Kleistwahr - Where the Word is Never (2024)

It's probably fair to say Gary Mundy is a musical pioneer by some definition, at least by virtue of Ramleh being the other name most commonly associated with power electronics back when it was mostly tapes shared amongst friends of friends, photocopied lists of the same returned to the curious in stamped addressed envelopes. Whitehouse may have had the greater influence on what followed (although I suspect that's very much open to debate) but the appeal of Ramleh, at least for me, is that there was a lot more going on than just sonic assault. It was harsh as fuck, violent and free-form for sure, but it was never just random noise with the volume jammed on eleven; and this is as much true of Mundy's solo recording as Kleistwahr. Ramleh, for example, have switched between layers of screaming feedback fed through effects, to walls of guitar, to the single, It's Never Alright which somehow reminds me of the Groundhogs; and yet all feel like the work of the same individuals, communicating a similar mood regardless of how it's played.

Kleistwahr began back in the eighties with one foot in more or less the same cacophonous camp, but has continued to evolve - or possibly to refine its attack - particularly since the resumption of activity back in 2009, and more recently the annual release of one new album each year, sort of like the Beano Book when you were a kid, but more harrowing.

Frivolity aside, this is the latest, again representing a certain evolution from its predecessor - last year's For the Lives Once Lived in this case. The sound is loosely familiar - a pensive drone of organs, instruments and noises sharing some imaginary cavernous space which, for what it may be worth, definitively sounds like a studio - as distinct from the usual bloke sat in a cupboard with his digital reverb. It drones and it's dark, but it thankfully isn't - ugh - dark ambient. There's too much going on for this to sit in the background despite an undeniably hypnotic quality. Where the Word is Never expands on previous offerings in that it almost comprises songs - which isn't immediately obvious, but the more you listen, the more you notice the drones and the slow chords falling in line with the heartbeat rhythms of something happening a few buildings away; and similarly distant vocals deliver just enough of a legible narrative to underscore themes proposed by titles such as Hell Won't Want Your Soul or It's All Escape. The effect is akin to a droning soundtrack which doesn't quite admit to being comprised of songs, albeit songs on the verge of collapse, until third or fourth listen; and it's grim, except that it goes beyond grim into something uncomfortably numb - like Swans with all the ego and bluster kicked out of them, which actually makes it very difficult to describe, as may be obvious from this paragraph; and because it's all catharsis, there's something ultimately comforting about this noise, or at least a suggestion that it understands.

Swans - Feel Good Now (1987)

Here's another recent purchase inspired mainly by the fact of it having been reissued. I didn't pick it up at the time because it seemed to be Children of God live and I hadn't yet warmed to Children of God when it came out. Children of God sounded to me like they'd run out of steam, or at least that there was something missing. I returned to the fold a couple of years later with Love of Life, which was fantastic and seemed to represent a few stops down the line on the journey for which Children of God had been the first step, roughly speaking; but then going back to Children it still sounded long and underwhelming - a poor second to even the b-sides of its own singles.

I don't usually bother with live albums, preferring the stuff I already enjoy by whoever it happens to be without feeling the need to complete sets for the sake of it; but there are always exceptions, and this ended up being one of them. I failed to pick up Public Castration is a Good Idea at the time because I simply couldn't afford it, then bought the reissue in response to some vague feeling of having missed out, and I was shocked at how much better Greed sounded in a live setting; so I was sort of hoping Feel Good Now might be a better representation of what they were getting at with Children of God, and holy fucking shit…

I see it now. Where the Swans' - because referring to them without the definite article feels like an affectation - previous work was a sort of post-Whitehouse emotional extreme directed inwards, Children continued the theme into religious, or specifically Christian pastures as neither an endorsement nor a refutation of the same, but rather a summation of the absolute negation of self in a religious context, or that's how it now sounds to me. At the time I assumed they had just gone the way of Bob Dylan or Bon Jovi.

I don't know why these songs, if we're going to call them songs, work so much better on a stage, and work even transferred to a medium lacking the spectacle of the live performance, even with a sound of inevitably muddier quality than the studio versions, but the difference is fucking incredible. You can feel the sheer volume in the recording, the raw power of the dirge, and the intensity it communicates is not even merely Biblical, but positively Old Testament in its uncompromising invocation of terrible power and submission to the same. Sex God Sex, formerly a silly title for something that went on too long, could easily score one of those Biblical epics of the thirties or forties. It's music for the construction of great pyramids or the parting of the red sea and is, as such, absolutely crushing - the culmination of the Swans first five years. I've since gone back to Children of God, and if it sounds improved, it still doesn't quite transcend having served as a warm-up exercise for Feel Good Now.

Megatonewelle - Mirfield Pads (2022)

This is Paul Tone, who was associated with both Smell & Quim and Swing Jugend way back in the dawn of time; and I actually had the impression that Megatonewelle was Paul in collaboration with someone else, except I can no longer find the facebook message stating the case, apparently having dreamed that part; so I've no idea, beyond that Neil Campbell contributes to Crystal Airfield, the last of the four tracks.

Well, whoever it is, it's not at all what I expected given the lad's resume. Initial impressions deposited the phrase like a cross between Tangerine Dream and Throbbing Gristle into my head, but I'm trying to get out of the habit of reviews amounting to this sounds like a cross between the Swans and Splodgenessabounds or similar because it's lazy and rarely helpful. Spacious washes of sound combined with busy sequencer invoke the sort of ethereal scale one might associate with new age efforts, but this does something slightly different, hence my subconscious having been reminded of Gristle's abrasive chug. The chug is particularly compelling on the first track, Barry N. Malzberg, named after a science-fiction author I'm not aware of having read, but who John Clute describes as powerful but gloomy, a voice in the wilderness, speaking in wisecracks, which seems to fit.

The twenty-three minute Crystal Airfield on the other hand verges on krautrock with its motorik rhythm and soaring e-bow guitar, assuming it is e-bow I'm hearing.

For all I know, we may be experiencing a glut of this sort of thing right now, but being no longer fully cognisant with what's going down with the kids on the streets, I have to say it's been a long time since I heard anything like this, specifically anything which strikes me as being like a cross between Tangerine Dream and Throbbing Gristle, although neither does it really sound entirely like an exercise in nostalgia. Mirfield Pads is dreamlike, pensive, spacious, and moving. It also sounds a little bit expensive, which makes a pleasant change from the usual.

World Domination Enterprises - Let's Play Domination (1988)

I hadn't thought about them in some time, then two days after I dig this out on a whim, they turn up on Bandcamp with Go Dominator, a new single, the first in a couple of decades - albeit a new single  which was recorded yonks ago but never released. It's as though the universe is trying to tell me something, something above and beyond that the time is right; because the time has always been right for World Domination. With each year that passes, these songs seem ever more relevant.

My first encounter was the phenomenal Asbestos Lead Asbestos, possibly one of the most wonderfully unpleasant songs ever committed to vinyl; although never really having had my finger on the pulse of anything, it was a couple of years old by the time I heard it and seemingly contemporary to the Acid Angels' Speed Speed Ecstacy which similarly named two substances in the title, and one of them twice, so Asbestos Lead Asbestos somehow felt like its dark toxic counterpart, at least to me.

