Roni Size / Reprazent - New Forms (1997)

Whilst I'm always happy to hear new music, I generally find that new music makes its way to me so it's just a case of keeping my ears open. I don't actively seek out new music for the sake of it, and I tend to regard those who do as trying too hard - for example, a certain facebook twat who recently opined:

I'm fifty-one. My favorite bands right now are Otherkin, Bad Sounds, Spring King, Sundara Karma, Inheaven, Kagoule, Vant, and Moaning. I can't see myself ever not listening to new music.

This came in response to some clickbait about a teenager observing that she had heard of the Pixies because her grandparents listened to them. Following Mike's the aforementioned facebook twat's recommendation, I sought out Moaning - which really is the name of a band - but they sound like the fucking Mission; and Otherkin sound like the Strokes or the Fratellis - both of whom were shit first time round - and doubtless have a bright future composing theme songs for edgy Channel 4 comedies about teenagers having abortions.

New Forms won the Mercury Music Prize back in 1997, most likely thanks to some tiresomely self-conscious upper management twat who, much like Mike the aforementioned facebook twat, prefers his music to be new new new. The Mercury Music Prize has also been won by Primal Scream and something called Gomez so probably doesn't count for much in the great scheme of things. Anyway, possibly as a result of winning the Mercury Music Prize, Roni Size was on the telly singing a couple of his songs. They sounded decent so I made purchase of the album, but the thing jumped all over the fucking shop. It could have been big fat bass frequencies making for poor groove integrity, or it could have been a dud pressing on vinyl recycled from truck tires and the plastic bits of vehicular dashboards, what with it being the last days of the original wave of vinyl. I played it maybe twice, so it never had a chance to sink in, and I never got over my vague feeling of disappointment.

The thing is that I'd heard about drum and bass, and most of it didn't actually sound quite like I hoped it would - nosebleed breakbeat falling somewhere between Peshay's Piano Tune and I, Me, Mine by Godflesh, which probably doesn't even count. Drum and bass compilations seemed to feature a suspiciously heavy emphasis on all that deep forest shit, and some of it even sounded like - ugh - jazz. Then I discovered Panacea, so that was one itch well and truly scratched; and yet somehow I still picked this up on CD on the grounds that there wasn't much point trying to play the vinyl edition; and now, two decades later, I've finally managed to listen to it all the way though more than twice in the same year - because it's one fuck of a long album - building up to three or four times just this week, and finally I have an opinion.

I'm still not sure why New Forms won the Mercury Music Prize other than new new new and you probably won't have heard of it, but we have, and I'm not convinced of it being a landmark album; but it has impressive peaks, and nothing which truly sucks or outstays a welcome. I think the thing which confused me relates, more than anything, to my own expectations and related quest for a truly brutal drum and bass record which kicks your head in like no other. New Forms is really just a bunch of people pissing about in a studio, trying things out, some of which just happens to involve accelerated breakbeats. It's as much soul, dub, rap, ambient, techno, and even jazz - but in a good way, I guess - as anything. It's an album which never should have been square-pegged into a round hole by industry wankers with some giant medal burning a hole in their collective pocket, although to be fair I probably shouldn't have been so stupid as to grant such categorisation any sort of credence.

New Forms takes a while to sink in, but somehow does so as a coherent, mildly hypnotic whole - all thirty fucking hours of it. Brown Paper Bag still sounds insane after all this time; Watching Windows is gorgeous; and Hot Stuff - which I'd somehow never even noticed before - is one of those rare pieces of music which seems to be the same size as the sky. So I'm finally glad I bothered, not least because I might never have come to such an appreciation were I engaged in an endless, ostentatious quest for new new new.

