We Be Echo - The Guestlist (2024)

 

Somehow this one wasn't quite clicking for me, which was puzzling given that it sounded like it should be doing something, at which point I realised I nearly always listen to We Be Echo on headphones - as we used to say in the olden days - where I'd been playing The Guestlist over speakers, almost as background. I don't know why this should make a difference but it does, and listening by my traditional means was a very different kettle of fish, specifically involving those terrifying things found at the bottom of the sea.

The Guestlist forms a wall of rhythmic sound, much like previous albums, but there's so much going on here that you really need to immerse yourself to get the full benefit. It does too much to be limited to the term industrial, although that's as good a reference point as any and is earned in this case. Where the last few albums focussed on stretching a particular formula limited mostly to bass, percussion and vocals, The Guestlist sees an expansion of the familiar palette bringing in a wider range of electronic and treated sounds, notably in the rhythm section, building up the sort of pensive moodscape in which Gristle excelled back in the day, and which is sonically descended from Kevin Thorne's work with Third Door from the Left; so, as with Third Door, if it goes places you may recognise from Throbbing Gristle (particularly the live material) it nevertheless manages to sound very much its own thing. The major progression from previous albums, given that the general mood remains more or less the same, is in the vocals, with some tracks allowed to stand as instrumental, others with vocals treated or the voice howling away beneath a fog of reverb. Somehow this gives the impression of a more rounded whole, something with a beginning and an end rather than just the latest selection of songs.

Where Do Not Switch On seemed to be the best of the reformed We Be Echo* so far, The Guestlist has gone one better, which is as it should be.

*: I realise the idea that a musical act comprised of a single individual can reform is basically fucking ridiculous, but it was the easiest way to write the sentence.

We Be Echo - Ceza Evi (1983)

I now have three versions of this, and I've a feeling I've reviewed it as many times over the years, with excerpts of my previous reviews having been reprinted on the cover of previous reissues, albeit reissues of related We Be Echo material rather than this specific collection. I'm quoted on the cover of this one too, which is massively gratifying, although it presents the weird possibility that you may even be reading this on the cover of some future reissue. Anyway, before I disappear up my own arse…

Ceza Evi was recorded by Kevin Thorne, formerly of Third Door from the Left and fairly close associate of Throbbing Gristle. It was one of the first independent cassettes I bought, and as such set an unusually high bar for the form. It had quite an impact on me. The music - and it is music rather than some dreary bloke scratching his nuts next to a tape recorder and declaring it sound art - utilises drum machine, synth, bass guitar, electronics, and a lot of tapes to communicate a powerfully brooding atmosphere approximately parallel to the sort of thing Gristle always did so well, something bordering on the edge of the profane or unthinkable - beat driven music which really grinds its way into your subconscious. The incredible thing is that this material didn't even have the benefit of a four track portastudio. It was captured by bouncing tracks from tape to tape on a domestic double tape deck. Naturally, no-one's going to mistake Ceza Evi for a Trevor Horn production, but nor does it quite sound like anything produced by a bloke sat cross-legged on the rug in his front room. Kevin got the absolute best out of the extraordinary limited equipment available at the time, even without the significant occurrence of tape hiss, and it succeeds because the simple power of these tracks sweeps you up and carries you away to some very dark places before it even occurs that maybe it wasn't knocked out at Abbey Road.

There were two versions of Ceza Evi. The special edition came out a year or so after the first, replacing more than half of the tracks with newer, more technically sophisticated material. This double disc from Cold Spring polishes up and remasters the special edition on the first disc - or rather Martin of Attrition polishes up and remasters, and a great job he's done too. The second disc collects the tracks which were lost in the update. They're perhaps more primitive than others on the special edition, harder or even more brutal, but - fuck - I'm glad they haven't been left completely by the wayside, and it's particularly great to hear I'm A Gambler, Micro Penis, and Knechtschaft again after all this time. Listening to this lot again, it's also interesting to hear formative clues as to the current We Be Echo sound, which has evolved greatly from these beginnings, but still carries some of the same mood.

I've lived with these tracks for what is now a bewildering two thirds of my existence on this planet, and can't imagine what life would have been like without this stuff somewhere in the background.