I wasn't convinced by the album when first I heard it. I recognised the fucking horrible racket, but it seemed to lack the restraint which worked so well for Asbestos Lead Asbestos, taming the chaos just enough to suggest something in the vicinity of a funkier, noisier Public Image Limited around the time of Metal Box.

Anyway, I persisted. Initial impressions additionally suggested comparisons with the Pop Group, but where the Pop Group were overtly funky between the squalls of guitar noise, Let's Play Domination seems more like some primal rockabilly enterprise spinning horribly out of control. It's the bluesy inflections and the one foot somewhere in the Venn diagram with black music - dub, reggae, rap, disco and so on, hence covers of U-Roy, LL Cool J and Lipps Inc.'s Funkytown blasted out without any obvious trace of irony or sarcasm and so firmly distancing World Domination from fellow guitar noise merchants of the time.

You may notice I've already used both horrible and unpleasant as compliments, which is because it's hard to know what the fuck to do with that guitar sound. It's like a detuned power station throwing up, something with no equivalent in nature which has congealed in the grooves, a truly untamed beast which seems to contrast wildly with the tight but excitable rhythm and Keith Dobson's teen idol vocal, teen idol here meaning Ricky Nelson rather than Donny Osmond. The combination seems so perfect and simple that it's bewildering how no-one else thought to do it this way. There hasn't been much which has sounded quite like this album before or since, possibly because groups this violent and noisy rarely sound quite so happy about rubbing our faces in everything which is repulsive about human society right now, yet without simply adding to the shit mountain; and in Ghetto Queen, I'm not sure I've heard anything so beautiful which doesn't really communicate anything you would call a tune, just the jagged drone of electricity pylons fighting on the horizon in a world where the Cramps were actually the Swans, sort of.

New single available here.

David Bowie - Images 1966-1967 (1973)

I had all but seven (I think) of these tracks on Decca's World of David Bowie compilation, purchased for a quid from Dean Howe at school and which was therefore among the first albums I owned; but I'd always intended to buy this double so as to get the extra tracks, and now at last I have. Life is too short to be without a recording of The Laughing Gnome in some form.

So that's another one ticked off the list, but one which has brought a weird realisation: these silly novelty records may actually have constituted Bowie's greatest work, even if it's easily forgotten once you get to spinning later, less patently ludicrous offerings.

I never quite got the idea that Bowie was attempting to bring about a marriage of pop music and theatre because it sounded like one of those meaningless juxtapositions persons such as myself suggest without actually having thought about it - imagine Splodgenessabounds covering the Swans, and so on and so forth. Additionally, it has long been my contention that theatre is mostly wank, and mime in particular - so that's a side of Bowie to which I've never really paid much attention, which is probably why I never noticed despite it having been staring me in the face all along.

Most of these tracks are novelty records, which isn't in itself a bad thing, but which I've tended to regard as Dave desperately trying to squeeze out a crowd pleaser and secure fame and fortune prior to taking himself more seriously with Space Oddity and all which came after; but the form is no more opportunist than anything he did later, despite sounding like it wouldn't have been out of place on the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang soundtrack. That's the theatrical quality he was talking about, I guess - songs as short stories, but stories told by multiple characters in ludicrous situations as distinct from, She loves you yeah yeah yeah, or even the more prosaic storytelling of country music which tends towards the autobiographical or is at least less likely to wear an orange wig whilst pretending to be from outer space. I suppose you could argue that Sgt. Pepper's inhabits roughly the same territory, but this phase of Bowie's career owes more to variety, even sixties lounge music than to rock and roll, which is in turn reduced to just one of a number of costumes worn when the narrative requires; and yes, I have indeed heard of Anthony Newley, obviously.

That which distinguishes this music from pure novelty is the sheer range. Beyond the chocolate box psychedelia of Come and Buy My Toys or She's Got Medals - none of which are to be sniffed at, I might add - we have the likes of London Boys - which just plain tears your fucking heart out - We Are Hungry Men - which somehow tackles eugenics and population with such incongruous and chilling effect that I'm sort of surprised Von Thronstahl haven't covered it, and which presumably foreshadows The Supermen, Bewlay Brothers and others of its thematic type - the Pinteresque Tony Day, and of course The Laughing Gnome, which is just fucking brilliant and I don't care what anyone says. Yet everything here superficially sounds like something which should feature a bowler hatted sixties cat winking and grinning at the camera with that lush big band production, all sweeping strings and pizzicato for emphasis.

We forget this material was as good as it is because we often forget, in our rush to be all grown up, that great art can be cheery, populist and silly without subtracting from whatever the hell it's trying to say; and so these songs have spent most of their collective existence as the pissing about from before the good stuff with no-one quite sure whether it was an album or a stack of singles or a compilation or a greatest hits without any actual hits and a photo of some completely different glam rock bloke on the cover. This is a shame because, as I say, I've a feeling this may actually have been his greatest work. Listen to the opening bars of She's Got Medals and tell me different.

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.

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.

Swans - White Light from the Mouth of Infinity (1991)

My first encounter with the Swans was hearing Time is Money on Peel, a track with which I became briefly obsessed. It suggested a New York version of Test Dept channelling Whitehouse, an impression which I guess might be considered fairly perceptive given Michael Gira citing the influence of Whitehouse in one of the music papers a little later. Naturally I owned everything I'd been able to find within the space of another month - Filth, Greed, Cop and a stack of twelves. I'd initially experienced some shock at just how slow that material was after the moderately jaunty Time is Money, but I got over it and played those records to death, fascinated by how such a racket could ingrain itself in my mind's ear so profoundly. Of course, it was more than just the noise. It was also the atmosphere, dark and genuinely unsettling without any of the usual pantomime by which music artists tend to summon a bad vibe. I'd been horrified by Whitehouse the first time I heard them, but the Swans seemed to go much further, much deeper, inverting William Bennett's psychotic abuse as something more reflective, closer to self-harm.

Then came Children of God which wasn't actually very good, so poor in fact, that ownership of the related Love Will Tear Us Apart 12" single - another one of those Joy Division covers which improves on the original - means there's no point owning the album given that Our Love Lies is on the b-side, that being the only decent track.

So that was the point at which I drifted away. I didn't hear anything about The Burning World or White Light which made me want to listen to them. They're very good, I was told a couple of times, but I'd already lost interest. The hypothetical Swans record full of jangly songs sounded like it would be about as much use as a one-legged man at an arse kicking competition; and yet, there I was in Rough Trade in Covent Garden in 1992, and I hadn't bought a record for a while, and the only thing which seemed worth a tickle was Love of Life, and how bad could it be? Curiosity got the better of me.

