Nocturnal Emissions in Dub volume two (2020)

When the first one came out, I assumed it would be - you know - a remix of Going Under or No Sacrifice with more echo, but no, it actually did what it said on the notional tin, and actually did it without making me think of Alan Partridge. For anyone still wrestling with the idea of Nocturnal Emissions as dub reggae, all I can suggest is that you listen to the stuff because he's not fucking about. As with other stylistic bathtubs into which the Ayers toe has been submerged, the man knows what he's doing, and after a couple of plays the shock should have worn off.

With hindsight, I realise the first volume probably wasn't such a surprise after all because for all that its heart seems clearly rooted in the general vicinity of the Effra Road, the percussive sounds, the hi-hat, and the shreds of musique concrete all skitter around the bass and the melody with a rhythm - and a disregard for rhythm - which you will certainly recognise from those previous Emissions less conspicuously in thrall to King Tubby, Scientist and the like.

There seems to be less stretching of boundaries on this one, or at least less of them stretched in a particular direction off towards something distantly related to drum and bass; or to put it another way, volume two has more of a traditional sound in so much as that most of this could have come from a semi-regular band going through a sound desk. It's more organic, less about wave forms pasted to another part of the screen, at least spiritually. This isn't, by the way, to suggest musical conservatism, more like if the first volume took us up to maybe eleven in the evening, this one takes us to around four in the morning, by which point we're all seriously fucking stewed, barely even able to stand (not that we have any need to do so) as we're sucked in by the rhythm. I'm assuming that description should be familiar to at least some of you.

Volume two takes it back from the digital rasta vibe of its predecessor to something predating dancehall, something in which the hand which crafted Viral Shedding is clearly heard, particularly in the bass, but which absorbed a different set of influences from its south-east London environment in a variant timeline. This is a mighty and righteous sound, as they probably say.

Adam & the Ants - Kings of the Wild Frontier (1980)

I was probably born at exactly the right time to appreciate this one. I'd just turned fifteen and was already vaguely aware of the Ants, and if not intimately so, enough so to have anticipated this second album and got some pleasure out of it before you suddenly couldn't escape from the fucking thing. Six months earlier, I'd found the Ants disturbing yet fascinating, mainly because for me - tucked away in the Midlands and still at school - they seemed only to exist as an indie chart presence and rumours. The music press hated them, and the astonishingly thorough lack of coverage lent them the appeal of forbidden fruit. Paul Woods told me he remembered a few of their early performances, notably one in which Ant supposedly provoked audience members into beating him up and appeared to be getting off on the thrashing. This, Paul said, was quite disturbing to watch, and that's my only real clue as to why the Ants should have been so reviled in their early days, although personally I suspect it may have been more to do with the Cromwellian demand for authenticity during those early post-punk years. Adam & the Ants had art college associations and were born from a fifties revival band called Bazooka Joe and were therefore fake, unlike the Clash - something in that general direction anyway.

Of course, it's all bollocks, as was the notion of their having sold out due to thirteen-year old schoolgirls buying this album. Adam & the Ants - here meaning mainly Adam Ant so as to include everything up to Vive Le Rock - had been an essentially theatrical concern from the very beginning, hence few anthems to either the dole queue or boredom as a general condition - very much sons of Bowie, and Roxy Music in particular. It's all too easy too think of this as the third version of the Ants, following on from the fetish-punk decadence then stark European cinema phases; and this was populism, musical eclecticism, Morricone's sense of scale, and songs which specifically referred to being in a band called Adam & the Ants. I seem to remember one critic objecting that these songs were about antmusic, as distinct from actually being antmusic such as we'd heard on Dirk Wears White Sox. Looking back now, without having to filter out appearances on Jim'll Fix It or the Basil Brush Show, it's difficult to miss the continuity. Sure, they were absurd, even pantomime with Los Rancheros and Jolly Roger and a lot of what came after, but they always had been. Music hall was sort of the point, and had been from the very beginning with Young Parisians, Punk in the Supermarket, Il Duce and others. The only difference here is the camera pointing in yet another direction, new scenery, change of wardrobe, and with a shift from black and white to garish technicolor.

