened on the night, it's more an underwhelming dream than anything.

Also for what it may be worth, I've been in bands that cleared every single person from the room by the third song, so it doesn't seem that big a deal. You can still hear faint applause and appreciative whistles on side four of this one.

*: Assuming these haven't already been shoved out on green quadruple vinyl.

Severed Heads - Cuisine (1991)

 

Back in the late eighteenth century when I took to recording my own music by bouncing tracks from one wax cylinder to another, I had a vision of perfect pop music recorded by unorthodox means, which is probably why I couldn't pay people to listen to my stuff. It was partially inspired by the first two Eno solo albums being so beautifully infectious as to make the Beach Boys sound like that album Lou Reed made with his washing machine, yet with the sort of weird depth you'd find in a decent novel or painting; and by depth I don't mean the cobblers usually qualified as deep - mathematical musicianship, references to Tolkien, and anything else that sounds great when you partake, if you know what I'm sayin', man. The eighties explosion of bands who read books and played synths suggested that maybe I wasn't the only one to have the same idea; and then when I eventually stumbled across a copy of the Severed Heads' Rotund For Success, leading to my immediately buying every record I could find by them, I recognised something seemingly akin to what I'd been trying to do except about a million times better because it worked. I've never trusted anyone whose entire identity is their love of some band, but for a couple of years at least that could have been me with the Severed Heads.

Cuisine came out, which was exciting until I realised there was to be no vinyl release. I'd assumed those fancy new compact discs were some audiophile deal limited to mostly classical material, and we'd otherwise be carrying on as normal. Puzzling sightings of CDs by Kylie Minogue and Chas & Dave gave me cause to wonder if maybe I had it all wrong, and then suddenly no fucker was buying vinyl apart from me. I didn't know what to do. Foetus released a couple of CD only albums and my enthusiasm began to wither until, a couple of years later, my friend Eddy got so bored of my whining about there being nothing on vinyl that he gave me his old CD player. The idea took some getting used to but I eventually tracked down a copy of Cuisine in an effort to get with the programme. It was good but the moment had gone, like some weirdly uncomfortable interaction with an ex-lover. Of course, I eventually got over it when I discovered the Discman, even though my listening habits had wandered off in another direction by that point.

Thirty-five years later and we have Cuisine on vinyl as nature intended at long fucking last, and somehow it sounds like I'm hearing it for the first time, as the successor to Rotund for Success rather than merely some other stuff they did. I'm not sure I ever bought the idea of CD being necessarily superior to vinyl, nor the one about vinyl being somehow warmer or summink, but Jesus fuck! this record packs a punch of which I was somehow unaware. Severed Heads make sonic technological precision sound as human as even the most ruthlessly authentic blues guitarist captured with the sound of someone frying chips next to the microphone. It's what they do with the technology - deep intestinal bass, heartbeat percussion, and tunes which manage to feel both rapturous and traumatic at the same time. Emotionally, it's a rollercoaster - if you'll pardon my borrowing a phrase from persons who describe things as rollercoasters: the peaks and troughs of an overwrought teenager on some bipolar jag with plaintive lyrics bordering on Dadaism. A good Severed Heads record will make you feel great and tear your heart out at the same time, and this one is no exception because there's no such thing as a bad Severed Heads record - nothing they ever released has left room for improvement.

I know the above reads as self-indulgent hyperbole. These are just the words that came out when I sat down to listen to this album. The short version is that Cuisine is fucking great and you probably need to hear it.

Cloth Ear - 一 (yī) (2026)

 

I assume this to be the work of Peter Hope, it having been hustled forth by Wrong Revolution, but I'm otherwise mostly in the dark given the lack of information on either cover or Bandcamp page. It could be the first album from his milkman for all I know, but let's assume it's the man himself, being consistent with Hope's sonic aesthetic which allows for noise, distortion, and things occasionally sounding like they were captured on a mono-portable tape recorder in 1974 - allows for without it being the entire point such as you tend to find with young bearded men who curate things involving 'vinyls' in coffee bars. Instruments feature, or at least there's a guitar providing scraping noises, meandering bass notes on some kind of primitive synth, percussive sounds which are probably cardboard boxes and bits of wood, and everything dominated by a delay, possibly a WEM Copycat by the sound of it. It chugs, whines, hisses, screams, drifts from place to place, and what we lack in anything you'd call a tune or even a groove is compensated by the slow repeat and decay through a dirty echo box; so it becomes hypnotic and absorbing fairly soon. I don't detect any significant element of nostalgia, but the mains hum, technology, and general mood hark back to those brief seven or eight months before anyone described anything as industrial, and all we had were rehearsal tapes of Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Deviation Social and hardly anyone else; and we didn't really know what the hell it was except that we liked it. The repetition of the delay is what makes sense of this material as something powerfully musical and after a few plays you begin to anticipate certain sounds and noises just as you'd anticipate the chorus of something more obviously structured.

It wasn't that I didn't have expectations of this album but I didn't have any idea what it was, relying on the House of Hope to come through with the goods as usual; as indeed it has, and this may even be my favourite Wrong Revolution release, or at least it's up there with the best.

