Zeke Manyika - Mastercrime (1989)

I assume my finger must have been well and truly off the musical pulse by the end of the eighties, which - admittedly - I recall as being mostly about who was drawing the X-Men comics at the time. I wasn't actually aware of this ever having existed until about a year ago, and it's only during the last hour that I've discovered it wasn't even his first. Obviously I remember Zeke from Orange Juice, The The, and some sort of vague association with Foetus, and Mastercrime reveals him to be very much a musical force in his own right, or at least it did thirty years ago back when I was busily agonising over whether the refugee X-Men would ever return to their School for Gifted Youngsters in Westchester County.

First impression, which I suppose I may as well go with because why not, is that you can hear how he was such a good fit for The The, and particularly Soul Mining, although I may actually be hearing Manyika's aural footprint on Johnson's record, for what it's worth. The gospel element is more pronounced with an added afropop sensibility which reminds me of Young Fathers, most likely due to my extensive ignorance of the form, and it inhabits the same cinematic Savannah of the soul as The The - if you'll pardon the sheer ballsache of such a cliched description, which in all fairness you probably shouldn't. I knew what I was doing.

I have a vague idea that Some Bizarre had taken a lower profile by this point - unless it really was the case that I missed everything - but it seems a great shame that Mastercrime should seemingly represent some kind of half forgotten afterthought given that it's at least as good as any of the label's other top tier releases.

I probably need to track down a copy of that first album now.

Iron Maiden - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988)

First a little context - where many English children growing up in the seventies attended C of E schools, mine was apparently NW of BHM which, as all former Sounds readers will recall, stood for New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Unfortunately for myself and maybe six other kids, I wasn't massively keen on the form, meaning I was essentially gay 'n' stuff, preferring the rampantly homosexual music of Joy Division, the Ruts, Devo, and a load of other funny haircut bands, as the genre was known at our school. I didn't even like Queen or Judas Priest, for Ozzy's sake! What a massive bender I was!

My unreservedly heterosexual pal Crispin attempted conversion therapy by forcing me to borrow the first two Iron Maiden albums, and to my surprise I found that I actually sort of liked them. It was like the heavy metal I heard blasting from every bedroom window in town, from every garage and milking shed, and yet it had a punky edge which appealed to me; and thus were my ears jimmied at least a little way open. The Number of the Beast followed and I was grudgingly forced to admit that it too was not without merit, even with the addition of a more traditionally hairy rock vocalist who did that wobbly scream thing with his voice and sounded as though he might be wearing silver trousers.

Years passed and I lost touch with anyone who might expect me to borrow further Iron Maiden albums, and so life became much easier in terms of my musical palate. Then one day, probably late nineties, I happened to pass a junk shop when I noticed a box of records outside perched on a table - actually just seven records, the first seven Iron Maiden albums - excluding the live one - for a quid each and in what looked like good condition. The tidiness of the transaction was hard to resist, and even if the four I'd never heard turned out to be rubbish I'd still be able to look at the covers and follow the story of Eddie as he has a lobotomy, reincarnates as an ancient Egyptian God, becomes a futuristic cyborg, and so on and so forth.

The first three sounded even better than I remembered, Piece of Mind, Powerslave and Somewhere in Time all sounded good, and this one sounded fucking amazing beyond all expectation and accordingly glued itself to my turntable for the duration of the next few months.

I appreciate that we're all way too sophisticated for this sort of thing, and that the otherwise mighty Rollins regards Maiden as the most ridiculous band to ever stick their tongues out on a stage; and I know there's a thin line between Maiden and Spinal Tap, but fuck it.

This one was inspired by an Orson Scott Card novel, and accordingly invokes all of usual horror tropes picked up from Dennis Wheatley and Tomb of Dracula comic books, all delivered as Dickinson pulls an operatically scary face to the soundtrack of a million widdly-widdly guitar solos; but even the notion that so melodramatic and populist a take on the occult might be ridiculous is itself ridiculous, unless you somehow think David Tibet has a direct line to the real stuff; and if that's so, let me know when he's recorded anything half as powerful as Moonchild or even Can I Play with Madness.

I still don't understand how Iron Maiden succeed with the same formula as all those other leather studded wankers who made my school years so fucking depressing, apart from that they get it right and don't sound like a bunch of disgruntled farmhands showing off their 50cc motorbikes to each other in the town square on a windy Tuesday evening. They gurn and wail and scream and go right over the top somehow without trying too hard, and they only ever sound like Iron Maiden even on an album such as this with all of its convoluted song structures and funny time signatures; and whilst there are virtuoso moments, nothing ever distracts from the whole; so all of the pieces fit together in an almost symphonic sense. I'm not even sure Seventh Son of a Seventh Son is metal, or that it matters given that most metal is shite.

All I know is that this is an amazing record.

