Henry Rollins - Hot Animal Machine (1987)

Aside from the TV Party single and a few other things half heard whilst hanging around on YouTube, I'm not that familiar with Black Flag other than as the band with which Henry Rollins was involved before he ceased to be involved with them, so there's a strong possibility I'm coming at this like the man who reviews a Ringo Starr album without having heard any Beatles records; but fuck it...

I guess after the break up of Black Flag, Rollins found himself having to carve out new channels by which to vent his fevered work ethic, and so Hot Animal Machine should probably be regarded as the transitional effort of an artist firing off in all directions and seeing what happens. The rockier numbers, or at least those paying more obvious dues to Chuck Berry, sound roughly as you might expect coming from a former member of Black Flag - muscular, hard, funky rock although with more of a garage sound than the metal workouts that would later characterise the Rollins Band formed with Chris Haskett, who also handles the guitar here by the way. The other tracks veer off into jazzier territory, soundtracks to monologues of the kind with which Henry kicked off his spoken word career, and are actually fairly similar to the sort of material that ended up on Short Walk on a Long Pier.

It's all powerful, but somehow the range of styles is almost too broad, resulting in something resembling a compilation album. Black and White or Followed Around sound pretty much like the Rollins Band, whilst other tracks have more of a Stooges feel, and the more conversational numbers roughly suggest someone or other was listening to those early Swans albums a lot. The effect is further emphasised by the inclusion on the CD of the Drive-By Shooting EP as recorded under the name Henrietta Collins & the Wifebeating Childhaters - harrowing Gira-esque sound poems, a cover of Wire's Ex-Lion Tamer, and a title track which could easily have been the theme song from a Cliff Richard film but for the subject matter:

We're gonna get in our car,
We're gonna go go go,
We're gonna drive to a neighbourhood,
and kill someone we don't know.

The variety is disconcerting, a group of songs - or at least tracks - which don't quite fit together, like finding a straight cover of Little Red Corvette on Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report. This isn't to say there's anything wrong with any of the tracks individually - indeed there's not a weak number here - only that one listens to some of them in quite different ways to others, and it makes for a strangely uneven album compared to later efforts bearing Rollins' name.

Still, I'm not complaining. The rockier numbers are as intense as anything he's ever recorded, the gut-busting black humour is in full effect, and the front cover is drawn by Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, so what's not to like?

Aphex Twin - ...I Care Because You Do (1995)

So here I am catching up once again, having a listen to things which somehow passed me by at the time. Obviously I was aware of the Aphex Twin throughout the 1990s. He regularly appeared on the cover of everything on account of having single-handedly invented an entirely new kind of music. I was a Melody Maker reader for most of that decade, mainly because David Stubbs' Mr. Agreeable column was a work of genuine inspiration, something not to be missed regardless of whatever crap was then clogging up the other pages, The Liberties, The Shite Stripes or whoever. My frustration with the non-Stubbs derived content of said weekly would occasionally boil over into testy and probably grammatically ham-fisted missives thrust in the general direction of the letters page, one of which was actually printed. Why you no write about experimental band, I demanded to know, reeling off a list of names of artists who had been around for ages, who sold records, had plenty of fans, played well-attended gigs and yet remained ignored within the pages of the mainstream music press. We do indeed cover the work of interesting and innovative musical pioneers, came the reply, but the bold leaps of which you speak are occurring on the dance floor and within the DJ booth rather than with the sort of miserable industrial fuckers you seem to like.

I always assumed they meant Aphex Twin and his ilk, but I'd never heard any of his music. My friend Carl, once thumbing through my copy of Melody Maker, found a photograph of a grinning Richard James pulling a scary face, underlit and glowering at the reader from beneath portentously furrowed brow. 'That tells me all I need to know about his music,' Carl announced, and although he may not have been right about everything, in this instance I suspected he was close. My friend Andrew Cox was similarly underwhelmed by the Aphex Twin. Andrew was often described as a recluse, had grown up in Cornwall, and had been making electronic music with his own home-built synthesisers since the end of the 1970s, and was perhaps justifiably resentful that no music paper had ever stuck him on the cover as creator of the most wildly innovative music ever conceived.