ABK - Hatchet Warrior (2003)

 

Here's a late submission because I assumed I'd already written about it on the basis of its top shelf status. ABK, or Anybody Killa, was an affiliate of the Insane Clown Posse and this was his first album released through their Psychopathic label. Anyone already rolling their eyes should probably fuck off now.

Those rolling their eyes were most likely doing so due to the Juggalo association. Juggalos dress as nightmare versions of circus clowns and make regular pilgrimages to massive events, mostly ignored by mainstream media, drawn by the music of ICP and others which might be characterised as gangsta rap with custard pies. I'm not into clown paint, tattoos, piercings, or stage diving, but the Juggalos strike me as one of the few youth adjacent music based movements which isn't full of shit, which has never pretended to be anything it wasn't, and which truly looks after its own. The cool kids never liked Juggalos, but then once you get past the award-winning haircuts, the cool kids are nearly always arseholes.

ABK ticks a few of the familiar Juggalo boxes, notably the slapstick horrorcore and ghetto testimony, but on his own terms with his own unique voice and take with the added perspective of his Native American heritage; and if there's a cartoon element, as with many Psychopathic releases, it takes a back seat - or is at least riding shotgun, I suppose. The music, mostly produced by Mike P, is  flawless, banging hard and funky with one foot in Parliament, one in the boom-bap New York sound, and with a third mutant foot (possibly where a hand should be) tippy-tapping across genres ranging from the obvious rap-metal to Native chants without ever quite being just one thing; so it all sounds like it should be familiar except it kind of isn't. ABK tells stories, cracks jokes, and delivers an emotionally powerful account of life as was in 2003 with all the obligatory references to mucho screwing and smoking oneself into a coma, yet without turning it into one of those stoner rap deals drawing from Bill and Ted's Unwatchable Adventure more than anything which ever attached a turntable to a light pole in the park; and whatever you may think of his testimony, it feels real and from the heart; and regarding ABK's credentials here, it's telling that no lesser authority than Paris drops a blistering verse on Ghetto Neighbor. The album is loosely pinned together with references to Walter Hill's Warriors of 1979, which has become a common fixation in hip-hop, but it's done exceptionally well here, fitting dialogue to tracks with what feels like a certain logic even if it's not always obvious what that is, then ending with a faithfully anthemic rendition of Joe Walsh's In the City as closing credits - which could have gone so wrong but is a triumph on all counts.

Whine all you like, clutch those Quest albums until they snap in two, but this was a rap milestone even if you were too important to listen. It's an album that does you good, like a full meal on an empty stomach. Whoop fuckin' whoop!

Northstar (2004)

 

As usual, I'm late to the show and since recording this debut album, one of them is dead while the other lives on despite having chopped off his own penis during a failed suicide attempt, so I think I'll pretend it's still 2004 for the next couple of paragraphs if that's okay with the rest of you.

Northstar were one of a couple of west-coast acts incorporated in the Wu-Tang's extended family alongside Royal Fam, Shyheim, Killarmy and all of those guys. I first noticed them stood heads above the rest on the Ghost Dog soundtrack, then making similarly outstanding showings on other Wu-related compilations. Suddenly, a mere quarter of a century later, I rushed out and bagged me their debut album and here we are.

More than anything, Northstar have always stood out thanks to Christ Bearer, one of those MCs you could never mistake for anyone else. There's a unique skip or twang to his delivery meaning he sounds like no-one else and you can't help but listen and be drawn in. It's the same deal as you get with Paris. Although rhythms and subjects may differ, it feels similarly urgent, even important. As a bicoastal fusion, this may seem like a bit of a novelty deal, but the blend works beautifully. Where the RZA produces, his beats are cleaner than usual, less cluttered, working well alongside other material, notably the magnificently cinematic Luv Allah from Armand van Helden. We have the sort of lyricism you'd expect from Wu-affiliates over a westerly version of the beats you'd anticipate, so maybe closer to the Alkaholiks than Westside Connection - not much gunplay but no backpacking either, and certainly no filler. It doesn't jump out of the player as an obvious classic album during the first couple of plays but after a week or so I'd rate this one as at least in the same ballpark as Tical or Supreme Clientele. Christ Bearer really seemed to be a unique voice, but Northstar would hold your attention even without his involvement. They should have been huge.

Mysterious Kitchens (1980)

 

More recently reissued on CD by Klang Galerie, Mysterious Kitchens was a Terse Tapes compilation cassette from way back in the depths of the Precambrian. Terse Tapes, as you will doubtless recall, was the Australian organ from which the mighty Severed Heads didst squirt forth. Featured artists include Pissy Relay Switches, the Nobodies, Wet Taxis, Mr + Mrs No Smoking Sign, Lamington Lady, Holiday Funn, and Mindless Delta Children amongst others. As you may have guessed from the fameproofing of the names in combination with this being a cassette from 1980, what we have are weird noises recorded on cheap equipment by a subs bench of about ten persons working in various combinations under different names. Mr + Mrs No Smoking Sign may be vaguely familiar as an early incarnation of the Severed Heads, which it is, although Tom Ellard and Garry Bradbury are each involved with half of the other named artists on Mysterious Kitchens so it's six of one, half dozen of the other, and Pissy Relay Switches actually sound closer to Clean or Ear Bitten. Standouts include the Nobodies, seemingly the only act failing to share its membership with anyone else from what I can tell, who fall marginally closer in sound to early Cabaret Voltaire or Devo, for want of a better comparison; also Garry Bradbury's Wet Taxis who notably managed something of a career beyond this compilation. Primitive rhythm boxes, cheap keyboards, tape loops, hiss, and one effects pedal between the lot of them accounts for the sound, generally speaking, although there's plenty of variation, with Tom Ellard's involvement betrayed by his luxurious Pre-Raphaelite melodies which sound gorgeous even when recorded on what may as well be one of those little plastic records you used to find in the back of your talking Action Man.

