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.

Severed Heads - Haul Ass (1998)

I bought one just before it got deleted, the better tracks creamed off for a wilderness years retrospective named Focus. Neither Cuisine, Gigapus, Haul Ass nor Under Gail Succubus were shifting units on Bandcamp and were therefore deleted and reprocessed lest their antinumismatic energies irradiate other releases with a spirit of failure. I only discovered its existence as a download album when receiving news of its impending deletion. I didn't even know there was a Severed Heads page on Bandcamp prior to my purchase of the Clifford 2000 compilation from Medical Records, and I've considered myself very much a fan of the Severed Heads for at least the last three decades. Tom Ellard seems to have become the weirdy music Van Morrison in terms of online grumbling about stupid fans and lack of support; and yes, I could have googled Severed Heads at some point to see if he was still alive, but dude, I have a life to live, and wonderful though most of your music certainly is, it's probably best not to assume it will be central to the existence of everyone who hears it and thus subject to pilgrimage.

Cuisine was pumped and dumped by our Canadian label over a few months in 1991.

I started work again, now meeting rejection after rejection. We were out of style.

In 1993 I tried flying to Canada to talk face to face about Gigapus. Old friends were now too busy to meet. The A/R guy suggested a bass player and a female singer. Soon after that label was nothing but female singers.

I didn't have a CD player when either of those came out, and I didn't have an internet connection until 2007, which is probably why I didn't get around to buying a copy of that later Severed Heads album which was issued in an edition of three CDR copies in a fucking suitcase, like the lightweight fairweather fan that I am. While we're here, Cuisine and Gigapus still sound like transitional albums, a little too digital for their own good and driven by a slightly more downtempo version of the bassline that kept Stock, Aitken & Waterman at the top of the hit parade for a couple of years - which is probably why the A/R guy suggested a female singer, sort of like Lisa Maxwell who sang the chorus on Heart of the Party; and while we're still here, I'm pretty sure World Serpent - the international label and distributor with which I was dimly associated for most of the nineties through Konstruktivists - would have bust a nut to get Severed Heads on the books, given some of the losers they did sign thanks to tenuous association with David Tibet's milkman or whoever.

Never mind. Sometimes one has to disassociate the art from the miserable bugger who didst gift it to us, his unworthy, ungrateful so-called fucking fans; and the irony is that now that circumstances have aligned in such a way as to allow me to finally listen to Haul Ass without having to jump through all sorts of silly hoops, it is - I would argue - revealed as what happened at the other side of the transitional phase represented by the previous two, and easily the best, most convincing thing he'd recorded since Big Bigot or Rotund for Success - neither of which should ever have been considered acts easily followed. My only criticisms would be that it's CD length and therefore probably a little longer than it needed to be, and that Ellard's voice is often what makes his albums so I probably could have stood to hear more of it than on just three tracks - or however many it is.

Haul Ass is mostly techno, or techno drifting off into other realms, but techno of the pure, heavily layered Severed Heads variant and hence unlike anything over which one would ever expect to hear Kylie Minogue squeaking away - a sort of sombre optimism with brief interludes of euphoria. More than anything, the album packs the kind of powerful emotional punch which got me buying their records in the first place - not just the heartbreaking watercolour melodies you might expect, but even those screwy, kitschy sound collages such as Dreamsong and All That Matters is You. Anyone can plug a synth into an effects box, but there was never really anyone who sounded quite like Severed Heads or who did the same thing. They should have been huge but weren't, and that's unfortunately all there is to it; and you can't even buy this one any more. I would have bought the fucker twenty years ago had it been a realistic option.

Here's where you can't buy it from.

Beef Terminal - The Grey Knowledge (2002)

I don't really know anything about this guy - one M.D. Matheson trading as Beef Terminal, which I've somehow only just realised is apparently slang for a woman's area. The previous album, 20 GOTO 10, was sent into The Sound Projector for review about er… two decades ago, come to think of it, and it was chuffin' fab; and two decades have somehow passed before it's occurred to me to have a look and see if the guy did anything else.

