ABBA - The Magic of ABBA (1980)

I thought ABBA were amazing when I was a kid, definitely the bestest since the Beatles. Naturally I fancied the blonde one and have vague memories of some formative fantasy involving the Beatles reforming so that they could play a concert with ABBA, which would be the bestest concert ever, at the conclusion of which I'd somehow cop off with the blonde one, despite my being merely ten. ABBA was proper music, and so Matthew and myself would quietly sneer at Sean who was still listening to the Wombles.

My dedication waned as the years passed, particularly once I'd discovered Devo, but endured at least enough for my collection to include a scratched 7" of Knowing Me, Knowing You procured from a bargain bin at some point. Later when I joined Academy 23, Andy Martin developed some weird theory about my being a massive fan of ABBA and would entertain himself by imagining my visitors astonished and scandalised as I blasted them first with Coil, then all those ABBA albums like the crazy, unpredictable character he had apparently mistaken me for. The joke got on my tits after a while. I had one scratchy single and, in any case, had never particularly liked Coil.

ABBA's legacy was further diminished by Mamma Mia!, or the fifteen minutes I manged to watch of the DVD, wherein ABBA songs somehow punctuate the saga of Meryl Streep seeking to identify the father of her daughter, Karen from Mean Girls. It could be almost anyone, it seems, because Karen from Mean Girls was conceived during a train full of Ruperts pulled by Meryl Streep at some ghastly seventies sex happening.

Nevertheless, here we are. I always liked the idea of a greatest hits album without ever quite getting around to buying one. Friends and relatives now routinely present my wife with stacks of their old, unloved vinyl records which she paints and transforms into decorative objects, and the latest skip delivered to our door included The Magic of ABBA. It seemed a shame to turn it into another ornament given the record being in excellent condition, and given that we already have a whole garage full of Mantovani and the like.

Yet somehow I find it genuinely weird listening to this thing in 2020, having failed to truly pay attention to these songs since they seemed like the only real competition for the Beatles. ABBA wrote decent songs for sure, but with hindsight it sounds as though they may have been inadvertently responsible for that sparkly sound everyone assumes came from the Cocteau Twins, beloved of television and advertising executives around Christmas - the musical equivalent of Thomas Kinkade's twinkly winter scenes. The twin vocals are strange too, overproduced possibly with Phil Spector in mind, only really working when one individual vocal takes the lead and otherwise coming close to a forerunner of autotune.

Wankers will of course object on the grounds of it being cheese and just a bit of fun and I should lighten up and what's wrong wiv me and it's just a bit of fun; but I don't know. ABBA don't sound terrible, but being less shit than Mud or the Rubettes is hardly a recommendation, and no golden moment has endured without something getting in the way - never mind the Eurokitsch of Fernando, Chiquitita and their like, even the good stuff sounds strange. I can no longer listen to the proto-metal of SOS without my brain hearing Little Frank singing, but with my cardboard hands it would be no good; and Does Your Mother Know just seems a bit Jimmy Savile: yes, I would indeed like to shag you, but I'll politely decline your kind offer on the grounds of your being twelve, if it's all the same.

The darker, more haunting tracks, The Name of the Game and Knowing Me, Knowing You still just about manage to foreshadow Joy Division but seem to be exceptions to a generally underwhelming rule. This really should have been better. It's true what they say about how you can never go home.

Amoeba - Watchful (1997)

I reviewed this one back when I was writing stuff for Ed Pinsent's Sound Projector about a million years ago. I encountered my review once again just a couple of weeks back and, aside from wondering why Ed even printed some of the garbage I submitted, it occurred to me that I'd done this album something of a disservice, so here we are again. I'm just trying to be a better person.

To be fair, I suspect Ed sent this one my way having formed the initial impression of a tasteful new age soundtrack for coffee bars, or at least this was how it looked to me. It's certainly constitutes a type of which there were a shitload back in the nineties - young poetically inclined men with black clothes and cellos presenting musical analogies to the cover of a Sandman comic painted by Dave McKean; and yet for all that Watchful ticks boxes which shouldn't ordinarily be ticked, two decades later it still blows you right off the sofa, out the window, and into the yard.

Musically we're not talking anything too unexpected - double bass, brush drums, pseudo-Spanish guitar and whispy vocals preventing the subtle loops and digital wash of sound fully descending into ambient territory. It's probably not a surprise that half of Amoeba were probably better known for hanging around with Lustmord, although frankly this is better, and sufficiently so as to give me cause to wonder whether better than Lustmord might not be considered an actual genre in its own right, although of course there would be one fuck of a lot of acts under that particular umbrella, possibly as many as all acts.