One for the kids there.

Mysterious Kitchens is rough as fuck but has a joyous peculiarity that elevates it way above the standard photocopied industrial collections of its day - closer in spirit to the Residents and their like than any of the Gristle bunch; and honestly it's a lot more fun and interesting than many of its more technologically adept successors.

+DOG+ - Rural Highway [After Hopper] (2025)

 

Even given the apparent limitations of noise, they continue to surprise. Here we have four tracks, two recorded live and two which sound as though they've been recorded live - live here implying someone in the audience with a tape recorder, so it has the ambience of something released on Broken Flag back in the day with none of the usual high definition clarity of oscillators suffering in some digital hellscape. The sound, as ever, is difficult to identify beyond the roar, aside from the element of workshop percussion, drums and cymbals going way beyond free jazz into the territory of someone hammering nails or taking a chisel to something on a lathe. This kind of noise has accrued such associations that one might assume something fucking appalling happened on this rural highway, but that's never what +DOG+ have been about, and being committed to a sort of pastoralism I have to conclude that this is presented as a different form of beauty. Not everything in nature is pretty or lends itself to sentiment, which isn't to say it's necessarily ugly either, and I suspect that may be what +DOG+ strive for unless I'm simply overthinking this one.

To take a massively self-indulgent digression in furtherance of my point, some years ago I made a wood frame to cover our garden pond so as to protect the plants and fish from raccoons at night, because nothing fucks up your garden pond like a raccoon. I made the frame by bending wood into a kidney shape and covering it with wire mesh. The frame has done well over the years but is now in such a state as to oblige me to construct a replacement. One problem I didn't foresee is a wooden structure built at one end, a sort of open-ended box which rests in and covers the water where there's no protective mesh and so allows frogs and toads to come and go, built deep enough to prevent raccoons reaching in and yanking out the plants, as they tend to do. This box structure, being partially submerged some of the time, had rotted free of where it was attached to the frame.

Bear with me. I'm getting there.

I took the structure out, this assemblage of rusted screws, algae, and wood eaten away by fish, snails, and insects. It was junk, but I'd put a lot of work into screwing and gluing the thing together and I couldn't quite bring myself to chuck it out. On close inspection I found the decay fascinating, quite beautiful in its own way, and so decided it was art. It's not quite a Dadaist readymade because I made the thing, but it comes close in spirit. I've churned out a great many paintings over the course of my existence, and even a few sculptures back in my twenties - or assemblages which I called sculptures - and it occurred to me that this belonged with them more than it belonged in the garbage. It's 13" x 10" x 4", made of wood, screws, and organic matter, and vaguely resembles a model of some primitive neolithic dwelling. The form speaks to me, although I'm not sure that what it says is worth writing down, and any future archaeologist digging it out from wherever it ends up will have no fucking clue why I assembled the thing and may even conclude that it's art. I'm not planning on exhibiting it, selling it, or even telling anyone about it beyond this paragraph, but there it is. I put it together and natural processes did the rest.

Returning to the point, whatever it is I see in this piece - which is how I'd refer to it if I took myself even more seriously - seems akin to what I hear in +DOG+, and particularly in this album  referencing the art of Edward Hopper. It's neither a flower nor a beautiful sunset. It's noise and decay and relics which have lost natural purpose over time, or patterns in bark, or a storm, or things found under rocks before we've given them meaning and declared them beautiful or otherwise. The noise, the howl, and the sonic scream is a celebration, not a herald of destruction, and this is in the ear of the beholder, just as it has always been. As a celebration, there's something very liberating about this noise, almost refreshing, even if not everyone is going to hear it.

We now return you to your normal programme.

Buy from Love Earth Music.

Laibach (1985)

 

Laibach's first album has recently been reissued in a box with all sorts of fancy extra stuff. Typically I finally found a decent quality copy that I could afford, or almost afford, about a month before anyone said anything about a reissue, but never mind. The pleasure of bagging this one is undiminished. While I can appreciate their more recent work, engaging with capitalism and consumerism using the same methods with which they once dissected totalitarian ideology (amongst other things) I still feel it steers too close to the wacky cover versions of the later Residents, at least for my tastes; and although Milan Fras growling be yourself brings me great pleasure, I remain drawn to the mystery of the earlier material from before the wall came down. I remain drawn to it because it's incredibly fucking powerful and I'm still trying to figure it out and whether or not this says anything unfortunate about me.

