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.

Jethro Tull - Benefit (1970)

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

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

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

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

Godflesh - Selfless (1994)

I've tried and tried with Streetcleaner, and while I can appreciate all which is great about it, I find it a bit loose and formless in certain respects; and hence a disappointment, having backtracked from Us & Them. However, Selfless, the third album, is much more in line of what I'd hoped Streetcleaner would be - crushing and intense, but where the first album howled, this one chugs. In fact, it's actually pretty tuneful for something which gazes so grimly across the plains of despair into the gloating maw of eternity - not tuneful in the sense of anything a milkman could whistle, but he could certainly grunt these riffs to himself while sorting you out for eggs and yoghurt, or remarking that's nice in response to a pensioner describing how she often enjoys a drop of milk on her porridge of a morning.

I'm inclined to wonder whether the lads worried over steering too close to becoming a variation on Black Sabbath, hence the wall of guitar initially serving as an effect rather than something which carries notes. Not that there's anything wrong with being a variation on Black Sabbath, but in any case it isn't really an issue. Even with this sludge variant on what may well sound like Chuck Berry when you play it at 78rpm, the mood holds, pinned down by its painfully slow rhythm and that howling into the void dynamic which I tend to associate with Skullflower, Ramleh, and the like.

Talking of Ramleh, it's probably no coincidence that Selfless should feature a track called Anything is Mine, although it resembles the Ramleh version mainly in terms of sheer force and aggression and isn't what you would call a cover, so far as I can tell. The biggest surprise for me, relatively speaking, has been noticing how these songs have an almost tender quality once you listen past the chug - bruised, abused and vulnerable, and something seeming to touch on a certain mania in the likes of Body Dome Light which suggests the kind of schizophrenic episode people associate with alien abduction - although it's probably a metaphor. I mention all this because I'm not sure this soft interior is anything the Swans ever quite achieved, at least not with such eloquence and not until they took to Simon and Garfunkel impersonations; and I mention the Swans as they seem thematically closest to Godflesh, but somewhat better publicised. Of course, all this bollocks may well be simply me noticing patterns, but then maybe patterns are the whole point; or summink.

All I know is that this one fucking rocks really, really hard.

Smiley face.

Smiley face.

Public Image Ltd. - Second Edition (1979)

...or Metal Box or whatever you want to call it. I have a great many all-time favourite albums, and of their number this is the one I have probably heard the least. I'm pretty sure that at some point an entire decade has passed without my having listened to this record, quite possibly two decades.

Public Image Ltd. were the first proper group that I liked when, at the age of about twelve, I graduated from playing my trusty quartet of Beatles albums into flexidiscs to listening to the top forty countdown on the wireless and noting that I quite liked some of this new punk rock stuff, or whatever it was, and I found Public Image particularly hypnotic. It wasn't that I hadn't liked anything before that point, but it had mostly been Abba and that sort of thing - tastes which neither translated into vinyl nor endured beyond puberty to any great extent. Public Image expressed something I didn't even know required expression, a sort of alienation or sense of distance dividing myself from almost everyone else; and the weird thing - at least with hindsight - is that I discovered Public Image Ltd. before I'd even heard of the Sex Pistols and spent a couple of months doubting that there was really any connection.

Having discovered music, it still took me a while to see the benefit of spending my pocket money on something other than Doctor Who books or Micronauts, and it didn't quite dawn on me that there might be a Public Image Ltd. album until Dean Howe tried to sell me his copy of Metal Box. I think he'd found it disappointing. Conversely I thought it was great, but those three discs didn't seem to like my record player, and the needle jumped all over the shop. Looking closely at the vinyl, the grooves resembled little zig-zag lines presumably due to the deep bass frequencies. Dean sold it to someone else, and I eventually bought the reissue when it came out as a more conventional double album. Annoyingly I've found this version similarly difficult to play even now that I have a relatively fancy record player, and so the thing has just sat in my collection ignored more or less since I bought it.

