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.

Public Image Ltd - What the World Needs Now (2015)

 

Yes, I know there was the butter advert and the Sex Pistols were a boy band who weren't actually the Clash, and Mr. Lydon has recently been overheard praising Trump and Farage, and there's probably some other stuff that's been revealed since I stopped caring. I don't know the man so I wouldn't presume to understand what's been going on in his head, but given his history of bending over backwards to annoy self-righteous wankers who really deserve to be annoyed I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Feel free to read no further if this strikes you as a glowing endorsement of wrongthink.

Of course, there's also the whole spent force deal about how we never liked the man anyway, which is up to the individual but is arguably your loss. If This is PIL took some getting used to - and I'd say it's worth the effort - this one is a more immediate, more convincing jobbie, suggesting the band have really come together. This should count for something given the presence of both Lu Edmonds and Bruce Smith, the latter whom you will recall from the Pop Group, the Slits and the New Age Steppers, Edmonds from Shriekback, 3 Mustaphas 3, the Damned, Spizz, and pretty much every other band ever. As a group, it's the closest they've come to sounding like the Wobble version while remaining entirely its own animal.

Lydon is on form, assuming we can agree he ever had form, switching from genuinely touching sincerity and even pathos to just not giving a fuck from one track to the next. The anthemic current of the McGeoch years continues here and there, and Double Trouble sounds as though the lads were channelling the Sleaford Mods without simply doing an impersonation. That What is Not is definitely an old man album, world-weary and full of regrets but still kicking up a stink and raging at the dying of the proverbial light, all tempered with a defiant optimism which seems to have come to the fore in this line-up of the band.

If you're still wondering why he should have bothered coming back to this lot rather than sign up for yet another Pistols reunion, this record answers most of your stupid questions.

Soz.

Sleaford Mods - The Demise of Planet X (2026)

 

Apparently we're all sick of them now although I didn't get the memo and I'm not sure who counts as we. The Sleafords recent on stage failure to demand freedom for Palestine with due enthusiasm - more likely a reluctance to engage with online nutters - prompted yet another Twitter pile-on wherein persons who've never been within ten miles of a football match denounced the boys as melts and Clash loyalists cleverly pointed out that they're not even mods. My favourite was the opera loving Rupert - as his Twitter bio proclaimed - dismissing our boys as Temu Cockney wankers due to his presumably never having met a working class person who wasn't minicabbing him to the opera house or serving a delicious avocado wrap therein. I suspect this sort of behaviour may be the subject of the title track, The Demise of Planet X, although as usual the Mods tackle the bullshit from an unfamiliar angle, in this case leaving us to puzzle over why the track extrapolates the Magic Roundabout theme. And as usual, it's not quite business as usual and we've moved some way on from the previous album.

We open with The Good Life, which tells us:

I'm not punching down, lads,

I'm gonna style it out,

I'm gonna make out I'm not doing it,

but in reality...

... I am!

I mention this mainly because the sardonic smirk you can actually feel in the ...I am! has enough charge to kickstart a stalled engine and is in itself massively entertaining. I'd even go so far as to say that it is in itself more enjoyable than the entire back catalogues of most other bands, so this probably won't be a conspicuously impartial review.

If we haven't quite moved on from the laptop Suicide variation, we've stepped sideways quite a bit, and the mood isn't quite the familiar raw ambience of piss-chasing a fag end along the full length of the urinal, although there's still a strong element of that. The biggest surprise of all is a quota of uptempo numbers you might even call breezy. The music seems a little more layered, at least closer to something a full band with instruments might come up with, and tracks such as Double Diamond and Don Draper hint at the bluesier end of R&B - talking Groundhogs rather than R. Kelly; Elitist GOAT almost suggests pastel hued Hanna-Barbera teens hopping in the dune buggy and heading out for a day at the beach, even if we all know it's going to be Southend-on-fucking-Sea and will end in rain and bruises; and, to end my admittedly vague comparisons, Bad Santa with its pensive flute and brooding pace is one of the most emotionally powerful things they've done, amounting to the unease of regrets nursed as the hangover clears the next day. It tears your fucking heart out, even with the vocal aggro; maybe because of the vocal aggro.