We Be Echo - The Misanthrope (2021)

 

It's not that I never imagined I'd still be listening to We Be Echo in 2021, but I didn't expect it to be new material; or for there to be quite so much new material - this being the second new album in about six months; or that the new material would actually eclipse those tapes from back when we were all a whole lot younger. With The Misanthrope we've gone beyond the possibility of attempts to revive former glories, which is weird because it seems like a new, unfamiliar dynamic in music biz terms, like Emotional Rescue turning out to be the definitive Stones album.

I suppose the biggest initial surprise was We Be Echo evolving into something sounding so much like a band and hence somewhat removed from the days of boxes plugged into a music center. As with Darkness is Home, this is very much a guitar orientated sound, or at least bass guitar orientated, presenting potential comparisons with Wire, Joy Division, the Talking Heads impersonating Joy Division, Neu, or even the first couple of Eno albums; but the more I listen, the more I realise this is a fairly logical progression from Third Door from the Left, Kevin Thorne's other band of times passed, and specifically from It's Not Us which seems vaguely ancestral to this material, at least in terms of mood.

For an album called The Misanthrope, this is a surprisingly uptempo set. The bass pounds and chugs with melodic intensity over driving beats and Thorne's increasingly confident vocal, and if it's slightly frosty in tone - possibly cold wave as I believe people who need to have names for things would call it - it's passionate, emotional and informed, so I would imagine, by turmoil. Love You Anyway and Need You Like Water are particularly powerful in this respect, presenting near solid walls of mood with the intensity of epic landscape painting or even something from Faith, the only decent album the Cure ever made, but without the disadvantage of being by the Cure. It's been a while since I got earwormed this hard by anything, but Love You Anyway may even be We Be Echo's New Dawn Fades.

 

 

 

Third Door from the Left - Face the Firing Squad (1981)

Face the Firing Squad really feels like it should be referred to in the same sentences as Second Annual Report, The Voice of America, Tissue of Lies and other brooding classics of the admittedly loose genre which I can never quite bring myself to consider industrial. It dates from roughly the same era and I played it to death at the time, but being released as a cassette, I suppose it's inevitable that it shouldn't be so well remembered. Third Door from the Left were Kevin Thorne and Raye Calouri, who met at Throbbing Gristle's performance at the YMCA in 1979, and Kevin's name appears in the list of those invited to the recording of Heathen Earth, alongside members of Coil, Konstruktivists, and others you will have most likely heard of; and you may recall Kevin's name adorning the covers of numerous Chris & Cosey releases in his capacity as designer.

Anyway, we might lazily characterise Third Door as occupying a sort of half way point between Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, or at least live Gristle. The comparison isn't entirely unjustified, or no more so than saying the Rolling Stones were just Charlie Patton for suburban whities; but there's a lot more going on than just strange sounds and dark moods. For starters, Third Door from the Left were never afraid of a guitar sounding like a guitar, and regardless of the pensive sense of menace, you might say they were significantly more accessible than anyone from whom they may have taken inspiration. The sheer emotional weight of It's Not Us still floors me thirty-five years later in ways that Joy Division never quite managed. Seriously, it makes New Dawn Fades sound like the theme music from the Generation Game.

This edition has been lovingly pressed up as a record by Vinyl on Demand, meaning no more coughing up hundreds of quid on Discogs for a Woolworths cassette which probably won't play. The quality remains as it was on the original cassette release, which isn't a problem as it was a fairly decent recording given the limitations of the equipment of the time. At the risk of sounding like a bit of a knob, I'd suggest that this one is essential.