Thankfully, my recent reading of Alexei Monroe's Interrogation Machine has answered pretty much any question I had, additionally confirming that my questions inevitably arose as a result of not having been born in Slovenia and being largely ignorant of its history. Laibach are surprisingly straightforward once it's explained, as is their preference for ambiguity even where the ambiguity leads to disturbing conclusions such as maybe they really mean it; but this isn't a discussion which is served by reduction to soundbites or disclaimers so you'll just have to read the book if you care that much.

Laibach's initial musical campaign reveals common ground with Test Dept, 23 Skidoo and the like, founded in intense rhythms and the sort of manipulation of sound heard before anyone could afford a sampler. Rekapitulacija 1980-84, issued the same year, better represents their first formative steps, with this debut as an arguably transitional album - still with someone playing a bass guitar amid various electroacoustic sounds, but they're moving towards neoclassical bombast of the kind which inspired a thousand other marching up and down bands, few of whom managed anything more than a dubious karaoke turn. Laibach here recapitulate the sound and imagery of totalitarian power according to its own strengths, its ability to reach down to our most primal selves and grab them by the metaphorical bollocks, because this approach is arguably more effective - and less insulting to its audience - than mere parody, or Billy Bragg bravely punching a Nazi with one fist while giving us a comradely thumbs up with the other. Crucial to this is what is said, and whether this repetition of noise and light actively says anything at all, because much of the totalitarian rhetoric is stripped of its meaning, leaving no identification of scapegoats (a popular theme with ideological types), nor even anything more coherent than a nebulous hymn to some kind of progress couched in retrograde terms combining early modernism with the folk art so beloved of authoritarian regimes. Should anyone still be bothered by how any of this fits together, or unduly bothered, I'll close with an excerpt from Françoise Thom's Newspeak: The Language of Soviet Communism as quoted in the aforementioned Interrogation Machine.

Confronted by the terror of nothingness which ideology brings, man instinctively seeks refuge under the wing of some tyrant, unaware that in so doing he is handing himself over to the very thing he fears. Compared with sheer nothingness, tyranny always looks like the lesser evil.

Just keep thinking about it, if you're still not sure. I'd argue that Laibach create true art of tremendous intellectual and emotional force in summary of both the essence and the sheer scale of the problems of civilisation, and if you still get them confused with Skrewdriver or Ayn Rand or any other ideology driven shitbag, then you're almost certainly contributing to that problem. I'm not saying that this record will scare some sense into you, but it's probably a good place to start.

Sleaford Mods - The Mekon (2008)

 

I make vague efforts towards not writing the same thing week after week, and I know I covered their first one not so long ago, but Jesus this, their second album, has really got its hooks in. Everything that sounded like it was going somewhere and had probably arrived on the debut outing here comes into focus so sharp it'll have your eye out. My expectations may have been reduced by it being named after Dan Dare's cartoon enemy, but as I approach the Ozempic years, I realise I'd forgotten how the Mekon once served as the go to synonym for the absolute worst fucker you could have the misfortune to encounter. At least this was so in the West Midlands of the seventies, and I assume elsewhere. The Mekon was anyone awful beyond description - your boss, someone's shitty kid, a hated relative - and I don't remember any stronger condemnation; and this came back to me as I listened to the title track at the end of side one, a shrapnel blast of wrath over the stuff described as Liveable Shit in more recent times, weighted down with a loop of Pretty Vacant, which remains terrifying all these years later and somehow sounds even angrier here than it did back then.

We're off to a flawless start with a Rotten sample and Jason bellowing toilet over and over as we build up to Armitage Shanks, which lyrically feels like early Viz comic pushed to a harrowing extreme. Another day in the gutter, darling. Forget about it...

As with the first one, we're mostly dealing with looped samples, although there's layering, some structural work here and there - so a belated hats off to Simon Claridge, whoever he may be. Thought has gone into this so it's never just a record of loops, and the aforementioned Armitage Shanks may even have borrowed a full instrumental for all I can tell. The Sex Pistols, Nas and the Who notwithstanding, I don't immediately recognise too many of the sources and nothing gets in the way of The Mekon feeling very much in the vein of a sixties beat album in its entirety, with jazzy undertones which might be smoky were they not so fucking angry. The first version of Jobseeker builds on the Yardbirds' For Your Love to great effect and I think I prefer this version, at least once I've got past reminders of all the fun I had at Tile Hill job centre. There are plenty of memories here, mostly the kind ground into the brain like the vintage gunge around a neglected overflow - pubs with red flock wallpaper and the stench of Rothmans or JPS hitting you in the face upon entrance, synthetic carpet tiles underfoot before staggering out into halogen daylight with the manic urgency of excessive booze, a violently embittered version of the swagger promised by Oasis but nowhere near so dumb or blunted. The worst of times were the best we could manage or expect.

Then we come to Trixie with another loop which somehow improves on its source, and some of the grimmest, most depressing shit ever committed to wax; and it suddenly makes sense that the Sleaford Mods have always enjoyed a certain popularity in noise circles. It's not just the element of two blokes stood on a stage with a laptop. Trixie could be Consumer Electronics but for the repeated riff from Submission. The Mekon also makes some sense of Sleaford Mods as the English Mobb Deep - grimy as fuck, cold and relentless as daily existence, and very much rooted in its own soil.

