Mozart Estate - Pop-Up! Ker-Ching! and the Possibilities of Modern Shopping (2023)

Ever since Denim ground to an unceremonious halt in that Paris underpass, whenever that was, I've been waiting for Go-Kart Mozart to deliver on the promise of Back in Denim. I know Go-Kart Mozart were a different group - sort of - and one for which disappointment might even be considered a central theme, but then I'm nothing if not an optimist*. Anyway, I've been listening to Mozart Estate for about a month now, and I think he's nailed it this time.

Surprisingly, and despite the glaring similarities, the Estate does indeed seem to be a slightly different animal to its pram-wheeled forerunner, occupying a reasonably comfortable midway between the airbrushed studio stomp of Denim and the bargain bucket novelty of the intermediary incarnation. I'm fairly certain the drums, for example, are programmed, but you have to listen closely to tell and the Bontempi organ has seemingly been relegated to the cupboard under the stairs. It's mostly business as usual, I suppose - songs which sound like seventies television commercials, chirpy sub-Beatles jingles, the potential influence of Mike Batt, and everything with a synthetic fibre sheen of the artificial so squeaky clean that it's initially quite hard to listen to; but the themes are even darker than usual, with the grinding squalor and despair thrown into contrast as sharp as a Stanley knife at the cup final by unrelenting jollity, and yet with nothing I can identify as either cynicism or irony. There's the typically unsavoury view of the homeless alongside a cheery homage to Poundland, Vanilla Gorilla which seems to stand in praise of white van man, the thoroughly unsettling I Wanna Murder You, and pretty much every track delivers a distinct whiff of the unsavoury with its broad showbiz grin.

I'm about to do something crazy.
You'd better give the cops a call.
The things I need to express,
Are all against the law.

Nothing specifically invokes Savile but this record nevertheless feels somehow like Consumer Electronics with tunes, and not just tunes but a full stage show with glittery dancers filling the slot between Doctor Who and Brucie's Generation Game. Pop-Up! Ker-Ching! and the Possibilities of Modern Shopping is potentially the most horrible record you've ever heard and probably qualifies Lawrence as an actual genius.

 *: This is patently untrue.

Consumer Electronics - Crowd Pleaser (2009)

I was never exactly drawn to Consumer Electronics. I liked Filthy Art, which was on some tape about a million years ago, but never felt I really needed to own more, just as I've never felt I needed too many Whitehouse albums in my home; but having come to precariously know Philip Best through mutual facebook friends, and having realised that there seems to be a lot more to his work than I initially realised, I bought this - albeit mainly because the lad had found a stash of unsold copies in the cupboard under the stairs and was selling them off at regular price; and it really seemed like I should buy one before they end up going for silly prices on Discogs.

So here we are.

I saw Whitehouse live several decades ago, back when Best first joined and they entered their terrorising the audience phase. It made such an impression on me that I duly ripped them off for a performance piece as part of the art foundation course I was taking at the time. I invited fellow students into a room, then shouted at them through an amplifier. Everyone was shocked, and it did a job, but sounds fucking comical on the tape recording made of the event - just me screeching and hoping no-one notices that I hadn't actually put much thought into the general thrust of my abuse. There's one point where nervous laughter breaks out and you can hear me squeak, you're not supposed to be laughing, like a sort of power electronics Frank Spencer. Once I was done, there was a question and answer session during which one particular knobend asked whether I'd been influenced by the Vyvyan character from the Young Ones. That's how good it was.

Not that any of that was Philip Best's fault, at least not directly, but that was what I'd been reminded of when listening to the occasional spot of Consumer Electronics on YouTube. It somehow sounded too much like a fight on a council estate or the worst EastEnders episode evah; or it didn't but that's the best I can do to describe my reservations. On the other hand, I don't think you really like power electronics as such because that isn't the point, besides which, the form always seems more at home in a live setting, given that the point is probably our reaction more than our appreciation. Nevertheless, even without necessarily feeling the need to listen, I was intrigued by the seemingly philosophical dimension which had begun to intrude upon the last few Whitehouse albums, at least meaning it had become more than variations on Nilsen was a good lad and now I'm going to do you up the wrong un'.