New Order - The Peel Sessions (1986)

I bought this recently, having somehow spent the last thirty or so years failing to notice that I didn't actually own a copy - which was fucking weird when I realised. This was New Order's Peel session from June 1982, something which loomed quite large in my own personal mythology. Myself and my little group of pals - or the other two if you need an actual head count - had been fairly keen on Joy Division and took to scrutinising New Order's subsequent development with obsessive intensity. We bought Ceremony on the day of release, and Movement too. I bought two copies of the Ceremony 12" even though I'm fairly certain they're exactly the same record but for variant covers. We stayed up late to tape Peel, or Graham did, and each time I hear the music on this record I can still see the gold and black of the BASF blank cassette on which Graham recorded it from the radio. I think it was BASF.

These four tracks are therefore embedded in my consciousness like nothing New Order have recorded since. Movement had been an astonishing record, and this was apparently where they were headed. The reggae number, Turn the Heater On somehow made perfect sense, and the rest built on Movement and even Closer with greater emphasis on the electronics - still sombre, but somehow lighter as though acknowledging the necessity of life carrying on. The green shoots were beginning to show, and my little gang could hardly contain our anticipation of what was to come.

Then Power, Corruption and Lies emerged and I never got around to buying a copy for reasons I no longer recall. More recently I noticed that actually I had bought a copy at some point, and yet was unable to remember doing so. I listened, the disc came to the end of side two, leaving me unable to recall anything of what I'd just heard beyond that it had been dull. I still don't know what happened to this bunch, how the band which had recorded Movement turned into something with which to soundtrack a slightly zappy automotive commercial, and not least because both 5-8-6 and We All Stand were re-recorded for the offending second album. They sound incredible here on the Peel session, and so I guess this was the last truly good thing, depending upon how you feel about Blue Monday.

Such a waste.

Johnson Engineering Co. - Unleash (1989)

I bought this for a quid because I'd heard of them, and I liked the idea of a band named so as to suggest they had been considered a reliable manufacturer of widgets and trunions since 1946 - drum machines and sequencers were involved so Johnson Engineering Co. seemed like a pleasantly sober change from the usual melodramatic cyberpunk bollocks. I listened to the album, and then it vanished in the general direction of Record and Tape Exchange during some briefly draconian purge of my vinyl collection. It wasn't a bad record. I just hadn't been able to imagine listening to it again.

Inevitably I picked up another copy at some point, because I still really liked the idea of a band called Johnson Engineering Co. and couldn't remember what it had sounded like. It turns out it had sounded a little like Portion Control impersonating Front Line Assembly - ostentatiously digital late eighties production but with a higher than average BPM and lots of shouting, a shitload of cowbell, busy sequencers but with tunes and no suggestion of having ever wanted to be a heavy metal act back when it was growing up. To be fair, Unleash sounds like a lot of other records from the time and as such may be viewed as the EBM equivalent of Status Quo - familiar moods and riffs efficiently executed, and probably not much you won't have heard before; and yet, despite whatever elements may be working against it, Unleash is somehow a fucking great album just as Accident Prone and Down Down were cracking singles.

Back in the day, I recall some suggestion of Johnson Engineering Co. being a kind of Portion Control tribute act, sounding the same, occupying the flat which members of Portion Control once shared, and even with similar haircuts. More recent research has revealed that one of them was actually in Portion Control for a while, so I've no idea where that leaves the mythology, or whether the aforementioned flat actually was above a shop called Johnson Engineering. Well, never mind, because this unassuming, mostly overlooked and now probably forgotten artifact has endured surprisingly well given just how much cowbell is featured; and if it's typical of a certain genre, it's nevertheless lasted significantly better than many who did this sort of thing to greater acclaim. Actually, it pisses over the majority of the miserable fuckers, if truth be known.

Beautiful Pea Green Boat - Get Religion (1988)

If Third Mind Records have endured to any extent in the collective musical memory, I've an unfortunate feeling it's probably as - ugh - old school industrial pioneers, as young people who know more than the rest of us are wont to put it, thanks to the undeniably seminal Rising from the Red Sand and status as a footnote in the saga of Front Line Assembly - apparently. Having actually been there at the time - and even painted a couple of the record covers for that matter - I can confidently state that this is complete bollocks, and nothing underscores the back catalogue's resistance to silly labels quite like Beautiful Pea Green Boat.