Howl in the Typewriter - Primalore (2026)

 

If you enjoy sentences like, 'Take your cunt-looking face and shove it into your dad's syphilitic arsehole,' that is a fine line between entertainment and insanity. This is but one of many statements delivered by Primalore like prison kitchen slops down those waste chutes on either side of your head. In fact it's a direct quote from track thirteen, identified on the cover as Spilling Processed Peas, although the album is just over an hour of continuous pseudo-narrative barrage without breaks, without pause for breath, and its division into individual tracks seems arbitrary. Elsewhere, Frailty Assessment Area teaches us that:

The sunset's air pollution melts ovary morning celebrations in breast wax and hot labia solvents splashing in dusty socks at cocktail parties of ass-kicking mind-wanking faith denominating a thermoviscous cooling snail in the head from the pre-fright ungulates of mutilated spastics in buried bodies seeping concrete the tourist trap entangled with incomer fashion chasers splitting the G, a coop noob move up north, even if such drink decorations exist there.

As you might imagine, it's difficult to get your head around this one, or it would be if the noise allowed you just a couple of seconds in which to ask, what the fuck was that?!? which it doesn't.

The music is a cut-up soundtrack of DIY synthpop chopped into fragments, most shorter than a second, of which some passages may repeat but I've been thus far too disorientated to tell. I think the point of the music is mainly so we can call it music because it's probably a better fit than anything else. First impressions are of a distant, more scatological cousin to Nigel Ayers' recent spoken word efforts, The Pre-War Noise Encryption Standard and Excavations in Substation. As with Ayers' narratives, Primalore almost makes sense but never quite gets there, leaving the listener forever struggling to catch up. The voice draws us into an ever-shifting unreal environment because we feel it should make sense, or should at least try walking in a straight line for longer than a minute; and yet much of the monologue may seem weirdly familiar but for the proverbial leg bone being inexplicably connected to the analgesic cyclotron bone.

However, where Ayers' hallucinogenic narrative is at least as soothing as the mad stuff that goes through your head when you're unwell and consequently delirious, this is closer to the information overload of Consumer Electronics, albeit without being quite so harrowing. Conversely, Stan Batcow's delivery is often surprisingly amiable, almost conversational, regardless of the onslaught and despite the rapid fire battery of bizarre, jarring images. It sounds conversational in places.

The text comes from Primalore Four, a magazine produced by Mark Reeve and Dr. Adolf Steg (real name - Dr. Adolf Steg), a copy of which is currently going on eBay for ₤24.50 unless you live in Americaland, as I do. Retooled as what I suppose could be termed a fulminating book, I suspect information overload is the method of delivery more than the point in itself. It's not so much that meaning is scrambled and reduced to noise as that there's too much meaning, the ultimate thrust of which perhaps leaks through during the aforementioned Frailty Assessment Area:

Everything must be perfect down the years, so destroy all art, culture and music, blow up this fucking useless planet and remove us from existence. What has the human race really achieved? We have fucked up a beautiful planet and spent billions going to a dead moon as the two percent on the bottom rung of society cause so much harm to the rest, the good people of this world.

If I've given an impression of Primalore as an unlistenable racket, which it may well be to many, that isn't my intention. Rather it's a sort of primal scream, or howl, I suppose; and whatever the hell it's saying, it's hard to keep from getting swept along in its sheer bloody-minded dedication to doing whatever it's doing, and it leaves the listener strangely energised or invigorated in a glow of recovery such as might normally be encountered after a gut-wrenching hangover or a dose of the most powerful laxatives known to man, and also some women. I don't know what it is, or even that I like it, but it impresses the living shit out of me and I don't know why.

Procure thineself a copy yonder.

In the Nursery - Twins (1986)

 

That whole thing which everyone now seems happy to clumsily label industrial music was once distinguished by an eclectic willingness to engage in experimentation while moving ever forward, as distinct from remaking the same record over and over - at least in the eighties as it sounded to my ears. Prefiguring Forrest Gump's figurative box of Milk Tray, you just never knew what you was gunna git next, and In the Nursery seem a particularly powerful example of this.

Soundtrack music, like industrial, has become a much overused term, more often than not referring to something with weird noises drifting through oceans of reverb with no obvious interest in forming songs. In the Nursery, on the other hand, developed a sound structured closely to the classical and narrative tendencies of actual film soundtracks where moods are built then subsumed by broader themes, so it's no great surprise that they graduated to film scores - here meaning the genuine article rather than curmudgeonly noises bubbling away during some blurred super 8mm nightmare.

Twins seems to be where it began, give or take some small change, although it's a logical progression from Sonority, and I obviously need to track down a copy of Temper, also from 1985. Classical elements invoke Elgar - strings here rather than samples - combined with meticulously beaten rhythms of martial cadence maintaining a certain remove from rock origins; and each element performs according to the needs of the sound rather than traditional rock hierarchy, so vocals fill a function more in line with the operatic than with Chuck Berry as part of the whole rather than just the foreground. It's often pensive or melancholy with bursts of triumphant conclusion and even the occasional splash of sunlight - plenty of drama rather than happy because it's grown up music. Twins is akin to watching a film in emotional terms, and they were just getting warmed up at this point. The charm of this album isn't immediate but grows with each play as you acclimate to what they were doing, and as it becomes apparent that no-one else was really doing anything quite like it at the time. Once again I curse that I was always skint back in the day in combination with never once coming across a copy of Twins in a record store without already having spunked away my pocket money on something else.

