In the Nursery - When Cherished Dreams Come True (1983)

Here's another one to which my pocket money didn't quite stretch at the time, despite how much I loved Witness, the single which came out the following year and ended up on just about every compilation I taped for anyone for at least the next five. Of all the groups to fall victim to ill-fitting characterisation, In the Nursery must surely rank among the highest, having started off as one of those Joy Division bands before evolving into one of those Laibach bands, then neo-classical, martial industrial, and so on and so forth, because someone somewhere will just have heard Elgar for the first time and decided that Sir Edward was himself a martial industrial pioneer. Cherished Dreams dates from their time as one of those Joy Division bands, although for what it's worth it reminds me of A Certain Ratio if it reminds me of anyone, or even Adrian Borland's Sound on Mystery in particular.

The confusion possibly stems from their interest in aesthetics as art in the formal sense, hailing as they do from an era where your fave bands would usually turn you on to what they'd been reading or some overlooked detail in the history of painting or film - I mean as distinct from just rocking out and so inspiring you towards the purchase of recordings by other artists who also rock out. Given their extended legacy of soundtrack work and film scores, combined with a strong visual - or at least poetic aesthetic - it should be clear that this is art, and as art it is very much its own thing in the sense of those associated with modernism being very much their own respective things; or to put it in less nebulous terms, if you can imagine Spandau Ballet with content rather than just style, then maybe that's what I'm getting at.

These six tracks are songs in the traditional sense, brought together by means of an experimental approach utilising whatever best approximates whichever theme they're going for - powerful emotive bass, military rhythms, horns, heroic crooning, funky guitar, and even what is almost certainly a Roland DR55 invoking a timeless sense of scale with surprisingly little. It sounds like the labour of love I strongly suspect it to be, meticulously sculpted rather than offered as here's some stuff we done innit; and the apparently silk-screen printed gatefold cover seems likewise true to the integrity of their aesthetic over commercial considerations.

When Cherished Dreams Come True is probably overdue a reissue but in the meantime I'll get onto tracking down their other records which I couldn't afford at the time.

The Sound - Jeopardy / From the Lion's Mouth / All Fall Down ...Plus (2014)

Here's an odd one, at least from where I've been stood. I was most certainly sentient between 1980 and 1982 - spanning the original release dates of these three albums - and not only was I sentient, but I was possibly at the most rabidly teenaged stage of my record collecting, a period during which I could pick even a Classix fucking Nouveaux album from the rack and wonder to myself what it sounded like. These years also happened to be the only time of my life during which I managed to keep diaries going right through until December. I'm presently transcribing some of these diaries for my own entertainment, and I have in particular noted firstly just how much I obsessed over certain bands at that age, and secondly, how little sense any of the rest of it makes thirty years down the line. I have therefore found myself having to look up quite a lot of stuff on the internets and the Googles in order to work out what the hell I was writing about, and it is during one such search that YouTube suggested I might also like to have a listen to New Dark Age by the Sound on the grounds of my watching something else that had happened in the same year. The cover art of both Jeopardy and From the Lion's Mouth - the first two albums - looked vaguely familiar, but I had never heard of the Sound. Then I recalled them as the band which had appeared on the front of issue seventeen of Alternative Sounds, the Coventry based fanzine produced by Martin of Attrition and which had been mentioned on Look! Hear! on the telly and everything. I went to the vault to investigate, but it was actually a band called the Silence who had appeared on said cover. Sound and silence - I suppose you can see how I might get them confused. Anyway, I recalled New Dark Age as something once recorded by SPK - a satisfyingly portentous title if ever there was - and so I clicked on the video to see what these Sound lads had been about.

A week later, I've developed such an obsession that I'm making my way through the four discs of this reissue of their first three albums, playing them over and over and over, and I'm seriously fucking bewildered as to how this bunch somehow escaped my attention. How they slipped past my teenage radar I will never know, given that they weren't particularly obscure, as indicated by the John Peel sessions and BBC Live in Concert bonus disc included here. The only explanation I have is that the Sound only exist in retrospect, their entire career having been retrofitted to the early eighties by some time-active power.

The excessive ghastitude of my flabber is down to the Sound being so much the distillation of everything I loved at the age of fifteen in musical terms that it seems inconceivable that I should only discover them now, three decades later. I suppose you might describe them as a cross between Wire and Joy Division with more of a power pop sensibility; except the more you listen, the poorer a fit such comparisons seem; and was there really ever a half decent band who suffered those Joy Division comparisons aside from Joy Division themselves? Maybe it would be better to suggest the Sound were quite clearly sprung from that same well of emotionally volatile post-punk which yielded Echo & the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes and U2 - before they turned into Rio Tinto-Zinc - but then the Sound clearly pissed all over those bands too. Maybe the Sound were how we all hoped New Order would turn out, how New Order might have been had they not spunked up the entirety of their potential on that first album.