Now, many years later and relatively impressed by the Come To Daddy video - even if it is just an old Hellblazer comic with a load of drum and bass sprinkled on top - I take the plunge and buy this; and  realise that I was right all along.

There are twelve tracks here, and nothing terrible, but - fuck - it's hardly a new kind of music. The names that sprang immediately to mind include Esplendor Geometrico, Nagamatzu, Pseudo Code, Nocturnal Emissions, Human Flesh, Kopf/Kurz, early Chris & Cosey, and Konstruktivists Black December album. In other words there's very little here which hadn't already been done, and been done better by about 1982 when the German Datenverarbeitung label put out their Sinn & Form compilation. I realise that nothing exists in a vacuum or without precedent, but most of ...I Care Because You Do could have been knocked up on a decent four track with a monophonic synth and an Alesis Quadraverb, and there's at least one number here which would have been someone tapping out a plinky plonky nursery rhyme on a Casio VL Tone had it not been drowned in a ton of reverb. I suppose this stuff may have sounded improbably futuristic in 1995 if this was the first electronically sourced album to find its way into your collection of Oasis and Morrissey records, just as fifth century yokels will believe you're a wizard if you flash your digital watch, but fuck...

This is the guy who changed the musical history of everything ever, whom they wheeled out to meet Stockhausen like it was some sort of clash of the titans rather than Michael McIntyre having a beer with Lenny Bruce? I prefer James' own assessment:

I'm just some irritating, lying, ginger kid from Cornwall who should have been locked up in some youth detention centre. I just managed to escape and blag it into music.

Well, hyperbole aside, ...I Care Because You Do is a thoroughly listenable album providing you keep in mind that it really shouldn't have been that big a deal even in 1995. It does what it does very well, which is fair enough, I suppose.

The Professionals - I Didn't See It Coming (1981)

As a kid, the Sex Pistols were roughly the first group I discovered that weren't the Beatles, Abba, or the Wombles. I recall my dad talking about some pop stars who stuck safety pins through their noses, and I remember one sunny day when he came in from the afternoon's milking chuckling about a song he'd heard on the radio called We're So Pretty Vacant.

Arf arf, my mum conceded and we all laughed.

Then my friend Sean showed me his Sex Pistols record, the one with the cartoon of Sid Vicious on the cover and Friggin' in the Riggin' on the other side. I was thirteen and that was more rude words than I'd ever heard in my life, plus I was intrigued because I couldn't quite work out if the band were real or not - which is probably thanks more to Sean and myself giving his Wombles album such a hammering than the cartoon on the cover. In any case, all I knew for sure was that I had encountered magic of some description. Clearly the music industry held the same view, milking the Sex Pistols cow for every last drop, every last variation or loose association; and I was fascinated by the Adrians Records mail order catalogue with its own special Sex Pistols section featuring rare discs by people who had once made some sandwiches for the band, or who simply had a picture of Sid Vicious on the cover of their single - not such a worthless exercise as you might think given that 99% is Shit by the Cash Pussies turned out to be pretty damn great, and just the sort of thing that the idiotic McClaren probably thought he was doing.

The Professionals were of course what Steve and Paul did next, so naturally I awaited the fruits of their labours with punky anticipation; although it's sobering to listen to this stuff now and realise that it's probably how the two of them hoped the Sex Pistols would sound, had McClaren not tried to turn them into the New York Dolls - basic power pop roughly in the tradition of the Kinks, Small Faces and so on. This shouldn't be taken as an indictment, reducing the pair to Lydon's backing band as some might have it. Steve Jones' guitar sound remains pretty much unique even thirty years later - a great big burping Cockney steamroller of noise somehow aspiring to the sort of music that works best in fast cars. It actually sounds nourishing, good for the soul in some way.