Gavin Friday - Ecce Homo (2024)

 

Somewhere in an alternate reality, spurred on by the success of his contribution to In Strict Tempo, Genesis P. Orridge formed a synthpop act with Dave Ball, went on to even greater things, and none of us had to spend any more time thinking about Psychic TV. It didn't happen but Gavin Friday and Dave Ball would have been at least as good, and now we have evidence to support such a claim. It's been forty years but better later than never.

I half expected a slightly more disturbing Soft Cell album, but the tone and mood remain consistent with Friday's work with Maurice Seezer; although no-one could possibly doubt that it's Dave Ball twiddling the proverbial knobs given his invoking John Barry, Serge Gainsbourg, or even Kurt Weill (probably) with the best of them. Gavin Friday always had one of the more powerful voices to emerge from whatever the fuck it was he emerged from - gorgeous, and darkly sexy whilst equally liable to scare the living shit out of us with songs one can easily imagine crooned by Sinatra somehow without any of the obvious contradictions getting in the way.

As with others of his - or our if I'm being honest - Friday's vintage, thoughts inevitable turn to change and what the hell happened, so yielding reflection on When the World was Young - chilling and poignant because I'm not sure what the hell happened either. Rather than pointing out how everything is now fucking stupid (which it is) he instead ruminates on what we got right and on what should be remembered - even in the ominous yet nevertheless uplifting Glitterstomp of Lady Esquire - without squirting generic rainbow juice over everything, case in point being the sublime Cabarotica, a memory of Soho in the early eighties. Avoiding music press as I've tended to do, I've never formed assumptions regarding the lad's sexuality because it makes no difference to me; and I enjoy the idea that it ultimately doesn't matter because I miss those years before we had to fill in forms, wear badges, and pass tests in order that adjacent arseholes - the social equivalent of useless upper management material - should feel validated. Just as significant an indication of the man's character is The Best Boys in Dublin, a moving tribute to Friday's beloved sausage dogs, and I'm not sure how much more you really need to know.

The loss of the late, great Dave Ball is an enduring source of sorrow and this masterpiece is both a fine memorial to himself, and a testament to Gavin Friday as an artistic colossus whose powers remain undiminished.

Sleaford Mods (2007)

 

As you hopefully realise, the Sleaford Mods were Jason Williamson and various other blokes as required for a good five years before Andrew Fearne got involved, and they - or I suppose he - recorded quite a lot of material prior to Austerity Dogs bothering the hit parade. Some of this early stuff has resurfaced on compilations and bootlegs but will most likely remain obscure due to the legality of clearing all those samples, of which there are many. Anyway, someone has at last done the right thing in issuing vinyl bootlegs of the first four as originally released on CDR, so we get to hear this stuff more or less as intended in terms of artwork, running order and so on - which I personally find less confusing than assemblages such as Retweeted, I'm Not a Mod - Fuck Off and others.

...and guess what?

Contrary to any faint expectation you may have of ropy demos from before someone got their shit together, it's fucking great!

Williamson rants, yells, croons, belches, cracks jokes and delivers one lyrical wedgie after another with the same relentless wit and bile with which you will be familiar. Presumably unsure as to whether anyone was even listening at this point, if anything, he seems to give even less of a shit about sparing anyone's feelings. The music is looped samples, blatantly stolen without any attempt to disguise sources, but with just enough crafting and editing to keep it from sounding like punky Philip Glass; and while we may have noticed the looping of riffs from the Jam, the Pistols, even the Who on Retweeted, the choice of wallpaper on this debut effort is such as to leave the whole feeling distinctly jazzy, albeit in a moody sense with bars lifted from Roni Size, Bernard Herrmann, Barry White and others; and there's even a sample-free acoustic guitar instrumental, just in case you think you had the thing all figured out - and it fits right in.

Should anyone have developed the wrong impression, Sleaford Mods is no shaky beginning, no finding of feet regardless of being a quite different animal to Austerity Dogs. It's a fully formed blast of inspired racket, opprobrium - and even crooning - and as vital a debut as Bollocks, Illmatic, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, or any others you care to mention.

Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction (1997)

 

I've generally given anything involving Al Jourgensen a medium to wide berth, my knee-jerk impression having been formed by his seemingly recording and releasing everything he does without any sort of filter whatsoever under a million different effortfully contentious personas, too many collaborations with famous friends, generally trying too hard to be a metal goblin and pulling scary faces at the camera while challenging us with philosophical conundrums on the level of going to church is shit RRRAAAARRRRGH!!! Life is too short for that much pantomime badassery.

Yet I have to admit that what he does well, he does very well - those Revolting Cocks singles, Acid Horse with Cabaret Voltaire, and of course Lard. I've heard a couple of Ministry albums, even owned one of them for about three days. All I recall is grunting and growling, everything jammed on eleven, and samples of evangelical types asking for money. It sounded like a parody, plus it's now 2026 and I'm bored thoroughly shitless with persons younger than myself* who really need to know whether or not this record is properly industrial so they can add it to their stupid fucking list. Well, Lard is 25% punk due to the involvement of Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys who were a punk band, and 75% industrial because of Al and the gang, so that's interesting isn't it, you fucking suckers.

