Residents - Mark of the Mole (1981)

My first proper gig - large venue, no-one from school in the band - was the Residents' Mole Show at Birmingham Town Hall, so it's probably peculiar that it should have taken me nearly forty years to get this given how much I enjoyed the aforementioned Mole Show. Partially it was just how it worked out, Mark of the Mole hardly being the sort of record I could find at my local WHSmith, and when I stumbled across a copy at some better stocked place it was usually just after I'd spunked away all my pocket money on yet another live Throbbing Gristle album. Intermission somehow made it to our local record shop during the six months of the place managing to stay open, so I bought that, and it was great, and then the next thing I actually found was George and James, which wasn't very good at all and which pretty much killed my curiosity regarding new Residents material. I liked the old stuff, the weirdly discordant tunes plucked out on bits of wire stretched across the back of a chair, the music which didn't really fit anywhere, which sounded like it was recorded on another planet. It seemed as though they had lost something since they bought their Emulators, and the charm of endless wacky cover versions had begun to wear thin. Oh yes - it's Shakin' All Over sung by Herman Munster with the guitar riff on something which sounds like a cow playing the tuba - ha ha…

Better late than never, I guess. It took me a couple of plays to hear past my expectation of the formulaic weirdness of the Residents as wacky covers band, but I got there, and I realise Mole was probably the best Residents album since maybe Fingerprince. It sounds played rather than programmed, and played by Residents rather than wacky entertainers giggling inside their giant eyeballs. The music develops organically, without too much suggestion of anything happening just for the sake of being fucking weird. It's that same alien folk music which first caught my attention and it tells a story, and the tragedy of the Moles driven from their homes survives the surrealism of its telling. I liked both Eskimo and The Commercial Album, but I never really played either that much. For all of their qualities, I always felt they were laying it on just a little thicker than I liked, whatever it was; but Mark of the Mole is perfect.

Mark of the Mole was the first part of a trilogy which was never completed, and online sources seem to suggest that this was due to disillusionment with the expense of the Mole Show and how the undertaking didn't really turn out as the lads had hoped. I always understood that the Moles were actually the Residents struggling to get by in our society, but I didn't realise that part of this reflected on the apparently poor critical reception which greeted the previous two records; and I guess this was, if anything, what went wrong with the Residents. They wanted a hit single, or wider acclaim, or the stuff you're probably not going to get much of a sniff at when your album sounds like it was recorded on Mars. I guess maybe that's why there was a time during which they seemed to be turning into a surrealist comedy turn, something to match the sales of Weird Al Yankovic; and I guess that's why I've heard more recent stuff, and it's all right but I still feel the spark has gone. I still feel like they stopped exploring and became a tribute act recreating material in the style of their former selves, but maybe - and hopefully - I'm wrong. I guess I'll just have to track down The Tunes of Two Cities and see how it all panned out.

Shangri-Lies - Drain / Greed / Hunger (2019)

Shangri-Lies was a collaborative effort undertaken by Peter Hope with members of Chakk, Moloko and Sweet Exorcist, here with three tracks which first appeared as a 12" back in 2012, now remixed right up the wrong 'un by various New York Haunted luminaries and issued as a fell length album. The original tracks - included here, naturally - constitute killer material of a standard you would probably expect from such names who, lest we forget, had already left their respective marks indelibly stamped upon the face of techno and didn't actually need to do anything else ever again - bleeps, filters, shuffle, bass ping, that sound your PC makes just before it crashes - except pinned down to a beat…

Generally speaking I still don't really know how I feel about the remix, but whatever I feel is irrelevant in this case given the transformations effected by David Harrow and others, yielding what are essentially seven entirely new tracks. Listen close and you'll probably be able to work out where they came from, but it's not obvious without looking at the track list. I never quite know what to say about dance music because beyond whether it's good or bad, further discussion seems a little surplus to requirements; but this collection distinguishes itself by demonstrating just how far techno can be stretched, pulled, bent out of shape until it kind of resembles some Throbbing Gristle outtake, whilst - against all odds - still banging like techno rather than some tediously overproduced chill out room brainfart. It turns out to be pretty fucking far, let me tell you.

Available yonder.

Salford Electronics - Communique No. 2 (2017)

Salford Electronics is one of the Grey Wolves, whom I gather have now ceased trading as a collective concern. I have to admit that I'm only loosely familiar with what the lads have been up to during the past couple of decades. I'm assuming they didn't have a Bavarian oompah phase or spend a couple of years as a sixteen piece ska band, but my estimation of where this disc stands in relation to the last few Grey Wolves releases, sonically speaking, will probably be somewhat off target, so you may have to bear with me.