I Didn't See It Coming is a weird album, and one that admittedly should have been better: great, punchy, anthemic songs produced as though someone was hoping for a spot on one of those John Hughes film soundtracks, the sort of thing with a scene in which Michael J. Fox rolls up the sleeves of his suit jacket and leads American teenagers in eighties dancing upon the hoods of cars stalled in a gridlock, cars driven by squares who don't understand young people. Steve Jones was ever a bit of a singing bricklayer when it came to vocals, but the production here makes a futile effort to smooth out his rough edges leaving the poor sod sounding like a backing singer on his own record. This CD reissue also includes the earlier Professionals singles - on which he sounds much better - and which are pretty hard to fault. He was never the greatest vocalist, but on the other hand, there's not many that could get away with:

We all know how it ends,

For the rock 'n' roll Hollywood God,

Found by one of your friends,

With your head flushed down the bog.

So, it's smoother than it probably should have been, but even given all of the above, I Didn't See It Coming is still a thumping good collection; another one to add to the list of things that need remixing by Steve Albini.

The Pump - The Pump (2009)

The Pump were the group which became Nocturnal Emissions, or at least Nocturnal Emissions were The Pump without Daniel Ayers, brother of Nigel who soldiered on under the NE banner for most of its natural life and about whom Discogs says:

Influential and uncompromising, Nigel Ayers chooses to remain underground even as his ideas are continuously appropriated by ambitious pop culture surface dwellers.

I've a feeling Nigel may actually have written that himself, but he's probably earned the right over the years, not least because it's roughly true - whether by coincidence, foresight, or actual influence, Nocturnal Emissions seem to have foreshadowed the mainstream on quite a few occasions, and it's a shame he hasn't received a little more recognition considering all the talentless fuckers out there busily taking credit for things they never did.

Nocturnal Emissions seemed pretty astonishing when they first began putting out albums, and I vividly recall the excitement in getting hold of Tissue of Lies - then not so easily done as buying, for example, Prince Charming by Adam & the Ants from the local WHSmiths - and having no fucking clue what the thing was going to sound like. Even given all the tripe that has since been churned out in the supposed name of industrial music, I've still heard very little that sounds quite like Nocturnal Emissions, which should be surprising as they were in the early days one of the few groups to whom one might legitimately apply the term by virtue of records which sounded like some automated industrial process, as opposed to - off the top of my head - a man softly whining into his acoustic guitar beneath a poster of Adolf Hitler upon which is inscribed he never done no wrong in Japanese characters. Nocturnal Emissions were noisy, but a long way from the artfully manicured noise of Throbbing Gristle with all those swirly bad acid trip sounds, more like grating urban cacophony roughly bolted into a shape resembling music, or at least art - just a racket at first, but after two or three plays it begins to sink in, just as you hear music in the automated rhythm of machines if you work long enough in a factory. It's often more like something channelled than composed - the diseased consumer spirit of western society, the true noise which reveals Second Annual Report to be a Pink Floyd album at heart; and it all started here with The Pump, remastered and reissued, which is nice as I never got around to buying the cassettes at the time. Some of it sounds a little more basic than Tissue of Lies or Fruiting Body, presumably having been originated on cassette recorders, but it's very clearly derived from the same fountain of filth. This is a weird and outstanding collection.

Available from Klanggalerie and Earthly Delights. 

New Fast Automatic Daffodils - Pigeonhole (1991)

One of the wonderful things about YouTube, aside obviously from ranting atheist neckbeards sharing their important views with the rest of us, is how it allows one to catch up with music about which you may have wondered without ever getting to hear. The New Fast Automatic Daffodils somewhat passed me by at the time as I didn't really listen to music radio, didn't like clubs or gigs, and they never turned up in the record collections of anyone I knew. I read about them in the music papers, but nothing inspired me to rush out and buy a record on the off chance that it might not be shit. So from time to time I'll YouTube up some name recalled from centuries gone by just out of curiosity, in case it turns out that I've missed out on something I would have liked; and occasionally I like something enough to chase up the album, as has happened here.