I got home, slapped it on the Dansette, and was startled to find that the Swans had turned into Big Country while I'd been looking the other way. It sounded nothing like their previous work, and yet had the same grinding quality, the same pensive intensity combined with an unfamiliar, more positive current, like golden rays of sunshine giving contrast to the shadows 'n' shit. I loved it immediately, and then bought nothing further because everyone had stopped making records - or vinyls as tosspots call them these days. Ed Pinsent slipped me a copy of the Swans Are Dead double CD when someone sent it to the Sound Projector for review, but it was clear that something had gone wrong. Swans had devolved to a slow jangly mess, the sleigh bell heavy soundtrack to one of those BBC Christmas idents with kids dressed as snowmen ice-skating around a giant Christmas pudding shaped like the number two, except in this case with the addition of John Kerry reading a speech about disappointment. I still dig out Swans Are Dead from time to time, and it continues to leave me unmoved.

Eventually it occurred to me that maybe I'd missed out with The Burning World and White Light, given that Love of Life had become one of my favourite records of all time. I found The Burning World on Discogs, which happily coincided with a vinyl reissue of this one; because I have all of the others on vinyl so that's how I'd like to keep it, if it's all the same to you.

The Burning World came as a shock, roughly being the Swans as the Dubliners doing songs with choruses and everything, and even that cheeky cover of Nice Legs, Shame About the Face. It's not amazing, but it pisses all over Children of God, and Can't Find My Way Home is pretty powerful.

Oddly, considering how it forms the jam in a sandwich of two distinctly song-orientated albums, White Light from the Mouth of Infinity somehow sounds like the intermediary stage between Children of God and The Burning World.

It's okay. I'll get to the point soon. I'm even starting to bore myself.

Technically speaking, I've waited twenty-one years to hear this record, and most of that time has been characterised by people telling me how much I've missed out; but then I'm referring to Swans fans here, and the worst aspect of anything will always be its stupid fucking fans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this band seem to have attracted an unusually joyless bunch of pillocks with not a chuckle muscle to share betwixt the entire sorry bunch. I'm sure you will have encountered one or two as they wend their wanky way to some yawnsome retrospective at the Barbican, fresh from sitting alone and frowning in an empty room whilst clutching a single rose. Did you see that piece on Derek Bailey in The Wire last month?

No, I fucking didnae.

Anyway, I play White Light from the Mouth of Infinity over and over and, month after month, it just won't stop sounding like the long, slow BBC jingle of an unusually depressing Christmas.

Love Will Save You eventually begins to resemble something half decent, suggesting the old Swans magic I remember, and Failure is okay, and some of the others seem all right; but contrast this with the direct celestial communication from God himself which was Love of Life, and it turns out that this was just another one of those intermediary records all along.

So now I know.

Godflesh - Streetcleaner (1989)

Funny how certain things send you straight off in search of a particular bit of music. This one came back to me through the reproduction of a Daily Mail cartoon likening Muslim refugees to a plague of rats infesting host countries, just as Nazi cartoonists once made the same analogy with Jews; and the first track here is Like Rats which, aside from the parallel title, pretty much summarises the shittiness of a world run almost exclusively for the benefit of horrible Daily Mail reading cunts.

I was introduced to Godflesh with Us & Them, but for some reason have only recently begun to venture further into their back catalogue. I'm not sure why being as I love the shit out of Us & Them; although with hindsight, it's weird to consider that it's almost their album of uptempo pop songs, at least compared to this beast.

Actually, I suppose I was introduced to Godflesh - or at least to Justin Broadrick - much earlier when he recorded tapes of electronic noise as Final, and a few of his tracks appeared on the same noisy cassette compilations as some of my own stuff. I don't recall much about the music, beyond that one track was called Belief, but the fact that I remember it at all suggests it had something going for it. Also, the transition from power electronics to this sort of noise metal makes a lot of sense, and whilst Godflesh weren't the only band to go down that particular road, they remain the most listenable of their kind for my money - possibly excepting Ramleh who were kind of going for a different thing anyway.

Where Us & Them seems to share some kinship with Killing Joke or even Joy Division, Streetcleaner is a different, more primal monster. This one isn't so much songs as power electronics with riffs and a drum machine. Ordinarily, much as I love Brer Drum Machine, I'd raise an eyebrow at his use under circumstances where an actual drummer would have sounded so much better - like on Big Black's otherwise astonishing Atomiser, for one example. Streetcleaner initially sounds like it could do with a human bashing the skins, not least because the drum machine here is clearly programmed to have more or less the same effect as John Bonham, but after a few listens the reasoning for the choice becomes clear. There's something about the impersonal quality of a drum machine and the very fact of it being a machine which works so well. Music reviews employing the term jackhammer in reference to rhythm seem a bit of a cliché, but this one really does sound like that. It rocks like fuck whilst nevertheless resembling some inhuman mechanical process occurring inside the meat factory, the sort of thing with a start button and that big red plastic mushroom you bash to shut the whole system down when some poor fucker falls in and loses his legs. Add to this massive riffs delivered like concrete blocks onto a loading bay from the back of a truck, over and over and over, and every single one of them landing on your fucking foot.

It's huge and brutal, possibly an heir to the Swans, except Cop seems surprisingly subtle by comparison despite equivalent soul-crushing weight. Extremity has become a bit of a minefield in musical terms as of at least the last decade, mainly thanks to too many industrial types coming to resemble the enemy in their relentless invocation of the violence of civilisation. In fact I'm surprised there hasn't yet been a pro-UKIP power electronics act coming through, but give it time. Godflesh at least seem to have remained true to the spirit of dissent informing earlier generations of noisy buggers, the Grey Wolves for example - whom I mention partially because they're about as dark as it gets and I know they're good lads, and also because I know one of them occasionally reads this stuff, and because for the sake of argument I suppose Godflesh are the Grey Wolves with tunes, just about, at least in terms of what they do to your ears, brain, and arse.

It's hardly pretty, but then neither is the world which has inspired this particular hour long howl of rage, and sometimes it helps to be reminded of the fact with no punches pulled.

Black Sabbath - Master of Reality (1971)

Black Sabbath initially came under the heading of artists to be avoided on principal thanks to my having grown up in a rural Warwickshire town in which a preference for Joy Division - or indeed almost anything with short hair - over Tygers of Pan Tang revealed one as a bare bummer who liked men's cocks and to dress up as a woman and was definitely gay and liked gay men's cocks and liked to feel them and thought Boy George was an inspiration 'cuz you were into men's bums and arseholes and that and being as gay as possible and liking men's cocks and if someone had invented a men's gay cocks sandwich you'd be first in fucking line for a bite, you gay cunt. To be fair, it didn't have to be Tygers of Pan Tang. In fact it didn't really matter so long as it was NWOBHM and you weren't a gay bastard who liked gay men's cocks because you were gay. I'm sure you get the picture.

Despite all the aversion therapy, I eventually came to understand the distinction between certain bands - notably Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden - and all the other useless wankers with knockery vixen warrior women clogging up the covers of their shitty records - Whitesnake, Def Leppard, Krokus, Rainbow, and all that utter widdly-widdly axe solo shite. Paranoid was somehow one of the first things I learned to play on guitar, and I borrowed the single from Philip Cameron at school, and I couldn't help but notice that the b-side wasn't bad either. With hindsight I've come to realise that aside from the hair there was never that much difference between Black Sabbath and the Joy Division, whose music I enjoyed without reservation.