Watchful haunts the listener, or it has haunted me, creating vast spaces within which one cannot help but pick out fascinating details, then suddenly you're listening to an actual song, something which tugs at the heart like the dream you wish you could remember upon waking; and the bass and the melody sound like the saddest thing in the world. I suppose there were a lot of similar acts in the nineties. I used to hang around the World Serpent office nosing around their stock to see what had come in, and aside from the obvious names, there were always a couple of goth-neofolk-darkwave hopefuls I'd never heard of - yet more poetically inclined men with black clothes and cellos, some mediaeval woodcut on the cover and a band name which was clearly trying way, way, way too hard. The Soil Bleeds Black was probably the funniest of those I'm able to recall; and Loretta's Doll*, of course…

Anyway, to get to the point, this is what I suspect all of those bands wanted to sound like; and in 2019 it reminds me of nothing so much as the more wistful bits of Kate Bush's back catalogue. That's a recommendation, obviously.

*: I don't know, but I'm willing to bet that she probably wasn't from the Barbie & Friends Malibu Beach Gift Set.

Headyello - Road to Elsewhere (2019)

Being somewhat out of the loop, I have no idea whether this is what people are presently referring to as noise, or whether this sort of thing is fairly commonplace for those with digits on cultural pulses, so bollocks to thee and thine should I give cause for sneering at my Grandpa-esque observations.

I generally don't do downloads, and yet here we are once again and not regretting the experience. Road to Elsewhere was approximately recommended to me as the work of a fellow Texan, and although Fort Worth is at such a distance that I've only been over that way twice this decade, it turns out to have been a good recommendation. As stated, I don't really know if this counts as noise, although if it does, symphonic noise seems as reliable a term as any. My initial impression was of random electronic farts, squirts, and bursts of tape hiss in the vein of factor X or maybe the nineties version of Nocturnal Emissions, and if there's a harsh element, it's to be found in the composition rather than the actual sonics. The album, which we may as well refer to as an album, comprises two lengthy pieces of respectively twenty minutes and half an hour duration. It's mostly found, treated sound from what I can tell, snatches of radio, telephone maybe, the buzz of a starter motor interfering with a tape recording, quiet sound sources peaking and distorting as the needle swings into the red, mains hum, things which sound like memories of the engine rumble on a childhood car journey. Excepting bursts of pop hits overheard, there's nothing musical, and yet the arrangement lends this whole thing a sort of tonal progression which becomes apparent with repeat listening. Loops cease to sound any more like loops than would be refrains repeated for the sake of a chorus in a more regular piece of music, and the rumble comes to complement the squeak and the squeal in much the same way as a cello might underpin the higher strings in an orchestra; and all the while Road to Elsewhere retains its sense of chaos, certainly nothing so twee as noise regimented as music. It's emotionally quite powerful is what I'm trying to say here.

If none of that makes any sense whatsoever, then I suppose you could say it's Max Ernst's Europe After the Rain as distinct from Jackson Pollock splashing it all about like Henry Cooper; and if that doesn't make any sense, maybe just take the plunge and listen to the thing.

Stop it and buy one here.

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention - We're Only in It for the Money (1968)

I'm out of my depth here, never really having had much to do with Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, or anything from the long-haired end of the sixties. It either hasn't grabbed me, or hasn't had the opportunity to grab me for one reason or another, which has never really felt like a problem given that I've always had plenty of other stuff to listen to, and I don't trust anyone who feels their record collection must include a representative selection of everything. It's not a fucking competition.

Nevertheless, I'm beginning to feel I've been missing out where Frank Zappa is concerned. I always liked the idea of the man, but never knowingly heard any of his work until the late, great Andrew Cox gave me this for Christmas. Given that Andrew passed away back in 2009, it's probably fair to say that it's taken me a while to click with the record, although in my defence there have been a few years spent in transit and without a turntable between then and now.

It seems Zappa viewed the long-haired end of the sixties with suspicion equivalent to my own. Scratch anyone who feels the need to tell you just how laid back and far out they are and you'll invariably find Joseph Goebbels somewhere underneath.

Obviously this one was taking the piss out of Sgt. Pepper, or what Sgt. Pepper seemed to represent, but ran much deeper than mere sarcasm, revealing a healthy distrust of utopian sentiment as being no more revolutionary than the hula hoop or the beehive hairdo; and if it fails to offer an alternative to turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, that's because it doesn't fucking have to because it's not chess. If you don't want to know that you're being used, then that's your tough shit.