The New FADs as I seem to recall them being abbreviated turned up at the same time as that whole Madchester baggy thing to which I maintained some distance having bought a record by Northside from a bargain bin for twenty-five pee and found it to be shite. I can see why they got lumped in with the Stone Roses and all, but they were actually pretty good, and certainly not the also-rans I probably assumed them to be. If anything they sound roughly like A Certain Ratio working their way backwards, devolving into Krautrock, roughly speaking - actually not that much of a stretch Madchesterwise given that Happy Mondays were basically Can with more drugs. Most of the tracks here tend towards extended jams rather than songs as such, workouts with choppy wah-wah guitar and a fantastic rhythm section with a ton of bongos and that. I can see why tossers in fishing hats might have regarded this as top or even sorted, and given that this didn't exactly sound like any of those other groups, it's a shame they didn't shift a few more records at the time. The only criticism I can come up with is that New Fast Automatic Daffodils wasn't a great name, and this compact disc version of the album could have stood to lose the last four tracks - it's not that they're bad, and one of them actually reminds me of Cabaret Voltaire around the time of 2X45, but less is more, and particularly so with rambling funky workout jam session type things. They're probably all taxicab drivers or working in kebab shops by now, but I hope at least one of their number is still able to look back on this material with fondness, and know that he recorded something which didn't deserve to get lost in the tidal wave of baggy Mancunian toss.

Panacea - Twisted Designz (1998)

The detail that's always guaranteed to put me off anything is nearly always its fucking stupid fans, and this is particularly so when it comes to music, especially regarding the sort of twat who can barely open his mouth without spawning some new and entirely unnecessary subcategory by which to define how bleeding edge he deems himself, because that's the shit he's like really into right now, yeah?

Take Clownboy - as I shall refer to him for the sake of convenience - denizen of an internet forum I once frequented. Got Djent? he asked in a thread of that title, a fiendishly imaginative play on the got milk? advertising campaign cleverly subverted so as to refer to a new subgenre of heavy metal he'd just discovered. Djent, he explained, is onomatopoeiacally named because they've invented this way of playing guitar with the strings muted to create an almost percussive note. I've now listened to a few supposed djent bands, and I still don't understand why it needs to be considered a whole new movement as opposed to, for example, just a bunch of gurning, hairy men playing guitars with a technique that was old even when every skinny-tie wearing new wave band was doing the same thing back in 1979 but with less grunting. Even more wearying was when Clownboy later invented his own new and completely original style of music. He explained that he didn't have a name for it, and he needed to get together some people who could play instruments in order to actually produce it - he couldn't play anything, presumably regarding himself as more of an ideas man - but it was going to be a cross between djent and dubstep.

Can you imagine that!?

He was really convinced this was going to be the next big thing.

Panacea was probably dubstep before dubstep, aside from the lack of any shitty autotuned pseudo-trance element; or it's drum and bass, digital hardcore, techstep, illbient, except like the work of any musician who isn't a complete tool, it does all of those things and more, working with what sounds appropriate rather than just ticking boxes. My first encounter with Panacea was when my friend Carl lent me the Low Profile Darkness album. I don't think either of us had ever heard anything that sounded quite so pissed off ,and yet which retained some sort of concessionary resemblance to music. We looked at the photograph of Mathis Mootz on the cover, apparently a fifteen year old fat kid from Germany, and we imagined all the usual tattooed buffoons reduced to something that may as well be The Dooleys' greatest hits by this chubby little fucker on a tricycle. Anyway, I've listened to various digital hardcore types thanks to YouTube, and Panacea doesn't quite fit in with them either, because it does more than just one thing.