More recently I came across a spoken word routine by Henry Rollins in which the lad proposes that innocuously named tropical weather systems such as El Niño be renamed in ways more congruent with their terrible destructive power. One such rebranding would, he suggests, be the First Four Black Sabbath Albums. Weather reports would then warn us that if we should be anywhere up the east coast of Florida this evening we might want to take precautions because the First Four Black Sabbath Albums have been heating up the air down in the gulf and we're probably going to see some serious storm damage by morning. Personally I think it could work, particularly having now heard at least three of them.

Having further differentiated Black Sabbath from anything involving David bloody Coverdale, I am surprised at how simple they actually sound - very basic, just your straightforward blues rock with special emphasis on the more malevolent vibes. I vaguely recall seeing Ozzy Osbourne interviewed on some show, accounting for the formation of Black Sabbath by noting that all he heard on the radio were flower children singing about sunshine and happy times and San Francisco, whilst all he could see out of his own window was Birmingham - or words to that effect. Keeping this in mind, much as I loathe the term industrial music, I'd suggest Black Sabbath did it first. Throbbing Gristle may have aspired to being a noisier Velvet Underground or even Hawkwind, but the mood was more Sabbath than Lou Reed or anyone so self-consciously Bohemian; and as my friend Carl has pointed out, Joy Division were basically Black Sabbath - providing you ignore Closer, which should probably be a given because it was mostly rubbish - and then of course there's Swans, and all those goth bands.

The more I listen to Black Sabbath, the more I realise how difficult it is to find rock music without a trace of their influence to one degree or another. Whilst they may not exactly have introduced the bad vibe to popular music - that being an essential ingredient of the blues from which they drew one hell of a lot of inspiration - they may have been the first to pass it on without embellishment, without trying to make it sound glamorous.

I know the Paranoid album a little better, and I've only just got hold of Master of Reality, so it hasn't quite sunk in yet, but it's already very clearly on the same level, and there's a noticeable improvement in the lyrics - some of those on the previous one being decidedly ropey in places; and, as with Paranoid, it really makes you wonder how all those shitty NWOBHM bands could have got it so wrong given how the great strength of this music is its simplicity, how it made even those Sexy Pistols sound like fucking ELO in places. I wish it hadn't taken me quite so long to realise any of this, but never mind.

Codeine - Frigid Stars (1990)

Everybody loves Mr. Unpopular the manic-depressive outsider, the tortured poet, the guy who just doesn't fit in, and particularly if he has a square jaw, dreamy blue eyes, and that little boy lost quality which works so well for Johnny Depp in whichever version of Alice Tim Burton has recycled this month. That's commercial, as Borgia Ginz will tell you. This probably explains the success of Nirvana, and how their rise to power wiped less successful, less conspicuously Beatly but I think more musically interesting groups out of the picture like the saaaaaaad losers they all were with their hilariously awkward and distinctly un-hunky brainiac frontmen. Ha! What did any of their lot ever know about alienation, the retard n00bs etc. etc.

Actually, I have no idea whether Codeine would have been fucking enormous if not for the distraction of Smells Like Teen Spirit, and I suppose it seems fairly unlikely. I guess my point is that this was more like the real deal in some respects - awkward, not very photogenic, and not something you would have heard at a party. I first encountered Frigid Stars when my friend Andrew lent it to me back in the nineties. I played it maybe twice but couldn't really get into it, which was a shame seeing as Andrew clearly rated it very highly, being a somewhat depressive personality.

Andrew died in 2009, leaving me with a possibly vestigial pang of guilt that I never made the effort with this record, not that it would have made any difference; and so obviously I bought it when I happened upon this copy in the racks at CD Exchange.

I can see why it took so long. Codeine were well named. Their songs are glacially slow to the point of tunes only being apparent if you play the thing at 78RPM so as to artificially bunch all those dwindling notes together; but on the other hand, this material really does grow on you if you're in the right frame of mind, that being the same sort of mood which allows for a full appreciation of Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea - another of Andrew's faves by the way. Frigid Stars is a little like early Swans in terms of pace and mood, but without any of the usual notational tricks generally employed to invoke doom; so the chords and the general structure is actually quite gentle and beautiful, if admittedly reluctant to pull on its dancing shoes. It's like being wrapped in cotton wool, and was - I suppose - one of many precursors to emo, except from what I can tell emo seems to have come from the marginally later generation whose first emotional crisis was experienced on the fourth level of Super Mario Kart rather than out here in the real world interacting with people who don't wear eyeliner. To get back to the point, I have an unfortunate hunch that Frigid Stars very much represents what it felt like to be my friend Andrew, and so I find this quite a powerful record in 2009 because I still miss him. I don't know if that's a recommendation or not, but at least I can see why he lent it to me.

Brothers of the Sonic Cloth (2015)

I've been waiting for the musical volcano of Tad Doyle to once more spew forth its lava, raining molten death upon surrounding villages for some time, at least since the Hog Molly album whenever that was, and certainly since that wonderful decade when a new Tad album seemed like a fairly regular thing; and the reason for such anticipation is that Tad were pretty much the greatest rock band of all time.

The lad has apparently spent the intervening years running his Witch Ape studio up in Seattle, generally avoiding music business headaches, and occasionally titting about with his own ditties. Eventually he decided this material justified getting a band together, and so he did, and here's the album.

I'm a bit out of the loop with all the musical subgenres into which everything has split of late, but then I've reached that age past which all sense of chronology goes out the window, by which I'd guess probably a couple of years have passed since the members of Tad all went their separate ways when actually that was 1999, which was fucking ages ago. Oh well.

One of the subgenres into which metal has split is sludge metal, or maybe I mean doom metal. You were probably all sick of it years ago, but I never saw the memo. Lieutenant Pigeon may already have enjoyed a sludge comeback for all that anyone has bothered to keep me informed. Anyway, the first Brothers of the Sonic Cloth album is something along these lines so I gather, meaning it's quite different to the music of Tad in certain respects, same ballpark maybe but a different game. In fact, most of Tad's output sounds quite light-hearted and breezy compared to this. To my ears - with all of their limited fat old man points of reference - I'm reminded of bits of Black Sabbath, maybe Cop-era Swans with more of a tune, and elements of Ramleh, Skullflower or whoever. The guitar represents a great wall of grinding neolithic pain rolling over its audience at glacial speed with the bass like some growling animal prowling around out there somewhere; and the drums just fucking pound. The raw force definitely reminds me of the Swans, but Tad - or Thomas Doyle if you prefer - always had so much more going on than just bludgeoning noise. As with his earlier endeavours, there's some serious if understated melody underscoring this river of lava, invoking that uniquely wounded quality which characterises the man's finest work, serving to throw the whole into sharp relief as something more than just the sound of stars undergoing gravitational collapse but with guitars - if you'll pardon what is probably a fucking ludicrous and possibly overused simile.