The Grey Wolves I remember were nothing if not confrontational, where Salford Electronics seems to be a less demonstrative concern. Somebody somewhere will already have described Communique No. 2 as dark ambient, which I'm not going to do because I'm trying to discourage the use of such silly terms, and because the music of Lustmord is always described as a dark ambient, and this is much better than Lustmord—pardon me, I meant Lustmørd. The plain black cover seems as initially inscrutable as the ten electroacoustic soundscapes on the disc, but as with patterns seen once you've gazed into the shadows for sufficient length of time, some sort of narrative emerges after a few plays; or rather a non-narrative because Communique No. 2 feels like what we're left with once all the words have been used up, nothing left to say, which it could be argued constitutes a statement in its own right. There are no songs, tunes, melodies, nor even rhythm - well, not exactly - just a pseudo-organic noise resembling that which endures when there's no-one left behind to operate the machinery. It's the sound of concrete, underground car parks, waste disposal machines going through the motions in a world denuded of humanity - what happens to the cities after we've gone, like an urban cousin to Nocturnal Emissions' invocations of the natural world. It ceases to be ambient once you turn it up to the sort of volume at which it deserves to be heard.

Very impressive.

Haystak - Portrait of a White Boy (2004)

Being 2019, I would hope we've all got over the thing with white rappers. I recall a few crackers of my unfortunate acquaintance getting a bit sniffy, or giggling and exclaiming yo whilst ironically twisting their fingers into funny shapes, apparently feeling somehow qualified to comment upon the legitimacy of an artist working in a genre with which they themselves were almost entirely unfamiliar, excepting the obligatory observation of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back probably being the greatest rap album of all time, in my humble opinion. I listened to it today just to be sure, and it really isn't, besides which, no-one who wasn't a massive arsehole ever used the expression in my humble opinion.
 

Back in 2002, certain sectors of the actual rap biz, were themselves getting distinctly sniffy about white people in rap, which came to a head when the Source magazine campaigned for the abolition of Eminem. Whilst there are all sorts of reasons why Eminem was never quite so amazing as everyone seemed to think, the Source was driving like a wanker and ended up shooting itself in the foot over the whole thing for no good reason; and even Haystak - an innocent bystander if ever there was - found himself called out because people who write rap magazines are fucking idiots. For what it's worth, he hit back on Red Light.

Bitch, I ain't no redneck, they hear my shit and condemn it,
Vibe damn near called me a racial supremacist,
Like I'm a skinhead, a mother fucking Aryan.
I'll tell you what I ain't, I ain't no fucking vegetarian.

Red Light is from Portrait of a White Boy, which probably isn't even his best album, but it's up there, and it's the one that got itself stuck inside my CD player this month. As with most of Haystak's back catalogue, it renders any objection one may have regarding white rappers redundant because he's the genuine article. Of course, he talks about being white, but not as a gimmick and certainly not from any weird reactionary angle, but because he endures life at the bottom of the economic totem pole, down where class and race amount to pretty much the same end of the shitty stick; and what distinguishes Haystak from so many of his contemporaries is that he isn't even trying to work that whole white trash angle. Rather he just gets the fuck on with it, talking about getting by, sharing what he's learned, and striving to make something good out of not very much.

Haystak never went in for lyrical backflips, but his flow comes easily, or sounds like it comes easily. He's witty, and funny without having to crack jokes, and his testimony hits hard with a crushing weight that characterises the true greats of rap; and because I don't seem to be able to write about this one without coming across like a teacher writing out an end of term report for a particularly promising pupil, let's just say that Haystak is what the blues sound like in the twenty-first century - still stuck on some southern porch, trying hard not to be broke as fuck, and the twang and slide of Nashville, Mississippi and other places can still be heard woven into the more recent crunch and boom of that sound you don't ever want to hear coming from the vehicle which just pulled up as you're walking along, minding your own business.

I wouldn't say Haystak is the white Tupac, but mainly because such comparisons are fucking stupid, and I'm not even sure Tupac was the black Tupac; but Haystak is one of the greats - top ten, possibly five, with not a poor album to his name, and Portrait of a White Boy transcends all possible objections which could ever be raised by anyone who ever held a humble opinion.

Električni Orgazam (1981)

Back in the early eighties, my school friend Eggy went on holiday with his family to what was then Yugoslavia. Passing through the airport on the way home, it occurred to him that he should bring back presents for his pals, Grez and myself, and thus accordingly he picked a couple of random music cassettes from the nearest stall. I had first dibs so I took this one, based on the cover looking sort of interesting, meaning Grez ended up with a tape of some bunch named Kamelioni - not very good, apparently, which I'd kind of guessed might be the case.

Amazingly, Električni Orgazam turned out to be a great pick, regardless of my having no fucking clue what any of it was about. I played the tape a lot. When I bought a CD burner, it was one of the first things I took the trouble to digitise, and now, having discovered the joy of hunting stuff down on the internet, I actually have the fucker on vinyl, kindly sold to me by a very helpful Croatian gentleman - nice big sleeve like a proper record as issued by Jugoton, the Yugoslavian state record label! This thing turning up in the mail felt like a message from space or discovering that Lord of the Rings really happened. I slapped it on the turntable, vaguely worrying this was going to be one of those exercises in nostalgia which doesn't quite pan out, faded photos of some distant holiday romance which has everyone scratching their heads, but no - this record still sounds incredible. It wasn't just my imagination.