Stephen Mallinder - Pow-Wow Plus (1982)

Somehow I always had the impression that Cabaret Voltaire was mostly Richard H. Kirk, musically speaking, which on closer inspection is obviously a ridiculous idea being as it relegates Mallinder to er... eye candy, cheekbones and mumbling, I suppose. It's taken me a thoroughly embarrassing thirty-five years to catch up with this solo album, but I guess it's never too late to find oneself standing corrected. My assumption of Cabaret Voltaire being mostly Kirk is based on how much his solo Time High Fiction sounded like them; so given that Pow-Wow could similarly also have been a Cabaret Voltaire release, I guess there was a point at which the two of them were musically attuned to an uncanny degree. Pow-Wow, here reissued and slightly expanded as Pow-Wow Plus, dates from roughly the same period as Red Mecca and 2X45 and could quite easily sit between the two as part of a set, with the only incongruity being that it's largely instrumental and maybe more stripped down in some respects. The new thing for me, or at least the thing which has been obvious all along but I hadn't really thought about, is how fresh this material sounds - even thirty years later - and how little it owes to rock music, or ever really owed. I know there were a lot of young men in vests bleating on about a dance influence at the time, but this really does owe most of its moves to the weirder reaches of black music, funk, soul, jazz, dub reggae, even bits of Parliament; furthermore, as with most of the music with which Mallinder has been involved, there's nothing demonstrative here, neither Bobby Gillespie wearing his influences on his sleeve nor Porridge jumping up and down yelling look at me, just a laid back groove quietly doing its thing without feeling the need to tick any of the traditional crappy industrial music boxes. I know Cabaret Voltaire are not without a degree of acclaim, but still I feel they remain underrated when you engage with just how good some of their music was.

Dayton Family - What's On My Mind? (1995)

When my music tastes began to expand in such a way roughly amounting to my switching to rap to the exclusion of everything else for more or less a decade, it didn't take me too long to work out that there wasn't much point paying attention to anything said in Melody Maker or other music papers catering to fans of Oasis and Primal Scream. The good stuff, whatever form it might take, probably wasn't going to be the sort of thing which would appeal to someone fancying a change of tone from a steady diet of Jarvis Cocker and that bloke who wrote the Father Ted theme tune. Happily both Tower Records and Maestro in Peckham carried issues of Murder Dog, an American import covering the sort of thing which had drawn my interest, and that was where I first heard of the Dayton Family, amongst other regional acts failing to make significant inroads into the fanbase of  Thousand Yard Stare.

Lacking an internet, I was obliged to buy my music from shops in the form of round things, which placed certain limits on what I could get hold of; so when this turned up in the racks of Rat Records in Camberwell, before I'd even got to the third syllable of holy shit I'd already bought the thing; and I was not disappointed.

The Dayton Family were named after Dayton Avenue in the city of Flint, Michigan, one of those urban strips concerning which the first ten Google hits will be posts on forums advising you against going there under any circumstances. Needless to say, whilst many of the tracks on this album describe life on Dayton Avenue, not many are likely to end up as soundtrack to television commercials for real estate or urban development. This is because the Dayton Family are, it could be argued, fucking terrifying.

It may not surprise you to learn that the album is probably not for you if you dislike sex, violence, or swearing as themes, because specifically What's On My Mind? speaks principally to other folks living on either the same street or one of equivalent shittiness. In case the usual disclaimer is necessary, it's an amoral glorification of everything you might be scared of in the same way that an episode of The Wire constitutes an inspirational testament to the economic benefits of investment in the crack industry. As may be obvious, this is some angry shit, gangsta for sure, and yet it steers a path between the righteous moral fortitude of Public Enemy and the fully ign'ant fury of NWA. In fact, once you take the beats into account, you may notice that What's On My Mind? is very much its own thing.

Steve Pitts production is hard and sharp, uncluttered and thus leaving plenty of room for bluesy stabs of electric piano kept in line by the relentless pulse of tinny drum machines underpinned with a ton of bass. It has an oddly organic feel for something so mercilessly programmed, even on those few basic tracks which could almost have sprung from a couple of Roland boxes rigged together. It would be g-funk but for hints at some sort of gangstafied version of the theme from Mission: Impossible.

Of course, what makes the album are the Dayton Family themselves, three angry guys and not a weak link between them, all shouting a variation on the same machine gun delivery, hardly a pause for breath and not a syllable left unused; and all this hitting you in the face for about an hour, as exhausting and exhilarating as running from the cops - probably - if you've ever had to do that sort of thing, and obviously I haven't. Lyrically they may not be big on acrobatics but the power of the stories is overwhelming:

A lot is on my mind, there's a lot of pressure pressing me.
America and it's system, I figure that they testing me.
I fall and catch myself, falling in my wisdom,
Daddies raping daughters and having sex with them,
My mother's turning tricks, and I'm no keener I know,
My sister had a baby and she's eating off the floor.
I'm going through a thang.
My mind's about to crack.
Somebody took my sack.
I gots to take it back.