It's good to have this guy back, and certainly not wishing to diminish the mighty force of Peggy Doyle or Dave French, but this is one absolute fucker of a comeback album - if such a term is quite appropriate - and clear evidence of why Mr. Doyle remains one of the most astonishing music artists of our time.

Controlled Bleeding - The Drowning (1994)

Controlled Bleeding are one of those bands which somehow passed me by. I was vaguely aware of their existence at least as far back as the album they put out on Sterile Records, and yet I never really intersected with whatever it was they did until my friend Paul stuck a load of tracks on a tape for me - which apparently I liked, but not enough to inspire my rushing out and buying anything. I think I came to view Controlled Bleeding as just one of those many industrial bands seemingly formed so as to bulk up the page count of the review section in Music from the Empty Quarter: Toe Revision, Terminal Necrosis, Stymied Function, Balding Operator, Sexy Hippo - there were a million of the fuckers out there, all frowning away in front of electrical substations, probably distributed by Play It Again Sam or Wax Trax! and no real reason for me to listen to any of it, so far as I could figure out.

Years later, a Controlled Bleeding CD has come to seem one fuck of a lot more exotic when found in a second hand store in Texas, a store of the type which prides itself on stocking both kinds of music - both country and western; so of course I had to buy the thing.

The Drowning does actually sound roughly how I imagined it might, at least in places, but is significantly more interesting than I expected. Whatever it was that Paul taped on my behalf left me with an impression of Controlled Bleeding as being, very roughly speaking, the American Nocturnal Emissions - at least in terms of those early discs, the ones which made SPK sound like the fucking Archies; but this seems to be only part of the picture.

The Drowning actually sounds almost as though it could be a compilation album, such is the variety of musical styles - hard electronics, drifting film score, vaguely rhythmic stuff, pieces hinting at Muslimgauze or Cop-era Swans or the aforementioned Nocturnal Emissions. Ordinarily such eclecticism might seem to verge on lack of direction, or at worse, just plain not knowing what the fuck you're doing - like all those skinny trouser bands with the token unconvincing attempt at reggae on each album; but somehow this set hangs together quite well. My guess is that this would be thanks in part to a great opening track which seems to set up the sheer diversity of the collection as a theme, or at least seems to do so in my small world. It's the generic guitar rock which abruptly pulls the rug out from under the feet of our ears - so to speak - with its sudden transformation into eight minutes of seriously hard power electronics, horrendous noise so distorted as to entirely obscure the source and recorded with absolute digital clarity, so allowing the listener to become lost in appreciation of the texture; and the more you listen, the more it feels like there's some sort of non-verbal narrative here, something which clearly owes some kind of debt to Russolo's noise symphonies. The suggestion of narrative, with certain sounds appearing to respond to each other in some sense, carries on for the duration of the album as the story mutates and is scored to variant genres. What is further quite refreshing here, is that this isn't to say that The Drowning serves as a soundtrack to something, but rather it is the narrative itself; so jolly good.

Amerie - Touch (2005)

I have maintained for some time that some of the most intense music ever recorded is to be found on R&B albums of one stripe or another. All Saints' debut, for one example, grits its teeth and thinks about pain at least as hard as anything you'll hear on a Swans record, although of course, having been made by miniature girls who consume lollipops and giggle rather than by Ernest Hemingway, songs such as War of Nerves and Alone tend to be overlooked on this score, specifically due to the absence of grimacing men reading Nietzsche whilst breaking detuned guitars in half with just their teeth. Another fine example would be Amerie's 1 Thing, a demonstration should it be needed, that for the last decade, all the genuinely weird stuff has been happening in R&B - not simply because any of it necessarily outweirds Nurse With Wound, but because it outweirds Nurse With Wound to a beat, sells millions, and sells millions to an audience who wouldn't ordinarily give a shit about recordings of a man dropping paper-clips into a bucket. 1 Thing, in case you're unfamiliar with Amerie, is a drum kit dropped down a fire escape whilst someone kicks a guitar, and the biggest pop record you've ever heard. It's kind of like Rollins Band at their most forehead-vein poppingly intense without sharing any actual ingredients with Disconnect, Liar, Low Self Opinion, Shame, or any of Henry's other face-punching classics.

The only problem with a song as great as 1 Thing is sadly that it tends to make everything else you might have slapped on the album sound weak by comparison. Against all odds, Touch is mainly decent, courageously deviating from any formula evinced by the hit single whilst generally keeping it minimal and inventive without too much fuss. Musically most of it's a groove, restrained in all the right places with sometimes just a slight shift in the established bass coming in half way through to really throw everything into contrast; and there's plenty of non-musical elements sampled into melodic shapes; but all the hard work is somewhat undone when a remix of 1 Thing turns up near the close of the album to reduce the rest to filler material.

Well, not quite filler material, but much of the album has the feel of something serving as background to a lifestyle, something heard in the club, on the phone, or bulking out an episode of Empire. I've a feeling this may be an unfortunate consequence of success, namely that Amerie is - or maybe was - a high profile artist in one of the few genres which is - or maybe was - still shifting units; and music as a mass commodity has become something occupying roughly the same cultural bandwidth as ringtones and console games, imposing certain limitations on albums such as what we have here. It's difficult to quite pinpoint what the problem could be, why 1 Thing should sound so much more vital than the rest. Amerie has a pretty good voice, strong and clear without any of the bland technique-over-substance warbling of yer Maria Careys, but she only really seems to let rip on the aforementioned hit single. I've a feeling it may be the otherwise entirely serviceable production rather than her voice which is to blame. They should have got Steve Albini in, but never mind.

Also, there are a couple of horribly loungey tracks, as there always will be on any R&B album featuring a presentable looking lady on the cover; and there's the obligatory song about having it off produced by Lil Jon and sounding very much like every other track he ever produced. Maybe it's just my age, although I don't have any trouble with the subject matter of the rest of the album, very little of which seems directly tailored towards fat, white men in their fifties. Amerie explaining how I'm very much mistaken in my belief of her being a good girl whilst pouting, one finger to her lips and doing that ooh you'll have to punish me now face only brings out my inner Hank Hill these days, inspiring thoughts of mowing the lawn and whether it is yet warm enough to seed with bermuda grass. When she suggests what it is I really want is for him to do to me what he wants to I feel embarrassed on behalf of everyone involved. I mean what if what he wants to do is a cleveland steamer? Yuck!

Still, given the raw power of 1 Thing, it's hard to care about the album failing to pull quite the same trick another thirteen or fourteen times. There are maybe three tracks it could probably have lost, but I'm still not complaining.

UFK - Rage Against Florence + the Machine (2015)

UFK - or Unlucky Fried Kitten to give it, him, or them his or their full title - is Andy Fraser who I met way back in the eighties when he was singer, and I suspect main songwriter, for a group called the Martini Slutz. I only saw them a couple of times, but they were impressive. They felt like a proper punk band, something that had slipped through the cracks from that first wave when no-one could possibly confuse one group with another, just before it got all spikey and leather clad and just a little bit samey. The Martini Slutz were exciting live, and exciting in the same way I always imagined the Sex Pistols must have been - a certain sense of witnessing something special that probably wouldn't be repeated, and which significantly wasn't lacking a sense of humour.