Listening to Austerity Dogs back in—Jesus Christ, thirteen years ago, it was difficult to imagine these two doing more than a couple of admittedly great albums without turning into something else. It didn't seem there would be much mileage in a band sounding like an argument with a nutcase at a bus-stop with half of the stage presence coming from a bloke who pushes a button then drinks beer for three minutes; but this may be the best thing they've done, at least so far. What doesn't kill them apparently makes them stronger.

Nine Inch Nails - Tron: Ares (2025)

 

I wasn't going to bother given that this is the soundtrack to a Disney movie, and while I can't deny that the Trentster has proven himself a dab hand at movie soundtracks, they've rarely been the sort of thing I would listen to over and over. I never saw the first Tron movie because it sounded like a huge pile of wank, as does this one, plus it apparently stars the impressively unwatchable Jared Leto and to paraphrase Garry Bushell without even the slightest trace of irony, cyberpunk generally holds about as much interest for me as that Yoko Ono film about arses.

But it was there in the store, and the sheer novelty of buying a brand new CD by a band I like in a place of retail with a till and a cashier and all the trimmings proved overwhelming.

To be fair, my experience of Reznor's soundtrack work is limited to bits and pieces on early bootlegs. It's mostly approximately ambient and all very nice, and I know I enjoyed The Social Network without remembering anything about its soundtrack; but this is either something different, or at least if you squint it feels like a proper Nine Inch Nails album, or possibly one of the better remix jobbies - even though I'm not unreservedly wild about those either. It's full CD length and features just four tracks which count as songs and are thus part of the canon; then an indeterminate number of instrumentals, some stripped down from parts of the four songs, others seemingly autonomous but all serving to reiterate specific musical themes just as you would find in a movie soundtrack by John Barry, Akira Ifukube, or one of those guys; and the instrumentals more or less feel like songs but for the absence of vocals, pasted together from the same grinding sequencers, pensive rhythms, and wailing electronic threnodies.

Crucially it's tense as fuck while retaining a certain ruined beauty, like the very best of Nine Inch Nails - a sort of wrist-slashing orgasm combined with a punch in the face over and over and over until it sounds like the only music in the world; which is pleasing.

Still not going to bother with sodding Tron though. Nice try, Disney but nein danke.

Cosey Fanni Tutti - 2t2 (2025)

 

Here's another Cosey solo, not radically different to Tutti but representing further goodness mined from the same seam; although it brings new realisations, namely that on reflection I think I prefer her solo work to anything recorded with him indoors, or even with that other group. I'm not even sure why this should be, for clearly it's a relative. Another realisation is that both 2t2 and its predecessor seem sonically closer to the very first Chris & Cosey outings than to the later, which may be to do with either a reinvestment in gritty analogue sounds or the renewed spirit of adventure which comes with endeavours beyond a familiar configuration of people. A lot of it chugs along at some halfway point between Gristle and Moroder, as much a bubbling bass as a rhythm. With Wrangler and countless others, the last decade or so has seen a revival in what I'd hesitate to call sounds of the seventies, harking back to those early experiments with plug-in synths grinding away, and so it is with Cosey's work. In most cases, and certainly this one, it doesn't strike me as an exercise in nostalgia so much as a reflection of changing music technology thankfully losing its fixation with the new, instead favouring variety and malleability in terms of sound design.

Anyway, while solo Cosey makes great use of rhythm, it's a different emphasis to that favoured by hubby and is more exploratory, hence the continued delight in things which make a noise for their own sake - the cornet and even a harmonica on this album. I gather these pieces were composed for some kind of installation, which I can see given that they have the quality of soundtrack, a certain cinematic scale wherein even the atonal elements gain musicality by contrast with adjacent sounds. It suggests improvisation and random juxtaposition but for the fact that everything works and complements the whole, so maybe there's an element of selection. Whatever the case may be, it's at least as powerful as weather in its emotional impact - an album in which to lose yourself.