Having been listening to the Ants for a full four decades, I still don't fully understand why they weren't massive from the start, so their abrupt ascent to teenybop stardom with this album is hardly surprising because, aside from anything else you might take into consideration, Kings of the Wild Frontier is an unreservedly great record. If Dirk had been European cinema, this was Hollywood, maybe even the Hollywood version of Hollywood - wide-eyed optimism, noble ideas albeit in cartoon form, and Link Wray twanging away in the background establishing a sort of pop classicism. It steals from pretty much everything, blends, mixes, matches, but steals with love, and so we have spaghetti westerns sharing grooves with the b-movie horror of Ants Invasion or Killer in the Home. Mostly it's a collage, elements which shouldn't go together but which work perfectly, and as such it's a pretty fucking weird record to have occupied either a number one slot or a teenage bedroom at the tail end of the seventies.

I've never been embarrassed to admit to loving this album, or Prince Charming or any of those which came after for that matter, and I've no idea as to the general health of the Ants' legacy these days. You may not like it now but you will seemed quite prescient back in November 1980, and I'm sure there's still time if you didn't but nevertheless fancy giving it a go.

Sleaford Mods - All That Glue (2020)

I must admit to having raised an eyebrow at the release of this, having dutifully snapped up all those obscure singles as they came out, then bought at least a couple of them again when they were reissued on the Chubbed Up + compilation, and now here's the opportunity to buy Jolly Fucker and others a third time along with some unreleased stuff, including the title track, All That Glue - the first thing ever recorded by Fearne and Williamson - but only as a fucking flexidisc issued with the gold vinyl edition.

Bollocks, I said to myself and bought the compact disc in protest, and because my shelves now have space for about another fifteen vinyl albums and not much more before I'll need to schlep down to Lowes and buy a new reinforced shelving unit, possibly also a new room for the house.

Grumbling aside, Glue duplicates only four tracks from Chubbed Up +, but they're four good 'uns, and as something vaguely intended to serve as an introduction to the Sleaford Mods for those who might require one, it's hard to fault. Actually, Glue is hard to fault even if you already have most of the previous albums. Not only does this represent their absolute best, but the sequencing from 2012's McFlurry at the beginning through to closing with When You Come Up To Me from 2018 reveals a progression and even a sophistication you could be forgiven for having missed. It's not all Bontempi loops and Jason yelling the word bollocks even if it may sometimes seem that way. There's a much greater variety of emotion here than I realised even with anger, frustration and sarcasm as the core, and for all its apparent simplicity, even rudimentary composition, the music evokes Joy Division, Suicide - the band rather than the deed - the early Pistols, and all manner of unsung laptop weirdies without actually sounding like anyone else out there; which is to say that even familiar tracks such as Jobseeker or Tarantula Deadly Cargo seem freshly dosed with manic energy as part of this collection, spliced together with tracks which somehow slipped through the cracks, of which Blog Maggot is possibly the greatest.

So I was completely wrong. This is just as essential as the rest, just as vital, and I only wish the awkward buggers had included the track from which the title was derived on the CD, but I suppose they must have had their reasons. Having achieved something resembling fame, and enough so as to summon the threatening stench of a regular restaurant review column in the Guradian like that bloke from Franz Ferdinand, we're now approaching the point at which gentlemen of a certain vintage will inevitably announce either that they only liked the first record, or they never really liked the Sleaford Mods in the first place - contrarian bollocks at least as risible as refusing to listen to anything which fails to tickle the hit parade. All That Glue serves as a timely reminder of what makes this band great and why we listen to their records. Let's not take them for granted.

+DOG+ - Helpless (2020)

Here's another one by an assemblage of which I was in complete ignorance this time last year, more noise, and yet somehow nothing like the previous offering. I'm not really significantly wiser than I was with 2019's Die Robot, aside from having discovered that +DOG+ have been at it for two full decades, and that one of them was in Big City Orchestra. Annoyingly, this leaves me with very little to write about other than the actual music, but never mind. I'll do my best.