So, to get to the point, what the fuck do we actually have here?

Accustomed as I am to listening to screaming rackets, Crowd Pleaser is tough going even by the standards of that with which I've become familiar, wherein the noise has some kind of obvious aesthetic appeal comparable to interesting patterns seen in broken concrete. The instrumental Oily Possibilities on the second side has an element of this, up to a point, but otherwise all parts of the whole seem dedicated to denying the listener even the smallest pleasure. It's electronic noise pushed beyond any aesthetic potential towards something you simply don't want going into your ears, something which is impossible to experience without feeling uneasy, something which comes pretty close to duplicating the physiological reaction you would experience in a live situation; and here's the distinction which I didn't really get - this is, I would imagine, why Best all but tears out his own throat in vomiting up the dialogue, tirade, or whatever you want to call it. It's not supposed to sound cool or reassuringly nihilistic like that nice Michael Gira or Nick fucking Cave crooning about black holes and humiliation. It's not about a tidily dark atmosphere in the traditionally Bohemian sense, but is more like the thing sucking all of the atmosphere out of the room. This isn't even I'm Coming Up Your Ass or anything so obvious or easily quantified. If it's about anything, it's something so fucking awful that there's no point trying to describe it, which is possibly why this exists as a record rather than an essay. It's a fight or flight panic response jammed on eleven, or half-memories of horrible childhood shit I'm not even going to bring up because it's nobody's business, and it makes most of those other noisy lads and lasses sound like cabaret turns.

That's the best I can do without vanishing up my own bumhole in trying to describe this thing, even though I'm probably already half the way up. Crowd Pleaser seems designed to spend as little time on your turntable as possible, which is itself bizarrely fascinating. Consumer Electronics treat us mean to keep us keen, I suppose you would say.

I'll shut up now.

Ceramic Hobs - Blackpool Legacy (2018)

It's taken me nearly two fucking decades, but I get it at last. Back in April, 2000 I described Psychiatric Underground - the Ceramic Hobs first album - as being like one of those kid's drawings of a circus where everything happens simultaneously. This was in an issue of Sound Projector, and the best I could do was a diplomatic concession admitting that it's never going to be my favourite album of all time but isn't without a place in the universe; and this was a review of my second copy of the album. I gave the first one away having found it impenetrable, then felt guilty, bought a second one and tried my best to say something nice about it; although to be fair, I gave Psychiatric Underground a spin just the other day, and I still can't really find a way in, even though I now have a better understanding of why it sounds as it does.

Anyway, I kept buying the records, mainly because Straight Outta Rampton - the second album - was fucking great, and I was friends with a few of them, or friends of friends, and I suppose we were all part of the same gang. Both Stan and Simon did guest vocals on some of my own stuff, and I briefly performed live with them at some Mad Pride event; and yet only now, with the release of this - essentially a greatest hits compilation - have I understood what they were doing, and understood that specific element I always found weirdly fascinating and yet difficult to define. Every review I've thus far seen of Blackpool Legacy has praised Philip Best's choice of tracks, it being himself who arranged the selection with the benefit of both a sympathetic ear and an outsider's objectivity; and the praise is justified because this record is a revelation, disentangling the formerly impenetrable from psychotic roots and providing the sort of contrast which allows all to shine. Most of these tracks were familiar, and yet somehow everything sounds better, heavier, tighter, clearer, harder, sharper, faster, funnier, and scarier. Where once I had the feeling of trying to listen to Nurse With Wound and the Cramps at the same time, most of this hits with the terrifying clarity of the first Pistols album.

As the booklet makes quite clear, the Ceramic Hobs could never be mistaken for worthy rainbow-wigged bozos covering They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha; and in case you're still wondering, they were described somewhere or other as the last true punk band and have certain associations with the Mad Pride movement through a number of members being very much on the radar of the psychiatric industry. My favourite comparison has been Idwal Fisher suggesting they make the Butthole Surfers sound like REM, which they do.