Shameful Ca$hin (2025)

 

Shameful Ca$hin began life as a conflation of the Girl Guided Missiles  - whom you may recall from here - and some former Cravats, specifically the formative line up of the same - although one of the four has strummed and bellowed in both groups. They got together for fun and for the joy of playing pubs. They didn't have a name and so for a while it was Cravats 2 or '77 Cravats for the sake of flyers, and because their repertoire incorporated Precinct, Shut Up, Pressure Sellers, Crash Barrier Dancer and others forged by that very first line up - alongside a few newies. The  Cravats hadn't existed as the Cravats for a couple of decades by that point so it didn't seem conspicuously cheeky until a reformed version coalesced with new material and someone from their label denounced the undertaking as a shameful cash in in the comments box of a live performance posted on YouTube. Legitimately peeved, the lads decided, We're having that! and thus was Shameful Ca$hin born.

Inevitably, the new numbers began to crowd out the resurrected material until there was enough for an album - a proper album on two sides of vinyl like nature intended, just as it was in the good old days, or at least the marginally less fucking stupid days. I've known Martin, guitarist and vocalist, for many years. He played me this album at his flat when I dropped by back in 2024. I was blown away. It was melodic, powerfully muscular, distinctly shirty without getting so angry as to lose the plot. It felt like hearing the Stranglers or Sham 69 for the first time and I was excited to learn they were planning a vinyl release.

Nothing seemed to happen for a while and then it appeared on Bandcamp. I downloaded and listened once but couldn't quite square what I heard sat at my PC with what I'd heard at Martin's place; but now that the vinyl has appeared I realise this may be something to do with either MP3 files or just the superior sound of music blasting from proper speakers. In keeping with the Girl Guided Missiles having been one of the few bands to form due to musical differences, as the legend has it, Shameful Ca$hin are musically all over the place, and yet so tight and so confident that it takes a while for the ears to register abrupt segues into tangential detours such as country and western. It's because this is what bands used to do rather than simply churning out a dozen versions of the same song, lest we've somehow forgotten Led Zeppelin's brief dalliance with reggae. The thing you notice, the first thing that hits you is the sheer driven power of the music - a motorbike beat even if that isn't exactly what they're playing. There are touches of the Who, the Clash, the Dolls, the Stones, others you may not even recognise, and Nowhere Fast could have been the greatest song Eddie & the Hot Rods never got around to recording, hitting you in the chest with the same apocalyptic pathos as Beginning of the End; but the album is nevertheless very much its own thing, distinguished more by its differences than whatever comparisons might be made. This is particularly true lyrically because, let's not deny it, none of us are getting any younger, and Shameful Ca$hin speak to me as a person of equivalent vintage in addressing that which troubles them without giving too much of a shit about appealing to anyone but themselves, which is as it should be. Thus they skewer pretty much everything that's wrong with the world right now, not least that it didn't used to be quite so fucking ridiculous back when we were all in short trousers; and they do it with wit, cracking tunes, and air-punching hooks.

Just when you think it's all over, this comes along. I'm not claiming that the Shameful Ca$hin album rocks more than anything has rocked before, but it's certainly in the running.

Get it here before they're all gone.

The LOX - Filthy America… It's Beautiful (2016)

 

I've been waiting twenty-five years for a follow up to We Are The Streets so it was kind of embarrassing to discover that there was one and it came out nearly a decade ago. This sort of thing becomes unfortunately bewildering once you're past fifty.

Anyway, it's not like there's been a shortage of LOX material given all three of them having churned out a succession of mostly incredible solo albums, each one invariably featuring the other two, notably After Taxes and A Gangster and a Gentleman which are both up there with Streets to my ears; but there's a certain grisly magic you only get in full with the three of them on an equal footing - the only three-man group where all of 'em is the strongest, as it says on here. Fifteen years after the previous group effort, the favoured sound hasn't really changed so much as expanded with the times. We still have the familiar glacial New York beats, and the inevitably sterling contribution of DJ Premier, but there are a couple which border on trap, notably Secure the Bag featuring Gucci Mane, without quite going the full sweaty distance to sound like they turned up on the album by accident. Mostly the beats stay minimal, grooves more than tunes but expertly tooled so even the moody minimalism sounds cinematic on What Else You Need to Know and others; and the beats stay minimal because that's really all you need. Few rap groups have even one guy who can weave a saga with the level of detail you get on this album, and the LOX have three. You could strip it all down to acapella and it might lose some of the force but it would still kick your ass. This is one of those that taps right into the core of rap, and what rap has always been. It's not always pretty and yet it remains both majestic and magnificent from start to finish. It was worth the wait.

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.