At the time, Third Mind seemed cut from approximately similar cloth to Some Bizarre (who weren't fucking industrial either), not least because they seemed to have booked all the Wild Planet people which Some Bizarre should have bagged - Nurse With Wound, Konstruktivists, Attrition and so on; but right from the off it was obvious that Gary Levermore simply intended to release great music regardless of how industrial or otherwise it might be deemed, and there was a point at which his main focus very much seemed to be Beautiful Pea Green Boat. He sent me a stack of records for services rendered or something, amongst which was an early Front Line Assembly release that I liked, but thought it sounded like a Cabaret Voltaire knock off - mostly grunting and sequencers. Get Religion, on the other hand, was clearly the prize of the litter. With hindsight it probably sounds very eighties, but at the time it seemed like the newest thing we'd ever heard. I'd already encountered sampled orchestral stabs and the synth pulse of New York high energy disco but never quite like this, and never with the same depth of feeling as the most heart wrenching sixties soul. The key to their power seemed to be in the contrast of Ian Williams' state of the art technical overload - at least as of 1988 - with Heather Wright's sweet, almost folksy voice. I'd say imagine a combination of the Pet Shop Boys and the Cocteau Twins, but as comparisons it captures nothing of the tumult or drama of their music which, in spirit, is almost Byronic.

Third Mind was a pretty great label while it lasted with more than its fair share of classics, of which Get Religion was possibly the finest. They really should have been fucking massive.

Jihad Jerry & the Evil Doers - Mine is Not a Holy War (2006)

Apparently an entire year crept past before I realised there was a vinyl reissue of the 2006 album, which in any case I hadn't actually got around to buying because I hadn't looked close enough to realise that it was more or less a lost Devo record.

Well, I got on board as soon as I could, I guess.

I assume the lads had come to regard Devo as pretty much over by 2006, hence the slight shift in aesthetic emphasis, although not so much of a shift as to have retained the album title for the reissue. Mine is Not a Holy War - as it's no longer known - could be viewed as the Devo record bridging the gap between 1990's Smooth Noodle Maps and Something For Everybody of 2010 on the grounds of featuring all other members of Devo and reviving a couple of songs from the early years. It's probably not as good as Something For Everybody - which was frankly astonishing - but it's better than Smooth Noodle Maps, and Smooth Noodle Maps was nevertheless a decent album bespoiled by generic eighties production which made it sound like Bon Jovi. Here we get more expensive sounding retreads of I Been Refused, Find Out, and I Need a Chick alongside material with which I'm entirely unfamiliar. Find Out is an improvement, I Need a Chick probably should have been left alone, and I'm still not sure what to make of I Been Refused. It's a decent rendering but the original demo version may be my all-time Devo favourite, so I'm still trying to work out what I think about the fresh coat of paint. The newer material is, for what it may be worth, dynamite.

It's a pretty great album despite my piddling fannish reservations, giving emphasis to Devo's bluesier roots and keeping absolutely true to the rubber pants wearing mutant spirit of de-evolution. Now that Devo really do seem to have become past tense - barring attempts to flog expensive books of pictures to the rest of us - I could probably stand to hear a whole lot more from Jerry.

Quougnpt - I Worship Inertia (2021)

One section of Papal Syrup, or at least one section of what I think is the first track - although I could be wrong - features some disc jockey failing to pronounce the name of the artist, or band, but probably artist. I can't pronounce it either, although it looks like kwoffn't to me, assuming that the p is silent and because the n looks like it should be h. I haven't been entirely sure what to make of previous Quougnpt releases, despite myself having now been sampled on at least two of them, but as I primed my Discman in readiness for the morning constitutional, it was either this or godspunk volume twenty-three; and because godspunk volume twenty-three appears to feature UNIT bravely taking a stand against the tyranny of labour unions - because you know those all-powerful labour unions have the entire western hemisphere by the bollocks right now, I chose this; and rather than making no fucking sense whatsoever, I've now played it four times today. Actually, it still makes no fucking sense whatsoever but I've been listening to the thing regardless.

I've thankfully managed to forget what sort of massively wanky name we used to have for this kind of thing - we here meaning everyone except me - not plunderphonics, but something in that direction. Anyway, I Worship Inertia is, I suppose, sound collage but with significant emphasis on spoken word, and particularly on juxtaposition of the spoken word to form a narrative which feels as though it should make sense but doesn't. It's the sort of thing which sounds quite easy if you have some sort of audio editing software on your PC, but is actually quite difficult to do well, or to do this well; and although the theme might arguably constitute gibbering random insanity, it feels as though the album is having a particularly weird dream and is mumbling to itself in its sleep. There's a sort of logic there. I'm sure you're waiting for me to mention Nurse With Wound, so here it is, and it doesn't really resemble Nurse With Wound so much as the Radio 4 afternoon play impersonating an album by the same; but different, possibly.

For something so heavily reliant upon stolen lines of dialogue, I'm impressed that I recognise only myself and Chris Morris, meaning I'm probably not quite so steeped in junk culture as I thought. Greatest moment so far, aside from there being a track called Wombat Arse, is probably:

I've made you a drawing of a giraffe fucking an elephant. Notice how his mustache looks just like mine.

If that doesn't convince, then you probably should have stopped reading three paragraphs ago.

Secure yrself a copy yonder