Ceramic Hobs are not a scrappy bunch of achievers trying to claw their way up the respectability ladder in society. Not at all. On The Prowler, Simon Morris croons the line drinking every night on the taxpayer's money, and he means it. Rubbing the face of the same people's mindset in our economic useless eater status. Yes, we do get drunk on the taxpayer's money as much as we want. Never work. We'll take and take and take until you admit you want to kill us. We'll bite the hand that feeds.

Anyway, their sound is all over like a mad woman's shit - to once again paraphrase Sir Les Patterson - which, as I now appreciate, has been an invocation of the sensory overload experienced during manic episodes, for any of us who may have been down that road - or the first SPK album with tunes, if you prefer; and this is why you'll commonly hear what almost resembles rock music - a sort of Oi! country & western tinged with rockabilly - buried behind layers of tapes from the telly, interviews with murderers, kid's shows, atrocity mixed with innocence. The problem I had came from my assumption of this being mostly random bursts of psychiatric noise, whereas it's actually finely orchestrated and arranged towards very specific effects, so you need to understand what is going on, which is difficult when even the Hobs themselves aren't always certain.

I've been surprised at how much sense these songs make heard in this context - scary, funny, often haunting, and the sort of stuff which makes a grown man cry. If you've forgotten what music was supposed to do before they got hold of it, Blackpool Legacy serves as a very timely reminder.

Hog Molly - Kung-Fu Cocktail Grip (2001)

As I've argued elsewhere, Tad were probably the greatest rock band of all time, at least for my money. It isn't simply that they sounded heavier than anything before or since; after all, any dummy with a fuzz pedal can usually manage that one, hence all those mystifying death, thrash, black, or whatever metal bands grunting their way through slabs of undifferentiated noise which may as well be Consumer Electronics for all the difference it makes to any milkman in search of something to whistle of a morning. Tad were different, having remembered to include tunes amongst all those crushing minor chords, and with some strangely bruised and fragile quality swaddled somewhere within the radius of the blast zone making the whole appear all the more extreme through contrast. Unfortunately they were also probably the unluckiest band in the world, as is evident from watching the excellent Busted Circuits and Ringing Ears documentary, from which it becomes clear why they might have felt like throwing in the towel, as they did in 1999.

Between 1989 and 1995, Tad released four frankly astounding studio albums without so much as a single weak track to be heard; and so left a substantial hole in the general rhythm of my listening habits once the well ran dry. Then in 2000, Tad Doyle - after whom the first band was named, in case that wasn't obvious - resurfaced with some new guys and released Kung-Fu Cocktail Grip. Unsurprisingly it's roughly the same territory as Tad, Doyle himself having a highly distinctive approach to composition, and with Jack Endino producing as he had done on Tad's Infrared Riding Hood and God's Balls.

Squint those ears and it could almost be the fifth Tad album, but not quite. I'm tempted to believe it may be the absence of Kurt Danielson that has shifted the emphasis here, but that's probably an oversimplification, if not just plain wrong. Hog Molly seemed a sharper, more streamlined animal than Tad, less given over to subtleties, and yes, I do maintain that there are subtleties to be found in something invoking the experience of a monster truck reversing over your head. Kung-Fu Cocktail Grip bludgeons, and keeps on bludgeoning for the full fifty minutes, but never becomes overwhelming, never sludges out into the usual big grey wall of grinding guitar. Even at its most thermonuclear, the recording is beautifully spaced, keeping even the squeak of a bass drum pedal intact as the band drop rocks onto your head, thus allowing one to appreciate every last sweating pore.

There's still nothing that quite tears out your heart and stamps on it like Stumbling Man or Glue Machine, but there are a few that come close enough and, as with Tad, there are still no duff tracks to be heard. Even so, this came out a while ago, and fifteen years has been a long time to go without fresh servings from this particular spigot. There's supposed to be a Brothers of the Sonic Cloth album out some time next year - that being Tad's current band - and it can't come too soon.