Well whatever, the Sound are - or I suppose were - sparse, punchy, tuneful, and intense, the song writing is of such absurdly powerful quality as to mean there's not a single track to be skipped amongst these four discs. Almost everything here could have been a hit single had we not been distracted by all the other shit that was around at the time, Bauhaus and the Cure and all those other sucked-in cheeks tosspots who somehow managed to forge out careers without a single decent album to their names. I Can't Escape Myself, Contact the Fact, Winning, Sense of Purpose, Party of the Mind, Monument, Calling the New Tune, Skeletons, Unwritten Law - one of those rare wonders wherein the bassline seems to bear no relation to the rest of the song and yet it all fits together with absolute perfection of intent, and Missiles - one of the most emotionally powerful anti-nuclear songs I've heard... all air-punchingly fine; and after a while you realise there's not much joy in picking out individual tracks, there being nothing which lowers the average, not even the four rare tracks recorded with Kevin Hewick who at first sounds like one of those horrible sub-Bowie types from some mushroom tea based Canterbury group. Even the live material sounds amazing, which is something very few groups ever managed on disc, in my view.

After three weeks of this lot on heavy rotation, I had to force myself to pack away the box and listen to something else. Absurd though it may seem, the Sound were just too good, too powerful. Never mind hairs stood up on the back of the neck, some of this stuff was beginning to bring tears to my eyes. I'm slightly fucked off that it's taken me thirty years to discover this group - particularly considering the tripe I've endured in a similar vein which isn't anything like so good - but better late than never.

MOP - Warriorz (2000)

A couple of weeks ago I bought a box set of the first three albums by the Sound, a group I somehow managed to completely miss first time around. I'd stumbled across one of their tracks by chance and decided they sounded right up my street. They proved so much up my street that I've hardly listened to anything else since those aforementioned three albums turned up in the mail, and I've now played them so much that I've become almost over-saturated and sorely in need of a palate cleanser. I was going to write something about the Sound this week, but instead Warriorz found its way into my discman, which is about as far removed as one can get from the Sound without just listening to Cartoons, whom Wikipedia describes as a technobilly or glam pop band from Denmark, best known for their 1998 Eurodance cover of the 1958 novelty song, Witch Doctor by Ross Bagdasarian, as well as for their outlandish plastic costumes and wigs used in live performances as caricatures of 1950s American rock and roll stars.

Anyway, to get to the point, the greatest obstacles to a working appreciation of rap are, I would say, the failure to understand what rap does, and the misconception that rap necessarily does just one thing. This is particularly true of the sort of rap which relates sweary tales of villainy, once amusingly parodied by my friend Carl with the line I'm gonna cut off your face and use it to wipe my arse. Whilst Warriorz may indeed serve as a filmic glimpse of life on the mean streets of Brooklyn, a valuable insight into the world of society's most pooed-upon, it's probably worth remembering that this is also rap guys stood around trying to make each other laugh by saying outrageous shit. It's a conversation which has somehow ended up on a CD in the homes of people with very different lives to those of the originators, and which should be understood as such, and should be understood as something quite different to a broadcast message sent out to a bunch of strangers with slightly fatter wallets. I've probably said this before, but this is what distinguishes artists such as MOP or anyone else who was ever labelled gangsta from self-proclaimed edumacaters of the Native Tongues school and their disciples - this sort of material is not offered as lifestyle tips or guidance.

Okay, excuses aside, MOP have refreshingly little to say on most of the usual contentious subjects, concentrating mainly on how great they are, and how they're fairly likely to punch your face off for no reason whatsoever. Whilst this may sound something of a bore, the sheer joy they obviously had recording this album carries it along. Rarely has anything sounded quite so furious, so ready to bash your teeth in, and yet so raucously happy at the same time. It's like that weird moment where you find that, for no obvious reason, you're suddenly best friends with the most enormous and terrifying kid in the entire school, and he thinks all of your jokes are hilarious. Also, I don't think I've ever heard quite so much shouting on one album.

Musically it's definitively in the DJ Premier vein - although the man himself only handles a few of the cuts here - grimy east-coast nineties beats reversing over you like an unusually smelly garbage truck, old soul and film soundtrack samples ground into functioning tracks on the sort of sampler that leaves grease stains if you stand too close; and because, as I've attempted to suggest, the best rap generally does more than just one thing, there's something powerfully soulful about this collection even taking all the yelling and grunting and diarrhoea jokes into account; and never has a xylophone sample sounded quite so terrifying as on On the Front Line. This is easily one of the greatest rap albums of all time, pooface.