Thanks to the wonder of the internet, I learn much to my pleasure that Andy is still at it all these years later, and against all odds, his powers seem undiminished. I'd heard a couple of tapes he knocked out under the names Death in Venice and then Basement Mania way back whenever, and had come to recognise Martini Slutz as having been just one episode in the life of a man who would probably explode if someone ever kept him from producing music; and its a testament to his dedication that he's kept on apparently regardless of the volume of whatever audience may or may not be out there - not because he has no interest in this stuff being heard, but because - to probably sound a bit of a twat - he's an artist in the truest sense of the word. He cares about what he does, and the rest is mostly just window dressing.

Rage Against Florence + the Machine is the second album under the UFK banner, and it should be noted that it is an album - a proper disc in a jewel case with a barcode and a fancy sleeve - not a feckin' download or a CDR with a phone number scribbled on the blank label side. This is nice because it suggests confidence in the material, and it turns out that said confidence is entirely justified.

I suppose if I have any criticism - just to get it out of the way - the songs mostly sound as though they've been recorded on some sort of digital set up, and initially all seem to have a similar tone and pace as a result; but fuck it - it's not like Rage Against Florence + the Machine hasn't already got more soul than most of the mainstream pop shite people post up on facebook every day, so it is what it is. Repeat plays accustom the ear to all the subtle differences here - all excepting the peculiarly abrupt cutting from one track to the next - but the words draw you in almost immediately, then pull you back for more once the forty-four minutes are up. There's a touch of Ian Dury to the song writing, or at least some of that same uncanny knack for jamming the most ridiculous elements together in a single sentence and making them work like poetry.

A mushroom, very soft and gentle,
Grows through concrete - that's just mental!

UFK songs often seem to focus on details so inconsequential as to seem almost comical, but always with affection, and often resembling a thought process much like the stuff which randomly dribbles through your head while you're stuck in a café staring out at the rain. Sometimes it's as small and simple as the above mushroom; other lines usher in matters of greater consequence, folks dying or car accidents; and whilst it may be a cliché to suggest that it's all part of life's rich tapestry, it's one of those clichés which happen to be true, which seems to be the point of UFK. Bizarre characters inhabit almost magically realist situations in UFK songs with more warmth and conviction than almost anyone since maybe Ray Davies, and so Rage Against Florence + the Machine sounds kind of unique in certain respects, particularly tone and focus, although I suppose that might say more about my general listening habits than this collection in particular. To summarise with the usual pointless scrabbling about for comparisons, try somewhere between a cuddlier Sleaford Mods and Frank Sidebottom - referring here to Chris Sievey in a papier-mâché head rather than the crappy hipster film inspired by the same; or Wreckless Eric crossed with Go-Kart Mozart, but much better; or if anyone remembers Space - that nineties bunch who brought us the fucking terrible Female of the Species amongst other similarly turdlike efforts - UFK is probably roughly what they thought they sounded like, but really didn't; or it's Swans covers of Splodgenessabounds if you want. I don't fucking know. Just trust me that it's great and buy the thing.

Buy the thing sharpish too, if you're going to. UFK have recently been receiving testy cease-and-desist style communiques from Island Records suggesting sales of Florence + the Machine entertainment products may be placed in jeopardy by the title of this album. It appears that there may be reason to suspect this mostly comes from one specific record company drone needing to make himself appear busy so as to justify his job by issuing overbearing decrees to bands no-one has heard of, possibly someone still stinging from Mr. Fraser having kicked up a fuss about the recent violation of his iPod with a free U2 album. Personally I can't help wonder if it's simple jealousy because next to this, Florence sounds like some self-involved drama student hooting away in an in-house Waitrose corporate training video.

Sleaford Mods - Retweeted (2014)

When I first heard Mr. Jolly Fucker by Sleaford Mods I felt compelled to seek out more, so startled was I by the sound - so basic, so exciting, and so face-punchingly angry. Within a couple of hours of poking around on YouTube, I knew I needed to get my hands on every last squeak and fart ever recorded by this group. It was therefore a bit disappointing to realise they - or he if you insist - had already pooped out at least four albums of material that I would probably never get to hear, despite this being the age of everything that ever existed becoming available once again. I used to be so good at this sort of thing, knowing what was out there and what was what, as a stack of early Foetus singles and Unkommuniti tapes are my witness.

Retweeted, collecting the best of that early stuff, was therefore well worth the wait, and well worth the additional wait of my having to buy an amplifier and record player so I could play the thing.

I can sort of see why the band - now that there's definitely two of them - seem to have drawn a line between this - mostly Jason Williamson and others - and Austerity Dogs onwards with Andrew Fearne pushing the buttons. It's hard to tell quite what the difference is, but there definitely is one. I never quite got those Wu-Tang references mixed up with all the other efforts of everyone scrabbling to describe the band - Crass meets John Cooper Clarke, Roy Castle fronting the Fall, Swans covering Splodgenessabounds... but anyway, I can see it here, or at least I can see Sleaford Mods as more or less an English Mobb Deep - as has been mentioned in some interview or other. Even without the occasional NWA reference or Illmatic sample, it's that same sensation of taking a piss in an alley behind the kebab shop and it's raining, and you're stood in a puddle with shit shoes and wet feet...

Where the hell was I?

Much of Retweeted sounds even angrier than the recent material, at least to me, although it could be the punk rock samples, loops from various Pistols and Alternative TV records evoking certain associations with punch-ups and a surfeit of crap lager. The slightly annoying thing is that I realise I was trying to do this myself a few years ago, right down to looping Pretty Vacant in an attempt to spin my own yappy yarns of minimum wage misery with some sort of local underpinning; but not too annoying, given that the stuff on this record does it about twenty times better than I ever managed, and without trying quite so hard; and in case it needs stating, the lyrics were brilliant even back then, terrible, hilarious, and strong enough to strip the paint off most walls. The more I listen to Sleaford Mods, the more I notice how bad so much music has been for at least the last couple of decades. I suppose, if you want to get snippy, this is just some fat old codger praising music which kindly references Ronnie Biggs' Biggest Blow and other crap left laying around by my generation, and I should probably be listening to Skrillex or Neutral Milk Hotel or fucking Ha Ha Tonka - which really is the name of some band; but bollocks - simply being an old cunt with a long memory doesn't necessarily render one's experience any less valid or even vital than that of a twenty-year old told to wait another two decades before forming an opinion. So maybe this is old people's music because teenagers spend their money on ringtones of autotuned Pokémon themes rather than Sleaford Mods, but so what, and does it really matter?

Jason Williamson's sleeve notes state that he isn't particularly proud of these old tracks, which I can sort of understand, although he probably should be, not least once you consider the competition. Retweeted remains a genuine racket, a real joyful noise, and it does what music was always supposed to do, and which not much of it has been doing for a while.

Three-6-Mafia - Mystic Stylez (1995)

Some years ago I happened upon a day time chat show in which one of those Jesusy evangelical backmasking obsessives confronted the lead singer of Venom - or possibly some other Venom personage.