See? If you can't tell the difference between that and 50 Cent talking about what a great party he just went to and how they had cake and everything, then you're an idiot. The ancestry of What's On My Mind? may not be obvious within the first couple of listens, but it's nevertheless your basic hard, grinding blues in response to the modern equivalent of whatever was pissing off those guys way back whenever, stories which really need to be told rather than lifestyle advice, and this is a classic album of its kind. Those who would disagree are doubtless welcome to pop over to Dayton Avenue, Flint, and take it up with someone there.

Yeah - I didn't think so.

Babylon Zoo - The Boy with the X-Ray Eyes (1996)

Ah the nineties; weren't they great! Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Carter the Unlistenable Sex Machine, Shed Seven, Primal Scream, all that good stuff...

Babylon Zoo is of course remembered as the name attached to the only ever single to wobble the charts on the strength of an advert for trousers that wasn't a pile of wank. Unfortunately the mind-bending moon disco everyone liked so much from the telly was actually the Arthur Baker remix which serves the single as a five second prelude to what may as well be a completely different song, almost a prefix provided just in case you'd forgotten why you bought the thing in the first place. It's David Bowie saying that yes he knows how much you enjoyed Ziggy Stardust, but if you'd just give Black Tie White Noise a chance...

Well not quite, because even if it wasn't on the original menu, Space Man is still a decent song in its own way, that way being roughly a portastudio Nine Inch Nails covering Suede's interpretations of early 1970s Bowie. That probably shouldn't sound quite so much like a criticism, and I'm not exactly suggesting it's a bad thing so much as that the music isn't entirely unlike anything ever heard before. Babylon Zoo was, or perhaps is, an apparently textbook case of an artist becoming too famous too quickly, and whose work really would have benefited from a collaborator who could point out which parts sounded faintly ridiculous, or that once you're past the first two tracks on The Boy with the X-Ray Eyes, it's a tough job telling any of the others apart. They all seem to operate at a certain tempo, share a similar structure, the same effects, same mood, same ambiguous and occasionally slightly clumsy lyrics just crying out for recognition as the deep, meaningful testimony of a true visionary; which is a tough call with lines like pungent smells, they consummate my home...

The word on the street regarding Jas Mann, the person behind, to the side, and in front of Babylon Zoo, is that the music industry didn't treat him very well and he went a bit bonkers; and for the record, the street in question would be the one in which the design studio responsible for the cover of this disc was situated wherein laboured my lifelong chum who shall remain nameless and was always good for showbiz revelations of this kind, although I probably need to keep my trap shut regarding Alexander O'Neal and the alleged reasons for why all those people ever did was criticize... 

Anyway, having dissected the deep and meaningful lyrics of Jas, I fear he may have been a troubled young Mann even without the pressures of fame and producing a second single which didn't sound exactly like the first one. The Boy with the X-Ray Eyes would presumably be a person who sees beyond the lies of falsehood to the truth of the facts of this inverted Babylon in which the sane ones are the caged animals in the zoo who do knoweth about global warming and people telling you to be this or that and stuff, or at least that's how it sounds to me; with only Caffeine - one of several songs for which the chorus is actually the title spelled out letter by letter - offering variety, hinting at wonky brain problems, as the condition is known amongst psychiatric professionals, and possibly the difficulties of an orthodox religious upbringing - although to be honest I'm just guessing here.

There are all sorts of reasons why The Boy with the X-Ray Eyes fell so quickly into the bargain bin of history, and fairly good reasons, but still it's difficult to dislike with conviction. It's repetitive, but at least it repeats tricks that were worth repeating, and with a few minor tweaks here and there it really could have been a great album rather than simply a curiosity; and of course Animal Army was a fucking fantastic single even allowing for the mispronunciation of tyrannosaurus.

The Boy with the X-Ray Eyes is an oddly appealing failure that's still superior to the entire Primal Scream back catalogue for all its being the weirdo electronic rock equivalent of Come Back Mrs. Noah.