I could listen to Biafra all day long. He cuts straight to the bone of the bullshit which makes our lives that much worse, and he's very, very funny, and that weird warble isn't like anything else in the pantheon; and so his involvement fills the bandwidth which, were it anything other than Lard, Al would probably have stuffed full of something annoying, or at least annoying to me. This allows me a greater opportunity to enjoy what Al and his pals actually do well. It's metal of some description, tight as fuck and paradoxically no fat, chopped into sharp edged steel blocks with swarf and grease all over the place, coming off the belt at twice any speed recommended by health and safety standards. The effect is akin to being stood on a traffic island with the constant vehicular roar forming an ocean of automotive noise for an hour, while Jello bounces around like the Mr. Rogers of hard, uncomfortable truths yodelling clues as to what you might like to think about should you ever get off the island alive.

I'm sure Al is one of the good guys but I really wish I liked a few of the others as much as I like this one.

*: Which is now admittedly nearly everyone.

Mozart Estate - Tower Block in a Jam Jar (2025)

 

If I'm in the habit of writing bollocks, what follows may be worse than usual on the grounds that Tower Block excavates and rerecords more or less an entire Go-Kart Mozart album with knobs on, namely Tearing Up the Album Charts from 2005 which, naturally, I somehow never picked up and haven't heard. Our boy felt that said album somewhat slipped under the radar and was thus deprived its due, which is obviously true in my case; so here we are again for the very first time.

Where Go-Kart Mozart was designed as a portastudio band - which makes perfect sense when you listen to the music - the Estate has a bigger budget with production values closer to Denim; so I guess the Estate is an automotive expansion rather than a feature of urban planning. You probably know what to expect here, which is what you get, and yet it's still weird and disconcerting because why would you do this?

Renovating the past for the sake of the future, is the answer given on the cover, which sort of makes sense. Tower Block in a Jam Jar isn't some beardy return to the rich songwriting traditions of Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, or Scott Walker so much as an unreconstructed defense of Micky Most and whoever wrote the lyrics to The Humphreys Are About for the Unigate television advert. It's nostalgia for all the stuff you've been trying to forget, and a reminder that while those who weren't there have come to view the seventies as David Bowie and Marc Bolan giggling as they apply glitter to each other's faces, it was mostly Barry Blue, Watney's Red Barrel, and getting your head kicked in on a Saturday night. It's nothing to do with current notions of cool. It's brown and orange with rounded corners because Chicory Tip existed whether you like it or not, which is kind of refreshing. Mozart Estate embrace and celebrate the grim, and I mean the showbiz smile so false that it hurts grim rather than the artistically grim, as most vividly embodied in the cheerfully harrowing A Lorra Laughs with Cilla. This album is weird, beautiful and horrible all at the same time, and is the opposite of everything the machine has been selling you for the past four decades.

Bolt Thrower - Realm of Chaos (1989)

 

I'm not sure it's even possible for me to be any further out of my depth than with this one. I hated metal, or what was then called metal, for most of my formative years. I hated the silly logos of chrome-plated skulls embellished with either Old English or piles of twigs. I hated the pantomime scary faces pulled on stage and record covers. I hated the lyrics endlessly referencing the dullest shite known to mankind - crap horror movies, Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & fucking Dragons. I hated the guitar solos. Napalm Death always sounded like a fucking racket to me, and while I was already listening to a lot of music which revelled in being a fucking racket, it was usually an interesting fucking racket, not just Motorhead played at 750mph with the Cookie Monster barking lyrically on the subject of Cthulhu over machine gun bass pedals. Despite hailing from Coventry, a city in which I have resided at various points, Bolt Thrower naturally passed me by.

As with many things I initially dislike, I eventually came to wonder whether I really disliked Bolt Thrower, and if so what it was that I found specifically annoying. It somehow took me three decades to overcome this one, but never mind. I had a listen to summat on YouTube and it gripped me with a Hadrian's Wall of the dirtiest, thickest guitar distortion you ever heard and drums pounding at the pace of a funeral.

'Yoink,' I yelped as I leapt from my seat, 'I must own this record!' I looked in a few of the usual online places and found that this, their first album, was long out of print and therefore prohibitively expensive if you could even find a copy. Another five years passed and suddenly there was a reissue sat in the racks of Hogwild Records. I got it home and was disconcerted to discover that  it sounded quite different to whatever I'd heard on YouTube, and that I'd actually made purchase of one of those Cookie Monster records I've been avoiding for more or less the entirety of my life.

Assuming I was mistakenly remembering something by the Melvins, or Eyehategod, or one of those other admittedly listenable bands, I gave Realm of Chaos a spin anyway. I couldn't figure the fucker out, so I gave it another spin. Why would anyone record this?, I asked myself, and kept playing it because I felt I should at least make the effort to understand. Eventually, probably inevitably, if it still didn't make sense, I could at least appreciate it as a mammoth slab of black vomiting from my speakers for forty minutes or so. The bass pedal came to sound more like a synth growl, and the wall of guitar drops chords like slabs of meat onto a mortuary floor, and even if I remained fully confused, it sounded like Bolt Thrower knew exactly what the fuck they were doing - which is probably all you need; although it possibly helps that there's a track called World Eater, which is the sort of title that predisposes me to enjoy whatever the hell it is before I've heard a note. Thankfully it wasn't zydeco.