I vaguely recall some loosely descriptive publicity material turning up with 20 GOTO 10, mostly focussing on the album having been recorded in Matheson's kitchen then musing over the mental well-being of the artist on the grounds of the album being distinctly less buoyant than, off the top of my head, Kylie Minogue's 1988 debut. Anyway, this one was similarly recorded in Matheson's kitchen and maintains the sombre mood established on the previous disc. One aspect of what drew me to the music of Beef Terminal was, perhaps oddly, the fact of it sounding as though it had been recorded on a couple of standard tape decks, one hissy backing track bounced onto the next deck with fresh instrumentation added in the absence of anything so lavish as even a portastudio. I'm admittedly overstating the rudimentary production values here, but 20 GOTO 10 had that sort of quality, and succeeded specifically because it made a virtue of its shortcomings, repurposing the hiss and rumble as atmosphere much as did, I suppose, My Bloody Valentine.

The Grey Knowledge sounds maybe a little more expensive, but Matheson has kept everything fairly simple, hence almost painfully direct in terms of raw emotional impact. Mostly it's sombre but melodic guitar almost bordering on the bitter-sweet, and I suspect a few of the pseudo-bass lines may be played on the E-string of the same. Rhythms, where provided, are either a cheap-ish drum machine or looped samples of noise, mains hum, or whatever. It's almost entirely instrumental - excepting a Eurhythmics cover, which probably makes more sense on disc than on paper - and effects are limited to a slightly boomy reverb here and there.

It's difficult to describe the nuts and bolts of what happens on The Grey Knowledge without it sounding massively underwhelming, and yet the sum of these parts is hypnotic, engulfing, and almost overpowering in its suggestion of tragedy, loss, and anything else which might reduce you to tears. If ever one should require a demonstration of the maxim about less being more, it's right here.

KMFDM - Retro (1998)

I always liked the idea that KMFDM stood for Kill Motherfucking Depeche Mode, and I seem to recall another version of the acronym positing a disgusting but faintly amusing allegation about Kylie Minogue; and of course that bloke from Brute! drew all their record covers; and there was the involvement of Raymond Watts who is credited with something or other on an early-ish Foetus album. I knew I'd probably heard something by KMFDM at some point, and they always seemed to turn up in the same places as a few other groups I've liked, and Retro is a best of compilation, so...

Kill Motherfucking Depeche Mode would probably be funnier if KMFDM were better, but they aren't. Let's think about that just for a moment - the band which isn't as good as Depeche Mode. Actually, I'm not even sure they were as good as I Should Be So Lucky era Kylie Minogue.

What we have here is grunting Belgian new beat with sampled metal guitars and the sort of growling effects heavy vocals you only get from really mean men who drink lots of beer and have massive penises and who get lots of nude women to kiss them and show them their boobs and that, the sort of mean men you wouldn't want to mess with; or I gather that's the intended impression. Unfortunately it all sounds like something knocked up for the demonstration CD you'd get when making purchase of an Akai S5000 sampler back in the year 1992, or whenever it was those things came out. It strives to pound and grunt and make you sweat - work pain obey blah blah blah kerrraaannnggg grunt work pain struggle thud thud thud... but the thing sounds so clean you could probably eat your dinner off it; and even if you enjoy the guitars, there's no earthly reason why you would listen to a KMFDM record in preference to the Young Gods or AC/DC or - fuck it - that Depeche Mode song which has a guitar on it. There's no reason why you would listen to this in preference to Front 242 or any of those acts who did this kind of thing properly. I'm not sure you would even listen to this in preference to fucking Ministry or - God help us - Pop Will Eat Itself.

Just to summarise, we're discussing a band who weren't as good as Depeche Mode, Ministry, Pop Will Eat Itself, or I Should Be So Lucky era Kylie Minogue. Let's just pause for another second so that we may properly acclimate to the concept.

I mention Pop Will Eat Itself because KMFDM were similarly inclined to refer to themselves in song - this is KMFDM you're listening to, KMFDM in the area, and so on. All that's missing is the sample of that guy suggesting we put the needle on the record when the drum beats go like this, or whatever it was he said.

This being their best of, I dread to think what the really shit stuff was like. I seem to recall KMFDM's name coming up as one of a number of potential scapegoats in the case of teenagers with guns going nuts at Columbine High School all those years ago. Whilst I personally suspect there's a great deal more to such tragedies than angry sentiments expressed on a noisy record album, it has to be said that this one really is unusually shitty.