As may be apparent from previous reviews, I'm no stranger to the grunting, shirty music of folks expressing their displeasure, but Jesus - this stuff really is dark, and probably because it goes for the pure emotional hit rather than wasting time in waving scary ideas in your face - Oooh look, there's a ghost over there, the ghost of a really bad man who robbed a bank, and I'm his BEST FRIEND and so on. The sounds are sharp as knives and perfectly orchestrated, ebbing and flowing like the wax and wane of muscular pains. Twisted Designz pretty much continues from where Low Profile Darkness left off in that it's a lot like dental surgery - you know you're going to be there for an hour or so, and that it's going to be fucking uncomfortable, so you sit tight and get through it because ultimately it's for the best. Whatever brand of supposedly hard and grumpy music you may be like really into right now, yeah?, Panacea makes it sound like a little girl crying over a prematurely melted ice cream cone.

Strapping Young Lad - The New Black (2006)

I grew up in the town of Shipston-on-Stour which had, I would guess, a population of around 4,000 of whom 3,996 were all massive fans of Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Def Leppard, Black Sabbath, Dio, Tygers of Pan Tang, Judas Priest, Saxon, and er... Meatloaf. This left the four of us who weren't quite so keen on heavy metal feeling at times a little self-conscious and subject to a degree of name-calling, also some grunting and pointing - not wearing a shitty denim jacket with misspelt band names scrawled on the back in biro being apparently indicative of raging homosexuality. This experience has not left me so well-disposed as I might be towards the genre once dubbed the village idiot of the music business; although with that said, I thought Iron Maiden and AC/DC were okay.

Metal isn't really something I've been keeping tabs on - unless you count Nine Inch Nails, which personally I don't - so it's mystifying to see how much it's progressed over the last few decades. Strapping Young Lad caught my ear, so to speak, because it's a great name, and I accidentally stumbled across the video for Love? and found myself fascinated by this prematurely balding man growling over a tune apparently written on a cement mixer. I'm no stranger to noise, and it's interesting to note how bands like Venom and Whitehouse no longer seem divided by quite such an aesthetic gulf as was once the case, but still - there's something about grown men pulling faces and singing odes to the man downstairs in the voice of Cookie Monster that's just a bit too stupid to take seriously. For my tastes, metal either succeeds or fails by how seriously it takes itself in relation to how scary it's trying to be, and Strapping Young Lad at least seem aware of the absurdities of the genre, even to the point of taking the piss out of them; unless they're being serious.

I still can't quite figure this one out. The New Black makes for fascinatingly peculiar listening material, although that's not quite the same as saying that I like it. Devin Townsend, upon whom this entire circus tent is pitched, is clearly a talent who knows how to throw a tune together, and this really doesn't sound like anything I've heard before, and yet...

The guitars chug away with ticker tape energy, bass pedals going at machine gun pace, Townsend grunting, howling, or going operatic and all pinned onto some sort of screwy prog rock template with all manner of unexpected shit thrown in, moments of distorted seventies glam, a horn section, high-pitched voices and all sorts. Townsend has apparently cited J.G. Thirlwell as an influence which makes a lot of sense. Strapping Young Lad are probably Foetus with Led Zeppelin rather than big band swing as cultural foundation; but, as I say, I'm still not sure what to make of any of it. I'm too divorced from the entire genre to understand what the hell is going on with songs like Far Beyond Metal addressing some otherwise unidentified ironic pop-rock fuck, or the generally excellent Fucker in which we're all fired up and we're ready to go, to give it all up at the metal show - it could be a protest song or he could be taking the piss. I have no idea and no way of telling. On top of inscrutable sentiments, The New Black is also a little more relentless than anything to which I'm accustomed, crushing and yet sounding somehow obsessively clean and digitised, and I can't tell if the contradiction works or not. It's probably just me. This is certainly one of the strangest things I've listened to in a while, and it's probably what the stuff I once listened to sounded like to all those metal types back when I was growing up.