'You record backwards subliminal messages on your records in order to warp young minds and turn them to Satan,' he blustered, apparently believing he'd just exposed the truth of a major conspiracy.

'Yes,' the Venom bloke agreed helpfully. 'Yes, we do!'

Three-6-Mafia seem to be coming from that same place, or at least they were in 1995, which I notice is now, rather terrifyingly, as long ago as was Jailhouse Rock when I myself first started listening to music. Anyway, whatever terrible claim you may have heard of that there rapper's music, Three-6-Mafia do that shit with brass knobs on and a big fuckin' smile on their faces; or, they used to. I'm not sure quite what they're up to these days as I drifted away when Gangsta Boo jumped the increasingly blingy ship. What recent stuff I've heard has a bit more of a club vibe, all squeaky synths, crunk juice and riding spinners. It's okay in so much as it does it's job, but I much prefer their earlier, more conspicuously evil incarnation.

Mystic Stylez was recorded back when the cost of those ice-grill vampire fangs imposed a fairly low budget on the recording of this, their first and best album. At least that's how it appears - gas-powered samplers creaking away, cracked casings, masking tape, distorted effects through what sounds like a vintage spring line reverb, and an album that may originally have been issued as a series of 78s, judging by the sound quality. It's the same basic griminess which is always attributed to the Wu-Tang Clan, but Three-6-Mafia did it better, underpinning the whole with a bass so deep that most of the time it's a feeling rather than notes; and compositionally it's nothing like the music of those Staten Island kung fu obsessives. Agonisingly slow beats invoke the more pants-wettingly terrifying John Carpenter soundtracks, contrasting with the staccato flow of triple time galloping raps wherein Juicy J and the gang do their best to scare the living shit out of you; and they succeed with a vertigo inducing sound akin to being knifed through a cough syrup haze. The science, so to speak, may not be lyrical by the terms of J-Live or related worthies, but it's exactly as lyrical as it needs to be.

Just to bang on about this one for the umpteenth time, the most misunderstood aspect of this kind of rap is not so much that it encourages or glorifies violence, that it's sexist or homophobic, or that it's lacking in redemptive qualities; the most misunderstood aspect is that it necessarily requires either the approval or endorsement of anyone still getting misty eyed over the era of De La Soul and socially responsible messages heard over a coffee shop tannoy system. This reduces to the notion that rap by definition must do only one thing, subject to the approval of people who don't actually like much rap when it comes down to it. Three-6-Mafia were always more Eazy E than anything else, with that same amoral glee taken in whatever it is that will piss you off the most; and because not only are these records done for themselves, for their friends, and for anyone else who wants to hear them - as opposed to anthems of moral guidance for the greater good of humanity - but because, sometimes smash it up is as legitimate an argument as anything with more syllables and a friendlier smile. So not only do they commit all the supposed cardinal sins as defined by rap's most vocal critics, but they added a few of their own on this album, Venom-style showbiz Satanism and cannibalism to name but two. In any other genre, this may have come across as faintly ridiculous, but here it not only works, but it's fucking chilling - an hour or so of cold funky sweats and adrenaline rushes which place the listener directly at the centre of the robbery, the street shooting, and the raw terror; and if you really need it to, yes - at least some of this can be considered a metaphor for the horror film of daily existence in one of the more frequently shat upon demographics.

As I've almost certainly said elsewhere, Mystic Stylez is why I find it difficult to take all those power electronics clowns seriously. It's not so much that Three-6-Mafia necessarily ever did any of the stuff described here for real, but they're almost certainly closer to some of it than William Bennett or even Michael Gira ever were, and they're not stood in an art gallery handing out tastefully shocking limited edition prints of it. Mystic Stylez sounds like no other album ever recorded, even in the context of the Three-6-Mafia's own catalogue. It's probably one of the darkest records ever made, and possibly one of the finest; and Break Da Law is still the greatest inducement to the dispensation of good old fashioned pissed-off get back since Straight Outta Compton.

Expandobrain - Mother of God! It's Expandobrain! (1986)

Here's a bit of an oddity, I suppose. Amongst a few tracks I taped off a John Peel show broadcast sometime in 1987 was Thyroid by Expandobrain. Peel didn't seem to know much about them, and I never heard their name again, which seemed a shame because Thyroid is a face-punchingly great song. Many centuries later I live in America and have somehow survived for three years without a turntable - or record player as is the correct terminology - due to the complications of stuffing my entire life into boxes and shipping it to another country; but now, at last I am fully equipped and once more spinning the living shit out of my beloved vinyl collection, and someone has invented the internet since I last considered Expandobrain. Sadly it transpires that they really were as obscure as I imagined, so there's not a lot out there, although I now at least have a means of getting hold of the album from which Peel played a few tracks. It's taken one hell of a long time, but it's been worth the wait.

I can't even remember what else was going on back in 1986 when this was recorded, and certainly not in terms of Americans with guitars. I was only ever an infrequent listener to John Peel's show, and I never really liked Sonic Youth, and I'm not sure I've ever actually heard any Hüsker Dü. The cover - very much resembling something scribbled on the back of an exercise book at school - namechecks Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Live Skull, Swans, and Moving Targets, regarding which I've heard one Meat Puppets track and have a stack of Swans albums which sound nothing like this. I suppose Dinosaur Jr. - another band to which I've never really taken - were around by then. I don't know where Expandobrain fitted in, but I suppose it doesn't matter.

I was anticipating Thyroid and a load of tragic b-sides, partially based on how good an album is likely to be when you've waited this long to hear it, but incredibly this one turns out to be good right through to the last track. Expandobrain - actually Expando Brain which looks wrong to me because I've thought of the name as a single word for nearly three decades - were your basic guitar, bass and drums in some guy's garage, fast and punky but tuneful, the sort of thing that Steve Albini might have ended up producing had they lasted, although for all the twangy angst and pounding tension, there's something wonderfully upbeat in here - reminding me a hell of a lot of the more recent Parquet Courts, maybe some sort of happy medium between the Monkees and a less wanky Sonic Youth with a touch of an angrier, more sarcastic REM before they became an international chemical processing franchise.

I don't know. The review is in there somewhere. Just pick out the bits you like. As I already said, Mother of God! has been worth the wait, and as a lost or potentially forgotten gem - which it really, really is - you might be advised to hunt it down now before obscurity and collector mania pushes the price up through the roof.

Devo - Moody Theater, Austin, Texas (2nd July 2014)

Devo were an early and important discovery for me. I was fourteen or so, and my record collection comprised four Beatles albums. I was aware of punk, although I wasn't quite sure what it was seeing as all I seemed to hear on the radio was either Dan Hartman's Instant Replay or the Electric Light Orchestra; although that said, I'd watched the first Public Image Limited single and Germ Free Adolescents by X-Ray Spex performed on Top of the Pops and found both songs strangely hypnotic. Graham, my best friend, lent me his copy of the first Devo album apparently having decided that I needed to hear it. It was on red vinyl, and there was something disturbing about it. It was something new in the world. I listened to it once whilst staring at the weird and freakish figures on the cover as I sat next to the record player, then decided to take it back to Graham. There was something strange and deeply unwholesome about this music. It implied regions of human experience I had never considered, and would rather not know about; but Graham insisted I keep at it, give it another listen, and so I did.