I suppose the benefit of all this, if there is one, is how fresh it still sounds now that I've chanced upon a copy on compact disc. By means I don't even understand, I know the thing like the proverbial back of my hand - every last little scrape and clang - and yet listening to it in 2016 is much like hearing it for the first time.

The Public Image Ltd. debut album, which I heard after I'd bought this one, seemed a transitional affair - a great big noisy discordant fuck you with all of the Chuck Berry sucked out of the mix just in case anyone had been anticipating Sex Pistols part two. Rotten seemed on the defensive, very much resenting the mechanics of his own fame, and yet unwilling to quite disappear off the deep end like some spoilt rock star recording an album of his own farts, so for all the walls of noise, First Issue pulls back from rewriting Metal Machine Music and heads off in roughly the same direction as Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Metal Box was where everything really came together. Rotten no longer sounds like he's even thought about anything relating to the Pistols for at least a year, and more than anything they're making the record they want to hear. You probably already know what it does - lengthy jams which sound very much as though they were improvised live, repetition and a certain minimalism allowing one to fully appreciate the acoustics, and easily as hypnotic as that first single. Coming back to this, I've also been surprised at how much electronic sound is woven through the structure of the record - often barely within earshot - and also how much is entirely instrumental. It's a frosty affair succinctly encapsulating how Britain felt in 1978 without recourse to slogans - damp and conducive to death - born as a vague fusion of dub reggae and all the German stuff of which Rotten was a fan, but not quite sounding like either. Aside from my preferring Another, the b-side of Memories, to its instrumental which appears on here as Graveyard, this really is a perfect record, and it will remain a perfect record regardless of how many Country Life butter adverts he appears in.

Henry Rollins - Hot Animal Machine (1987)

Aside from the TV Party single and a few other things half heard whilst hanging around on YouTube, I'm not that familiar with Black Flag other than as the band with which Henry Rollins was involved before he ceased to be involved with them, so there's a strong possibility I'm coming at this like the man who reviews a Ringo Starr album without having heard any Beatles records; but fuck it...

I guess after the break up of Black Flag, Rollins found himself having to carve out new channels by which to vent his fevered work ethic, and so Hot Animal Machine should probably be regarded as the transitional effort of an artist firing off in all directions and seeing what happens. The rockier numbers, or at least those paying more obvious dues to Chuck Berry, sound roughly as you might expect coming from a former member of Black Flag - muscular, hard, funky rock although with more of a garage sound than the metal workouts that would later characterise the Rollins Band formed with Chris Haskett, who also handles the guitar here by the way. The other tracks veer off into jazzier territory, soundtracks to monologues of the kind with which Henry kicked off his spoken word career, and are actually fairly similar to the sort of material that ended up on Short Walk on a Long Pier.

It's all powerful, but somehow the range of styles is almost too broad, resulting in something resembling a compilation album. Black and White or Followed Around sound pretty much like the Rollins Band, whilst other tracks have more of a Stooges feel, and the more conversational numbers roughly suggest someone or other was listening to those early Swans albums a lot. The effect is further emphasised by the inclusion on the CD of the Drive-By Shooting EP as recorded under the name Henrietta Collins & the Wifebeating Childhaters - harrowing Gira-esque sound poems, a cover of Wire's Ex-Lion Tamer, and a title track which could easily have been the theme song from a Cliff Richard film but for the subject matter:

We're gonna get in our car,
We're gonna go go go,
We're gonna drive to a neighbourhood,
and kill someone we don't know.

The variety is disconcerting, a group of songs - or at least tracks - which don't quite fit together, like finding a straight cover of Little Red Corvette on Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report. This isn't to say there's anything wrong with any of the tracks individually - indeed there's not a weak number here - only that one listens to some of them in quite different ways to others, and it makes for a strangely uneven album compared to later efforts bearing Rollins' name.

Still, I'm not complaining. The rockier numbers are as intense as anything he's ever recorded, the gut-busting black humour is in full effect, and the front cover is drawn by Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, so what's not to like?