So Realm of Chaos is what the first four Black Sabbath albums sound like after they've been through a black hole, or something - so vast it's not even possible to tell how big it really is and - on close inspection - just a few steps along the evolutionary ladder from the stuff I recognise as music. Yet this also is music, just a bit darker.

Sometimes it's nice to discover just how wrong you can be.

Foetus - Halt (2025)

 

So here it is, the final Foetus record and it sounds very much like a grand finale - a culmination of forms developed over the course of the previous nine studio albums, although admittedly the mutant disco of Deaf and Ache are represented in spirit more than actual sonics. The new Foetus album - whichever one it is this time - always expands on its predecessor, taking the ideas further, albeit occasionally in a different direction; and Halt is no exception, building on the symphonic excesses of Hide and Love while marking a more concerted reinvestment in the crime jazz heard on earlier records. I'm borrowing crime jazz from some online review I saw because it's amusingly descriptive and—no kiddies, this isn't fucking industrial music. Anyway, the big band is bigger and raging harder than ever, he's growling again, and we have that seasick sound which seems more or less unique to Mr. Thirlwell, here sonically underscoring the point of The World is Broken, for one example, which staggers along on what would be swagger but for its fatal failure to develop sea legs. We have excursions into both opera and a sort of nautical folk - another new deal which nevertheless makes perfect sense - but the set is dominated by what feels like a variation on soundtrack music, the huge orchestral scores of the Biblical epic. This seems appropriate given the theme of endings - both the Foetus mission and human civilisation if the world outside the window is any indication. He's really not fucking about this time.

Did he ever fuck about? I'm not convinced. All those songs about hot times in the old town may seem the opposite of telling it like it is, as Thirlwell does on Halt, but the intensity is the same firehose of imagery and loathing and we shouldn't mistake extremes of emphasis for some guy stood on a stage pulling scary faces because that's showbiz. Serious as cancer, as the saying has it.

This one may conceivably be his crowning achievement, and certainly for something which lavishes in and so subverts familiar musical traditions, it somehow doesn't sound like anything else; and where Halt might resemble Flow or Thaw or Nail or any of its predecessors, it does so but more and better with a thousand additional shades of grey bringing terrible depth to the shadows.

This man is honestly a fucking genius.

Money 3 (2025)

 

Watching Secret Mall Apartment, the 2024 Netflix documentary about a group of artists who managed to live in a shopping mall for four years before they were discovered, it occurred to me that real art - as distinct from AI renderings of Winnie the Pooh as a Japanese ladyboy on the one hand, or a child's pram filled with actual human turds on the other - doesn't need to introduce itself by telling you that it's art because it will be self evident. Money 3 qualifies as art without having to send out memos - art in the sense of it being akin to setting up a sound installation in your listening space, wherever that may be.

Of Love Earth Music's most recent care package, I'm surprised to find I've played this one the most - surprised because it's over three hours of whatever it is on three discs and I don't understand what the hell I'm listening to; or why I keep listening to it. There's something fascinating here.

Money 3 seems to be the name of the album as the third in a series, with Money 4 having been issued about a month ago. Aside from a label graphic and track titles - and all seven listed tracks are called Money - there's no other information and nothing to identify the creator, although I suspect it will be someone from +DOG+. The artwork is mostly images of dollar bills, so maybe they want us to think about money. Maybe it's the sound of someone rubbing a dollar bill against a microphone time stretched to three hours. I doubt it, but I wouldn't rule anything out.

What you hear is minimal and abstract with a faint suggestion of the familiar. Excepting track five, there's arguably more silence than sound on here, or if not silence, then at least space, the kind found in nature. Electrical glitches suggesting faulty leads open the first disc, crackling intermittently with some vague sine wave peep way down in the unusually quiet mix. It's rhythmic without quite having a rhythm. It repeats without looping, and there's not much evidence of digital processing or sampling. I listen to most CDs while cycling, and this one blends seamlessly with the whistle of wind, distant cop cars, traffic noise, and other sounds you hear out there. It feels as though it's born through neither human nor artificial action but rather is simply something which exists and which obeys only its own aesthetic. Only when we reach track four do we encounter anything you could call notation - possibly a piano, although it sounds only a couple of times. The next disc continues with oscillators, or something which suggests at least remote human agency, comparable to musical composition more than the rumble of traffic over an underpass invoked on the first disc, if not much more. The sound changes over time, nevertheless remaining consistent with the whole, whatever that is. It's not laptop glitch; it's not treated environmental sound so far as I'm able to tell; it's nothing to do with songs made famous by either Pink Floyd or the haircut-era Beatles, and I've a feeling it means whatever the listener brings to the equation. Maybe it's telling us that money is essentially meaningless.

I have no idea, but it's food for serious thought and it makes Nurse With Wound's Merzbild Schwet sound like the Beach Boys; and I'm glad we still have a world in which something like this can exist.

You'll find a link to Love Earth Music on the left under Some Stuff, and that's where you can buy copies of this one.