The Shamen - In Gorbachev We Trust (1989)

A faintly punky upbringing left me generally suspicious of psychedelia, at least as I understood it at the time. Fags and lager were my drug of choice, I couldn't stand even the smell of dope, and psychedelia seemed like sappy nostalgia for something which rarely sounded so amazing as had been promised. Wobbly drawings of gnomes engaged in lazily surrealist situations, smoking joints or whatever, were habitually greeted by a few of my peers with the usual chorus of wow, then pronounced amaaaaaaazing spelled with seven As in the middle; and if The Prisoner had been an entertaining, inventive TV show, it hardly seemed like anything containing the meaning of life. Psychedelia struck me as a safe, cultish understanding, the redundancy of which seemed confirmed by some book I checked out of the library, possibly something to do with Encyclopedia Psychedelica, and which listed the Psychedelic Furs as contemporary exponents of the form, presumably because of the fucking name. Of course, I had a few records which might be deemed psychedelic to greater or lesser degrees, but I never really thought of them as such because they usually did something else besides jangling or saying things like oh wow, I just tried to Hoover the carpet but I ended up carpeting the Hoover! The Shamen evaded my otherwise rigorous screening process when I heard Christopher Mayhew Says on John Peel, whenever that was, and found myself seduced by the startling combination of spaced out backwards mind-felch with hard, pounding electro not a million miles from what you might have heard on one of those Street Sounds compilations.

Sadly, as we all saw, they somehow became the Adam & the Ants of the nineties, someone of whom it would forever be said that you had liked their early stuff; but then even Ant's cheesiest guest spots on the Basil Brush show usually had something going for them, whereas the ravey Shamen were just plain fucking crap, at least to my ears - the sound of people who should have stuck to their Pink Floyd impersonations failing to understand acid house - which wasn't actually that fucking hard to understand; one shit hit single after another, the ingenious wordplay of Ebeneezer Goode, then LSI which stood for love, sex, intelligence and I felt insulted the latter through lacking either the subtlety or sincerity of Mel & Kim's similarly acronymous FLM, which was at least, as one of the initials promised, fun by some definition. Anyway…

Before it all went tits up, we had this record, tripping its knackers off while jamming acid house and psychedelic guitars together on the same tracks, and working because it never sounded like an impersonation, just a peculiar juxtaposition of unrelated elements. Gorbachev sounds as though it was informed by the spirit of seeing what would happen, with none of the later populist box-ticking. Half of it is way too hard and crunchy to work in a rave setting, and there's even a few of those tracks which jangle and say wow when you show them a picture of a rainbow pixie with a bong, but fed through weirdy filters sufficient to distance them from anyone still wearing velvet loon pants. Of course, sampling evangelical preachers praising God so as to highlight what evil fuckers those guys can be was so dated by this point that even Phil Collins had done it, but the Shamen got around the in-your-face obviousness of the affectation by really shoving it in-your-face with bells on to the point of it seeming so joyful as to render its raw cynicism positively poisonous. They were trolling, and they were trolling hard - not least with the album title - because the evil bastards in their sights needed to be trolled.

It was all downhill from here, albeit not in the commercial sense, but even silly Ebeneezer can be forgiven then dutifully ignored in light of this record. It did everything it needed to do at the time and was endlessly inventive, from the Star Trek samples on Synergy to an entire song about a lady's fanny euphemised as Rasberry Infundibulum. Had other psychedelic revivalists been so riotously progressive as this, I would have had much less cause for grumbling.

Da GobliNN - God Reactor (2020)

Here's another you've never heard of, although to be fair, me neither, so we're both in more or less the same boat even if I'm sat slightly nearer to where the sandwiches are stowed away by virtue of my having been spinning this banger for a good couple of weeks now; or specifically I've been spinning a CDR burned from the download. I would have had it pressed onto a series of wax cylinders, obviously, but I ran out of the blanks.

As a rule I tend to steer clear of arbitrary typographic eccentricity, but God Reactor caught me on a good day and it was on the New York Haunted label, so that seemed like a recommendation. It's your basic dirty old school acid, but as with a lot of stuff on this label, it never quite does what you might expect it to do and ends up going all sorts of unfamiliar places, sonically speaking, nevertheless riding on the familiar squelch and crunch-clap of the form, and with the music swelling in waves, coming and going, up, down, back up again, then right up - both mesmerising and euphoric without looking like a wanker.

In theory we have four tracks, then six remixes of God Reactor, but so remixed as to be entirely different tracks. At least I've been listening to this for a couple of weeks and I still haven't spotted the connection; so ten tracks, for the sake of argument: some familiar acid without, as I say, quite doing anything you might expect, plenty of harmonics and loops and snippets of filtered noise, although not quite anything the milkman could ever whistle; and then the L/F/D/M remix which makes me think of bass music, as in the Miami thing; the May McLaren remix which - for fuck's sake - is the most eighties thing you've ever heard and could almost be Trevor Horn's version of Front 242, yet somehow very much belongs to the God Reactor whole despite itself; and I'm not going to describe every last track, but there's a lot of stuff going on here, and for something to which repetition is so obviously fundamental, no-one seems to be reheating any existing recipes.