Lack of Knowledge - Grey (1983)

To launch immediately into this week's dubiously relevant preamble,  I seem to have developed a passing allergy to industrial music, or at least to some of that which tends to be saddled with the term for the sake of argument. It was a facebook encounter with one of those noisy cassette types of yesteryear. We used to write to each other all the time, and he now believes unions have too much power and that Margaret Thatcher saved the country - as he put it himself. This seems entirely consistent with an emerging pattern of former avant-garde oscillator-twiddling industrial types turning into the enemy in later years, although I'm beginning to wonder if the seemingly contradictory dynamic of this development results from a misconception on my part, having once equated experimental musicians with the tradition of artistic and intellectual libertarianism as once represented by the Surrealists, for one example; when perhaps it is more the case that so many sonic pioneers have been artistically out there and on their own principally because beneath it all they're mostly ultra-conservative, deeply misanthropic loners, and even more terrified of change and the big bad world than your average Daily Mail reading shut-in. The ironic posturing, mimicking harsh or totalitarian positions perhaps wasn't always so ironic as it seemed at the time. Perhaps that tape was called Face the Firing Squad because actually they really like firing squads, regarding them as an efficient and entertaining means of dealing with lefties and trouble makers blah blah blah Ayn Rand blah blah...

Well, whatever the case, this week I'm in the mood for something far, far removed from the realm of self-important fifty-year old men logging on to see how their Monsanto stock is doing whilst composing another whining I coulda been a contender missive on the subject of a thirty-year old cassette of mains hum with a picture of Peter fucking Sutcliffe on the cover; and Grey is a long way from that. It's also a four track 7" EP which is some way outside of my usual parameters, but I listened to the album, and although excellent, it just made me want to listen to this again.

Lack of Knowledge had a heavily industrial aesthetic - black and white photographs of tower blocks, gas stations, chain-link fencing and so on - but it was something with which they were grappling, artistically speaking - as opposed to just sneering about industrial squalor being texturally interesting whilst lounging around tossing playing cards into an inverted top hat. This came out on Crass Records and is as such as good a refutation as any of the notion of the label ever having peddled the droning monochromatic tedium for which it is remembered by people who probably weren't there.

Happily, there was never much ambiguity as to the nature or general identity of the enemy with anything on the Crass label, and Lack of Knowledge distinguished themselves by going at it from quite a different angle compared to at least a few of their contemporaries. Musically they weren't really about songs so much as pieces of music comprising different movements in an almost classical or progressive sense, so there's a dynamic, but nothing so commonplace as verses or even a chorus. Oddly, this structure isn't really the first thing you notice, or at least wasn't the first thing I noticed, because musically what you generally have are variations on a fairly intense, driving, and melodic sound somewhere between Joy Division's Dead Souls and New Model Army, but without all the fighting and burping noises. It sounds like nothing else released on Crass Records.

Arguably most unusual of all, Lack of Knowledge's shunning rock tradition extended to the lyrical content as much as to that which it narrated. The lyrics - if you really want to call them lyrics - are printed in the fold-out cover, reading more like short stories than anything, there being no concession to conventional song structure, rhyme, or anything of the sort; and these are nevertheless sung and with some passion. The stories - or scenarios might be a better term - are brief dystopian tales of life in an oppressive police state, borderline science-fiction but unfortunately nothing like so far-fetched as they should be given the kind of shite our governments tend to get up to when they know there's either no-one looking, or there are sufficient numbers of people like my former pal ready to cheer them on. The sum of the parts is astonishing and possibly unique in the history of modern music, sort of like what you might have had if Joy Division had been a bit less depressing and had recorded a talking book; and weirdly it works.

Doors burst open, and machine gun death rains in on the betrayed conspirators. The remaining few confess their crimes, and when justice is done, they die. They die but the hope lives on.

One criticism I've seen made of records on the Crass label is that they have a certain didactic quality which some find off-putting, a certain utilitarian naming of names, as opposed to slapping a picture of Peter Sutcliffe's garden shed on the front and saying oooh isn't it interesting and subversive how no-one realises that they're looking at Peter Sutcliffe's garden shed. Lack of Knowledge elude this pitfall by illustrating their anti-authoritarian point in cinematic fashion rather than spelling it out by means of the in-house style of having a dog bark at a swarm of angry bees. This gives their music a tremendous and raw emotional impact. In fact, thirty years later I still find it difficult to listen to these four tracks without getting a bit of a lump in the throat, because it's surprisingly uplifting to know that whilst there are some evil, manipulative fuckers out there running the world, we are none of us alone; and Grey represented the real thing, or as close to the real thing as a vinyl record gets - something political and genuinely revolutionary.