Musically, Money goes along with certain conventions of its era, subverting ragtime, doowop and others to the cause of its opprobrium, then glueing all the bits together with an avant-garde sensibility hinting at musique concrete and the weirder end of jazz, but with a precision and targetting which can be mistaken for neither. There's none of that saggy far out shit here, no aimless giggling at its own reflection, but neither is the record in any sense mean spirited. Frank doesn't want to piss you off so much as he wants you to wake the fuck up - which is probably why you'll laugh your ass off with this record, at least if there's any hope for you.

I guess this is approximately where Devo got started, and certainly the Residents, or at least that's how it sounds to me. I'd say that I wish someone had told me, but they sort of did.

Depeche Mode - Spirits in the Forest (2019)

'If there was a movie about them,' observed my friend Nick, 'they'd be running round the corner to escape the police in Basildon, and then be in a massive stadium with heroin addictions in the next frame.'

Surprisingly, there is a movie about them, and although Nick was off the mark where the plot is concerned, I nevertheless feel his comment expresses some deeper truth fairly well.

I recall Depeche Mode from way back, at least since they first started turning up in the pages of Sounds.

Ollie who worked in Discovery Records in Stratford referred to them as Depeche Toad, which was amusing; and Photographic on the Some Bizarre Album seemed like a fairly decent impersonation of Cabaret Voltaire, albeit without any of the funny noises which made Cabaret Voltaire interesting; and yet somehow there was a pervasive wholesome quality about them, something guileless, something a bit youth club with synths set up on the ping-pong table. This quality, whatever it was, lingered, rendering subsequent transgressions inherently comical, deeds effortfully undertaken as part of a futile effort to shake off the image, like kids with their first ciggies, lighting the wrong end and taking theatrical drags as though cameras might be running; and then there was the time they found those special sex clothes in that box at the back of dad's wardrobe, and then with the tatts and the arm candy...

I'm sure it was all real, but nevertheless, that's how it looked to me, and how it still looks despite everything. Even a few legitimately great songs - Two Minute Warning, Never Let Me Down Again, Enjoy the Silence, and probably a couple of others - can't quite shift the stench of pop, crisps, and jumpers knitted by your nan, which I propose even whilst holding that Dave Gahan is blessed with a genuinely powerful voice. I'm not even sure what it is - the ballsachingly appalling lyrics, Martin Gore's hair - which doubtless ensured that his dinner money never once saw the inside of the school canteen cash register, the plinky-plonky quality of certain songs, or something else, some emergent property resulting from a combination of indelibly wholesome factors.

Still, it was a free ticket for a film showing for one night only, so I wasn't going to say no, despite my reservations. I anticipated a documentary accounting for their transformation from Herman's Hermits into SPK and then ultimately into U2, but thankfully it was better than that. Spirits in the Forest has six Depeche Mode fans from across the globe tell their stories, interspersed with footage of a predictably massive concert in Berlin. It works because the fans, or at least these fans, are more interesting than the band, so they may as well be Lieutenant Pigeon obsessives for all the difference it makes; and I particularly enjoyed the story of DMK, a tribute act featuring a father and his two kids playing Depeche Mode covers on toy instruments. Actually, I think I liked them more than I liked the main feature.

The live footage, which punctuates the progress of our six fans as we follow them to the gig, fails to shed any light on the mystery of Depeche Mode, at least for me. What subtle qualities their less comical songs may have is lost once blasted out on a scale more suited to some Laibach parody, and Martin Gore standing around like a lemon with a guitar fails to make much difference to anything, and then we come to Dave Gahan, now a troubling hybrid of David Niven and John Waters whose face is too big for his head. His arms and legs are similarly too long for his body, which his weird Jagger impersonations only accentuate meaning that he now vaguely resembles one of those things from Ice Age. I don't understand why you would go to see this band, or why you would go to see them in a stadium the size of the Grand Canyon; but then I found it nevertheless watchable with a couple of decent tunes, despite it being Depeche Mode, so if that's your bag, I've no doubt that Spirits in the Forest must seem amazing.

Ice Cube - Raw Footage (2008)

The odds seemed stacked against this disc, the eighth solo album of a career spanning two decades by someone increasingly better known as a film maker and arguably creator of the hood chuckles genre - a rapper who had seemingly had his day; but not quite, at least not on close inspection. The last three albums had been less than amazing, but none were without their high points and whatever their problems may have been, it was never Cube's delivery. Surprisingly, Raw Footage is either his greatest single work, or just the one which made the most sense to me.