God Reactor is why you really, really need to open yourself up to new shit every once in a while. I know that now.

Wrangler - A Situation (2020)

It's unfortunately difficult to discuss Wrangler without at least thinking about Cabaret Voltaire, which seems potentially insulting to the two of them who aren't Stephen Mallinder; although for what it's worth, Mallinder's vocals and what he does with them are pretty distinctive, pretty difficult to mistake for those of anyone else, which is impressive given that his lyrics are more like serving suggestions, loaded images delivered in the same couple of bluesy notes which have seen him so well through these past four or five decades. He doesn't do a whole lot in terms of vocal acrobatics, but he's never needed to.

Musically, Wrangler feel like an outgrowth of Cabaret Voltaire, specifically from the shock of the clean sound where sequencers and electric pings replaced fuzzed guitar and flanged clarinet; and, of course, it's also a factor that what we have here are extended grooves rather than songs in the traditional sense.

Nevertheless, three albums in and Wrangler is beginning to feel very much its own entity regardless of historical detail. I'm told they use only analogue equipment, or at least analogue synths. I don't know whether this is true, or to what extent, and there are at least a couple of vocal burps which sounded somewhat sampled to me, but it feels organic, a jazzy groove which just happens to come out in bleeps, bloops and acid squelch. In fact, A Situation is funky in terms which Cabaret Voltaire never quite managed, despite the house phase, like an Asimov rewrite of the Gap Band and the like. The odd thing, at least at first, is how this one seems so much less immediate than the previous two, which is down, I suppose, to its ten tracks taking the form of tight rhythmic jams more than anything too reliant on hooks or a chorus; but three or four plays and it's tugging at your sleeve, pulling you out onto the dance floor, and no-one is going home just yet. I know it's not all Mallinder, but nevertheless it's hard not to marvel at the man and his career, that he should be involved in something of such magnificence some forty years since Voice of America and Mix-Up. I'm beginning to think we should consider an annual National Stephen Mallinder Day.

The Cravats - Hoorahland (2020)

I didn't really expect another one to come along quite so soon after 2017's Dustbin of Sound, but it's massively exciting that it has and in doing so has proven that this version of the Cravats is neither a happy accident nor its own tribute band. As with Dustbin, there are a couple of numbers you may recall from Grimetime, but numbers which, let's face it, more than deserved a second crack at the walnut whip. Otherwise, Hoorahland segues effortlessly into the extended timeline of the jazz-punk colossals we all remember from the good old days, back when everything was better than it is now, excepting the Cravats who have somehow retained equivalent value, hinting at the possibility of a really shit band trapped in Oscar Wilde's attic, sort of like Racey covering Frank Zappa, or possibly the other way round.

Here we have something which manages to amount to more of the same whilst being something new, a slight shift of focus, and a further mapping of some fairly peculiar territory. Goody Goody Gum Drops firmly replants the Dadaist flag in 2020 in muscular fashion, like Vivian Stanshall as one of those telly wrestlers who growls at the camera while climbing into the ring dressed as a dinosaur; and Now the Magic Has Gone pairs the Shend with Jello Biafra to teach us what Disney looks like when it really goes wrong - talking medication and buckles here rather than Tim Burton pulling a spooky face and holding up a drawing of a spider.

Having now thought about it, I realise that both the Cravats and Very Things felt as though formed from the push and pull of the Shend's disarmingly well-mannered wrestling holds with Robin Dalloway's longing for Motown; but I realise the idea is bollocks, and Hoorahland - entirely post-Dalloway - is actually fully soulful, and at least as much so as Motortown and the rest - think early Clock DVA but with a lot more oomph, as music theoreticians call it: white souls, black suits - not sure about the hats, possibly chartreuse. I'd say it's Svor Naan's sax which makes the difference given that it may actually be unique within general rock history, but I don't think it's any one element so much as how all of these absurdly disparate parts blend into such a perfectly formed whole. If I were to call it a comeback, which I'd rather not, I don't think any other band has ever come back in such convincing fashion as this, and I literally can't wait to see where they go next.

Also, if you look closely at the cover you will notice that someone has, at some point, caught our man right in the face with a chocolate milkshake, which could be taken as a metaphor for pretty much everything at the moment.

Nigel Ayers - Painted by Spirits (2019)

Nigel, as you will most likely know, has been recording as Nocturnal Emissions for several decades now. I'm not sure it's technically possible for a member of a one-man band to release a solo album, but here it is anyway. Of course, this is hardly the first work he's issued under the name to which his council tax bill is addressed; and for what it may be worth, I seem to recall a period during which Mr. Ayers expressed a certain weariness at having saddled himself with the name Nocturnal Emissions and the presumably industrial associations which tend to result from potential listeners failing to have read the memo; and I'm not sure whether this has any bearing on anything, or whether Painted by Spirits should be viewed as distinct from the Nocturnal Emissions back catalogue. My guess would be that a name such as is Nocturnal Emissions might be a bit limiting when attempting to extend one's reach beyond the usual audience.