To get into specifics, I chose Električni Orgazam over Kameleoni because the name sounded edgy and the cover reminded me of both Dadaism and Cabaret Voltaire's Voice of America album; and the first thing I was reminded of when I first played the tape was Cabaret Voltaire dabbling with sixties-inspired organ noodles on Red Mecca and others. Beyond this comparison, I suppose Električni Orgazam were maybe the angular Serbian Wire or Devo or something of the sort, but populist with a faint swirl of the fairground or cabaret about them - weird and spikey, but never quite bleak enough to have been remembered as cold wave. It seems they went a bit chicken in a basket after this first album, also losing Marina Vulić - their female bassist who, it turns out, was actually very, very easy on the eye - although the early warning signs can probably be discerned in both the obligatory Beatles cover and Fleke, the token white reggae number apparently translating as Stain. Then again, whilst the Yugoslavian state may well have obliged artists to a standardised quota of cod reggae and Beatle coverage, I don't really care because both tracks are wonderful. In fact, I prefer Fleke to quite a lot of proper reggae, so nyer.

Aside from Douglas P recording benefit albums for an end to this terrible genocidal war with proceeds seemingly going to those actually doing the genocide, my knowledge of the former Yugoslavia and its music is limited to Laibach, this album, and Mi Nismo Andjeli. Mi Nismo Andjeli is a film of which the title translates to We Are Not Angels and which was sent to me on DVD by some other Discogs bloke apparently because he had a copy laying around and he wanted to say thanks for buying stuff from me. It was made in 1992 and is definitely one of the weirder and more entertaining random presents I've ever received from a stranger. Furthermore, it seems to suggest a comedic sophistication we of the West have historically denied those Eastern block countries because we're too busy chuckling at Borat with his big moustache. In fact, Mi Nismo Andjeli suggests the former Yugoslavia developed strains of sarcasm we still don't understand even now, and which would make sense of both Laibach, and how Električni Orgazam had an unusually jolly quality to all those starkly spiky riffs.

Of all the best kept secrets over which I've ever evangelised,  Električni Orgazam is a genuine work of genius. I only wish they hadn't turned into the Serbian REO Speedwagon after this one.

Sleaford Mods - Eton Alive (2019)

That's better. I'm not sure what it was about English Tapas, but it never quite settled with me as the others did. It felt a little like the first post-chart success album, uncomfortable with its own status and a bit embarrassed at having been introduced by Simon Bates on Top of the Pops, or whatever it is you lot have over in Englishland these days. It felt as though all those appearances on Celebrity Cash in the Attic alongside Stormzy and some former Kaiser Chief were somewhat diluting the font of inspiration from which the other stuff had once gushed forth as from unto a blocked toilet, and the duet with Paul Weller couldn't be too far away.

Well, that's all a massive exaggeration, and English Tapas is still a decent record, but it seemed subdued nevertheless, and there was the crooning, presumably born of a reluctance to make the same record over and over - worth a try, but I wasn't sure it worked.

Eton Alive is definitively back on track, and possibly even the best thing since Austerity Dogs. It's hard to tell what they've done which didn't get done last time around, but the sense of shock is back, or possibly renewed in the combination of sardonic ranting and loops suggesting an East Midlands revision of Suicide; and the venom is fresh. Most impressive of all is that Eton Alive isn't some reversion to established factory settings, but continues the cautiously progressive trajectory of the last one, and the best track is probably the crooner, When You Come Up to Me. The difference could be something as stupid and simple as the fact of my having bought this one on vinyl, and that my stereo sounds better than the discman on which I've listened to the others; in which case, ignore all of the above but buy it anyway.

Tangerine Dream - Electronic Meditation (1970)

I came to Tangerine Dream through Phaedra, borrowed from Mark Steedman at college. I think I lent him Second Annual Report in return because we were comparing our fave bands and I hadn't heard anything by his lot, whilst he similarly knew Gristle only by reputation. Phaedra impressed the hell out of me, and I could see there was some common ground shared by the two groups; although at the same time, I recall Phaedra as kind of smooth and dreamy, and while it impressed the hell out of me, it didn't impress me enough to persuade me to pay full price for a record. I picked up Phaedra, Rubycon and Stratosfear second hand, but knackered copies which skipped all over the place and I accordingly played only the once.

Anyway, consequently I wasn't really prepared for this, their first album, which is a very different affair to the airbrushed material for which they became better known. The title suggests something dreamy and relaxing but is hugely misleading. It sits somewhere between early Pink Floyd and the work of Schoenberg, and is electronic mostly in the sense of its amplification and recording. Some of side two might be described as meditative, although I'd say immersive would probably be a better word, but there's definitely an acid trip going off the rails element to this music. Aside from the guitar solos, there's a lot of atonality and a tendency for repetition rather than rhythm, suggestive of the possibility that this record really might be more ancestral to Second Annual Report than anyone realised; and while it's not really Tangerine Dream's doing, I find it difficult to listen to Electronic Meditation without imagining scenes from rustic horror movies of the early seventies, so it's potent and powerful stuff in other words.