WILDING ...and the GOLDEN HAMMER (2021)

Typographic affectations usually get on my nerves because often the most interesting thing about the artist will turn out to be the name, embellished as it is with extraneous bits of programming code,  meaning that the music usually sounds like the Cocteau Twins but with extra helpings of twee. On the other hand, I'm not going to argue with WILDING who has more than earned the right to render his name however he fucking well likes. Much like its predecessor, Hard Noise to Scumrise this is one of those rare albums which proves both terrifying and yet invigorating, like an hilarious funeral. It leans in far too close, gently intrudes a rough hand down the front of your pants, then looks you right in the eye as it delivers the most preposterous testimony you've ever heard; or at least that's what it does some of the time. There's less of the Hard Noise but musical abstracts continue to dominate, flowering from the arse end of growling blues numbers, even illustrating them in the case of the extended coda to Meal with bleeps and electronic squeaks which seem to depict the consumption of the postmortem corpse by whoever happens to be around - the whole heap of bacteria, who want to treat you like a cafeteria, as the lyric tells it.

 

Yes, the lyrics - Meal and Gezellum are particularly wonderful, although I also enjoy Music and Truck - which incorporates no less than 436 variations on the word fuck* and as such inspires fond memories of working in Catford. The lyrical wordplay is dexterous, vividly disgusting and massively entertaining all at the same time, inspiring me to lazy comparisons with persons whose work I don't actually know as well as I probably should - Beefheart, Vivian Stanshall, the rococo doggerel of Richard Stilgoe and his unbearable ilk buggered and transformed into brutalist vaudeville; or what we have is Peter Hope's Exploding Mind but funnier, except no way would you ever grow balls of volume sufficient to facilitate calling it funny to its face; and amidst all the seemingly nihilist revelations, it's curiously life affirming to find that 2022 has kicked off with an album which really doesn't sound quite like anything before.

*: I'm guessing here. I lost count at around thirty, and that was only a few lines into the song. It's a lot anyway.

Wilding and Unwilding - Hard Noise to Scumrise (2020)

I've a feeling that almost every single review of this man's work will almost certainly have opened with a paragraph similar to what follows, but you'll just have to bear with me. Back in 1980 I was an only infrequent listener to John Peel due to having to get up for school the next day, but two or three of those infrequent hearings were distinguished by himself playing There Goes Concorde Again by ...And the Native Hipsters, a genuinely odd six minutes of Dada minimalism which didn't really sound like anything else I'd heard at the time. It made a big impression and reached number five in the independent charts. Weirdly, it also made an impression on a few of my wee pals, some of whom I hadn't even recognised for the sort of kids who would listen to Peel, most peculiar being Paul Boulton who resembled the singer from the UK Subs, regarded Sid's version of My Way as a protest song, and who was trying to form a punk band called the Suburbans - he thought Concorde was a bit weird but really good. So my equivalent of being able to remember where you were when Kennedy was shot is probably my recollection of that strange couple of days when everyone I knew seemed to be into There Goes Concorde Again. A few years later I ended up at Maidstone College of Art and discovered that one of my tutors, Bob Cubitt, had been loosely involved with ...And the Native Hipsters, which naturally impressed the shit out of me; and now, a million years in the future, Wikipedia informs me that Tony Visconti had aspirations to re-record There Goes Concorde Again, and that William Wilding - the man at the heart of all of this - has also performed as Woody Bop Muddy, a name I remember mainly because my friend Eddy used to go to see him perform quite a lot.

Anyway, my point is that this is what he is - or possibly they are - up to now, and that There Goes Concorde Again is probably a lot to live up to, but Hard Noise to Scumrise is fucking excellent and therefore does. Some of what we have here is noise, and noise in the tradition of Pierre Schaeffer, so we have slabs of untreated musique concréte delivered to our ears in sequences which, while appearing arbitrary, hint at a fairly refined sense of composition. Band-saws, drilling equipment, bits of factory, and whatever the hell else is making those noises doesn't usually sound quite so musical, at least not without going down the obvious route of sampling everything for novelty covers of Tutti Frutti; but this is familiar urban noise with unfamiliar punctuation and therefore works a little like Einstürzende Neubauten without the haircuts or self-conscious emphasis on cheekbones.

Additionally we have musical elements which introduce themselves, notably a powerful horn section, which further removes Hard Noise to Scumrise from the sort of thing everyone else would probably do given similar ingredients. Order seems to form from apparent chaos as the album progresses, allowing a Beefheartian element to surface - bluesy growling and absurdist lyrics, or absurdist with a point. It's unexpected but we adjust, much as we adjust to gentle acoustic guitar and pulsing synth, following the album where actually very few have gone before, generally speaking. The final track, and probably the hit single is Scum Always Rises, a genuine soul-drenched howler scored for jackhammer, chainsaw, and cocktail piano which somehow summarises everything that's been wrong with the world at least since we abandoned hunting and gathering, and does it with only a few words and a handful of pertinent location recordings. Hard Noise to Scumrise really is a masterpiece, very satisfying if occasionally disorientating listening from end to end.

Bag it hither.