Nevertheless, here's more of the quality work you've probably come to expect - distinctively identifiable as Nigel Ayers without simply pressing the same buttons out of habit. It's sort of ambient, but not quite, exhibiting that quality common to his more atmospheric works where the washes of sound never truly fade into the background, instead holding one's attention. Here the sounds seem to be derived from mostly conventional instruments and have kept most of their tonal qualities intact whilst being otherwise repurposed, so Painted by Spirits has more of a classical feel than previous releases and could probably be reproduced by a string quartet, albeit a patient string quartet. It's been a while since I listened to Henryk Górecki's third symphony, and too long to say whether there's any actual resemblance, but it at least reminds me of listening to Henryk Górecki's third symphony if that helps. As ever, and as is suggested by the title, Ayers channels rather than plays or composes in the traditional sense, so all of these assorted strings and blowy things have the rhythm of the natural world, calls heard in a forest, the metronomic creak of wood as it dries or stones cooling as the storm breaks. Considering how so much of his work tends to be of a certain type, at least since The World is My Womb, it's impressive how Mr. Ayers never quite repeats himself.

Available here.

Severed Heads - Clean (1981)

I'd heard of the Severed Heads, but they were mostly just an amusing name until I chanced upon a copy of Rotund for Success for mere quids at Greenwich Market. I took it home, played it, and by the end of the week had tracked down every last Severed Heads record I was able to find, then spent the next year playing them all to death. I'm not sure there was ever another band for which I fell quite so hard, so suddenly, and those records don't seem to have lost any of their power. Listening to Come Visit the Big Bigot now, thirty years later, still gives me a bit of a funny turn. Yet weirdly, I was somehow unaware of their having released anything much before Since the Accident and had always assumed Blubberknife to be the only thing of note. In fact, up until a couple of weeks ago I hadn't realised that Since the Accident wasn't even their first album; and it turns out that neither was Clean, it being the second. Thank fuck for reissues.

I had reservations, believing the earlier Heads to be mostly the stuff with the tape loops, as heard on Clifford Darling, Please Don't Live in the Past and the aforementioned Blubberknife; and the looped material is certainly interesting, even powerful, but for me, it was always the tunes. Clean has therefore been a bit of a revelation given that I expected noise, or at least something of a racket. Actually it is something of a racket, but a racket with drum machines, rhythm, mood, and those twinkly sequenced melodies which no-one ever did quite like Tom Ellard. Another revelation, one which came to me just this morning, has been that everything I ever liked about the music of the Severed Heads is shared by, of all things, John Barry's Persuaders theme; so if you somehow never heard them, even though we're now two decades into the next century along, the Severed Heads are the Persuaders theme in the mind of an eighties computer, or possibly a watercolour impression of the same, images blurring as the rain begins to fall and a lovely lady artist in a floppy hat enjoys her Cadbury's Flake which, I rather think you'll find, tastes like no chocolate ever tasted before.

That last sentence exists because it's otherwise difficult to describe the full emotional impact of Tom Ellard's greatest work - and actually most of it is great.

Clean - which is now expanded to a double with a shitload of bonus material, because that's how it tends to work these days - is a formative, rudimentary, slightly raw sounding version of that greatness dating from before our man built up the confidence to vocalise, and before these things began to sound like songs or lullabies or anthems. At this point, Severed Heads were approximately the antipodean Cabaret Voltaire, spreading their invocations of the sublime across extended grooves formed from elements which hadn't always started life as music. It's a little like Since the Accident on a reduced budget, except without my implication of it necessarily lacking anything which it needed to work. It wasn't the full ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which was to come, but we were very much heading in that direction.

Revbjelde - Hooha Hubbub (2020)

I have no idea how you pronounce it, but this is apparently their second album and the one for which Peter Hope vocalises, which is what initially caught my attention. It's sort of jazzy-bluesy with a fantastically tense live sound and is as such well suited to Hope's vocals, and probably would have been called acid jazz had it appeared three decades back, or downtempo around the turn of the century, but such labels are only ever useful up to a point, and you could probably call it krautrock if you really felt the need to do so. You will have heard this instrumentation doing this sort of thing before, or something related, but it still works, and in fact sounds more powerful and moody than ever on Hooha Hubbub - punchy soundtracks to films which were never made - including at least one spy thriller - a momentarily incongruous glam stomp here, grinding synth there, an apparent homage to Suicide concluding the bonus disc, even a flute wistfully parping away on a couple of tracks as it becomes clear this represents exploration rather than mere invocation. For something which walks such a seemingly familiar walk, it's surprising how difficult it can be to really find a comparison. What music I own which describes itself as downtempo frankly sounds like sixties game show theme tunes when stood next to this much purer strain of whatever Revbjelde have been channelling. Hell - this sounds like actual voodoo compared to most other things right now.