Admittedly, I picked this up on what was probably the equivalent of the first day of the rest of my life, new job in a different city, and a future which would either be disastrous or interesting but would at least be an alternative to rotting away in south-east London; and Raw Footage cemented itself immediately into my head, seemingly capturing the moment - which probably doesn't make any sense given that amongst all which Cube had on his mind when recording this album, moving back to his mum's house in Coventry and getting an agency job at Parcel Force doesn't seem to have figured highly. I guess it felt like a soundtrack for a future which once again held possibilities.

Ice Cube has forever moved with the times, musically speaking. It hasn't always quite worked, as on the War and Peace discs which have a bit of an also ran quality in relation to whatever else was going on at the end of the nineties. Raw Footage on the other hand sounded like it was about six months ahead of the curve with a sparse, spacious, yet luxuriant production of deep, deep bass and digital crunch, phone pings, detuned voice, yet more waveforms copied and pasted from place to place on a screen, and yet with Marvin Gaye levels of feeling. It's an album by an old guy, one happy to be older, wiser, and still very much disinclined to put up with any of your shit. Ice Cube's strength, aside from the obvious lyrical gymnastics, has forever been maintaining a fine balance between blasting your head off with the raw stuff whilst delivering one painful truth after another - black consciousness backpack with no qualms about punching you in the face, if you like; or regardless of whether you like it or not.

I Got My Locs On, Cold Places and Jack in the Box are as powerful, terrifying, chilling, and joyous as any of the man's greats, and this is one of those rare albums which is good to the last drop, an album which makes you want to rob a bank.

I didn't, by the way.

Nocturnal Emissions - Beyond Logic, Beyond Belief (1990)

I never quite got to the bottom of what this one was about beyond that it was clearly about something. It initially seemed to be some kind of celebration, an acknowledgement of Nocturnal Emissions first decade - the ten year anniversary of the release of Tissue of Lies without necessarily representing an extension of the same, at least not so far as I was ever able to tell. The sleeve claims the material to have been recorded between 1980 and 1990, which I assume refers to sound sources more than it does to any notion of previously unreleased tracks, so perhaps this is Nigel engaging in recycling, or at least making collages from his own back catalogue; which would account for the sample of Caroline K operating a hand drill - which I'd swear I've heard elsewhere, although not on Tissue of Lies at least.

Internet sources refer to some light having been shed in the first issue of Network News, which it isn't because I've checked. In fact I've checked the first three or four issues, none of which seem to contain this observation from our Nigel:

What's important in this culture we're now cultivating is we can gain an understanding of the world which speaks to us directly without the filters of belief which go within a spirit system, without the filters of logic that go with a science system.

So, if that's from the first issue of Network News, then I guess it isn't the one published in my reality; which may actually be approaching the elusive point, at last.

The last decade of the twentieth century had just begun, and Sterile Records was recently reborn as Earthly Delights, sort of its thematic opposite given the preoccupation with fertility and growth, but still releasing art which channelled rather than described its world - not quite refocussing so much as working from a much broader, even cosmic palette rather than limiting itself to the human cultural sphere of society ruined by industry. This was the point at which Nigel noticed how his earlier works had been changing hands for silly money and so decided that some of this money might be better spent in support of living art rather than historical documents, so this was issued in an edition of just 250 copies for what seemed a lot at the time, being more than the customary tenner, but I'm fucking glad I had the foresight to buy one. One bloke on the internet suggested this might even be Nocturnal Emissions' greatest work, and even if it isn't, it's easy to see why someone might have made such a claim.

Beyond Logic, Beyond Belief is well into what has been poorly characterised as the ambient years, but isn't really anything of the sort. It's atmospheric, evocative, and powerfully emotional without quite doing anything musical in the traditional sense, possibly excepting the oddly bluesy Memphis. Aside from the obvious sampling, it's not even particularly electronic. At the risk of turning into Paul Morley, and in light of the few clues afforded by titles, sound, and the above quotation, I'd say this is Nocturnal Emissions scrabbling at a description of reality analogous to Plato's ideal forms, the thing in itself, whatever the hell is there before we muss it up with sentences such as this one, or any language for that matter; and that's what the best art is all about. If I were able to describe it, it wouldn't need to exist.

Genuinely magnificent.