Devo became my new favourite band, and have remained pretty much unchallenged in this capacity ever since. Henry Rollins once observed that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who get Devo and those who don't, and generally I've found this to be true whilst thanking providence that I can be counted amongst the first group. The last person I knew who didn't get Devo was the pothead owner of an atheist bulletin board for whom they were essentially interchangeable with Duran Duran. He preferred Kiss and classic rock, and by strange coincidence he was also something of a dick in terms of his interpersonal relationships and how he dealt with other people. Since my brief encounter with that guy, I have known to shun those who don't understand Devo, to walk the other way before they can infect me with their failure and turn everything complicated.

The point that so many somehow miss, is that Devo were never art rock or novelty pop or weirdness for the sake of weirdness. They have always been in essence a folk band, and in American terms possibly the only folk band, the group who see clearly and who understand how our society really works. If they seem a little fucked up stood there in their fake plastic breasts and with those things on their heads, then maybe you need to take another look around yourself, at this world in which we were denied the silver rockets promised by Hugo Gernsback, where Archie has that sister with an IQ of thirty-seven who somehow never gets a mention in the comic books, with Betty and Veronica forever lost in their own lurid fantasy existence of cowboy pharmacology and giant babies. The bottom line - at least for me - is that Devo have ever been so finely attuned to the ongoing backwards progress of human culture, so sensitised to the real stuff, that almost any band or artist stood next to them will inevitably look like teenagers trying to appear cool whilst smoking the wrong end of their first cigarettes; and as a band devolving backwards along the timeline of their own career in keeping with everything else that's happened since the industrial revolution, it seems fitting that now, forty plus years, countless albums, and two fallen soldiers down the line they should be taking the dark Ohio basement in which they recorded their very first songs on tour.

I know most of the material played tonight from the Mechanical Man EP, from the two Hardcore Devo collections of formative recordings originally released by Rykodisc, and a handful of tracks which eventually made it onto the first two official albums. The original recordings sound muffled in places, prone to tape degradation, the best that could be done under primitive circumstances, bluesy science-fiction surf tunes scraped together with home built synthesisers on a rough framework of spastic rhythms. Transposed to a stage before hundreds of eager Texan spuds, it's peculiar how the songs remain the same whilst forming new, unfamiliar shapes. I feared it might sound as weird and cranky as those archive discs, partially because I was there with Mrs. Wax Cylinders whose main frame of reference was this being the band who once had a hit with Whip It. I needn't have worried, and found myself surprised at how funky some of the songs sound in such a setting, even how heavy. The loudest band I ever saw was probably Terminal Cheesecake, and although this wasn't at even half their volume, Devo - against all odds, the novelty band who got a namecheck on Different Strokes and upon whom a Kiss fan might rightly pour his hairy chested scorn - sounded or maybe felt bigger, heavier, darker, funnier, and more relevant to the mess we've gotten ourselves into than ever. Mechanical Man achieved an effect resembling the sort of thing to which Black Sabbath once aspired; Bamboo Bimbo could have been the Swans at their most pensive and grunting; Fountain of Filth and I've Been Refused came on with such righteous energy as to leave no doubt of this being the band formed in response to the outrage of the Kent State Shooting of May, 1970. They didn't exactly play all of the hits - I personally would also have liked to have heard Chango and maybe Bottled Up - but it was all of the good stuff, all the weirdly terrifying and yet strangely intoxicating forms found when you flip the Beach Boys over and scrape off all that stuff that's been growing on their underside; Jocko Homo and Gut Feeling and even the infant-headed Booji Boy finding his way onto the stage for a few numbers with the help of what was either a baby walker or a Zimmer frame, depending on whether you're looking backwards or forwards.

Finally, to boil the above bones down into something that will settle better on top of your beer, it was not only a good gig, but possibly the greatest gig I've ever attended by at least a few definitions, some quantified by hairs erect on the back of my neck throughout the performance. Forty plus years, countless albums, and two fallen soldiers down the line, and Devo are still able to surprise me. I don't know if there's ever been another band capable of such a feat, who could retrace their first steps and still take us somewhere entirely new.

Sleaford Mods - Austerity Dogs (2013)

It seems that in certain quarters there is a generally held view of Sleaford Mods as being the next big thing, perhaps suggested by a recent write-up in Mojo or some magazine of that sort. This seems unusual in so much as somehow I've heard of them prior to the predicted enmassivisation, and that they're fucking great, in contrast to the general trend of the last few hundred next big things being mostly toss, Neutral Milk Hotel for example - Neutral Toss Hotel would have been more like it...

Already the usual suspects are queueing up to forge the definitive summary of the Sleaford Mods sound resembling a fusion of John Cooper-Clarke and the Wu-Tang Clan, which it doesn't; or The Fall, which fails to get any closer, as is usually true of almost every band ever described as sounding like The Fall; or they're punk hop, whatever the fuck that's supposed to be. I'm not sure if anyone has yet suggested Suicide fronted by Pitman on the grounds of blue-collar rude words spat out in an East Midlands accent; or Nocturnal Emissions circa Songs of Love and Revolution mashed up with Skinnyman; or Swans covering Splodgenessabounds because it's an amusing image and not much worse than any other description, but if not, you can have those for free.

Sleaford Mods build songs up from raw loops of what sound like someone's rehearsal tapes captured on a mono-portable cassette player in 1978, and a sort of Tourette's attack of lyrics that really capture the feel of turning up for agency work at a Parcel Force depot at 6AM on a freezing Monday morning only to be told the failed Footballer's Wife from said agency was too busy painting her nails to send your papers through to the gate; and so you're screwed once again. Specifically, Austerity Dogs sounds to me exactly like life in England just before I escaped, at least life for the belching majority who somehow failed to end up in their dream jobs once they left school. Sleaford Mods are not only the opposite of  anything you will ever see on The X-Factor, one voice of the underwaged and supposedly unemployable silent masses against which the British Government has recently declared out and out war, but they're one of those once in a lifetime bands - depending on your definition of what constitutes a band - of such fierce and comic honesty that almost anything stood next to them will inevitably end up seeming affected, ridiculous, and divorced from reality.

The only phone on the road is chlamydia-ridden phlegm stained,
where the fuckers sell processed peas as weed.
It's cold when I look out my window.
Another local pub burned down to the ground.
I hated those fucking Motown nights anyway.
It's Jive Bunny meets Lucy fucking Pinder...
...on ice!

To be honest, Austerity Dogs is so good as to make all efforts to write about it completely pointless - simple, powerful music and brilliant words, and I just can't stop listening to the fucker. As with the cold leftovers of last night's kebab hastily consumed on the way to work in the hope of staving off a hangover, it may not be pretty but it's undeniably nourishing.

Available from Norman Records and probably some other places.