As I probably said, I'm sort of familiar with noise - or have been at various points of my life - but usually as something more overtly confrontational than Helpless; not that Helpless isn't harsh as fuck, but there's a lot of other stuff going on too. Die Robot seemed to carry some sort of narrative, albeit one which was probably equivalent to patterns seen while staring into a fire. This one seems to do the same sort of thing but with less to go on. Vocals are infrequent, usually distorted beyond recognition, leaving us with just titles, so whatever it communicates is effectively something beyond language. that said, the album draws you in and carries you along just the same. There's a sense of progression or at least evolution and it leaves the listener with an impression of having understood something, even if I'm not sure how to describe what that seems to be.

Yes, you may well ask, but what does the fucker sound like?

A lot of it sounds like coffee poured into rudimentary electronic circuitry as someone rummages around with a screwdriver, yet producing a much wider range of noises than you might anticipate, with different tones of distorted racket clearly divided and complementing each other in terms which seem almost musical. Occasional feedback intrudes, or what sounds like a drum kit undergoing demolition, or reversed vocals, or organ chords clipped to electronic sludge; then for the sake of contrast we get a few bars of She's So Fine, and finally Torpor in which the noise struggles to hold notes and which I suppose you might be justified in calling stadium mains hum.

These ten tracks could be unrelated pieces, but they surely fit together too well for it to be entirely accidental, forming a powerful, almost symphonic slab of raw texture which reveals more and more of itself with each listen. I am genuinely knocked out by what I'm hearing of this bunch.

Available here.

Pokey LaFarge - Rock Bottom Rhapsody (2020)

Some YouTube algorithm seemed to think I'd enjoy Pokey's Fuck Me Up, so I watched the video clip and I did. In fact, I fucking loved it - a gritty slice of the country that got left behind in the dirt when everyone else signed up for throat mics, autotune and sponsorship deals. I'd never heard of the guy. A month later I came across this album in Barnes & Noble - which is apparently his eighth - and it was the only thing in the store which seemed worth buying so here we are.

I find it all weird and disconcerting. Pokey LaFarge was born in 1983, by which point I'd left school. Rock Bottom Rhapsody, it could be argued, is the music of my father's generation - musicianship, real instruments, black and white photography with colour tint, and yet somehow it manages to avoid feeling entirely like an exercise in nostalgia. It's heavily traditional, I guess, drawing on country, blues, soul, rockabilly, ragtime, honkytonk or whatever you want to call it, and it's anything but a museum piece or an exercise. The playing is expressive without showboating, loose enough to let you know it's alive, and Pokey sings a little like David Sedaris's impersonation of Ella Fitzgerald - with maybe a touch of Ricky Nelson - but his voice is nevertheless perfect and the ease with which it all fits together and slips right into your heart and your veins is astonishing. It's music which still works, which still does its job, and is delivered with so little irony that it may as well be drum and bass when stood next to whatever autotuned vapourtrap monstrosity is ticking boxes on The Voice this week.

This is how all those authenticity twats would give their left one to sound, reminding us of why anyone ever bothered listening to music in the first place. Beyond all the phone connections and satellite links, all the bullshit, this album is what it feels like when you get back down to earth, to the human level, when you think about loved ones and people who died, and the little bit of good you've managed to scrape together for yourself. This album is about the stuff which really matters and about which you may have forgotten, and after the first couple of plays you may begin to wonder how you ever lived without Pokey LaFarge.

David Bowie - Images 1966-1967 (1973)

I had all but seven (I think) of these tracks on Decca's World of David Bowie compilation, purchased for a quid from Dean Howe at school and which was therefore among the first albums I owned; but I'd always intended to buy this double so as to get the extra tracks, and now at last I have. Life is too short to be without a recording of The Laughing Gnome in some form.

So that's another one ticked off the list, but one which has brought a weird realisation: these silly novelty records may actually have constituted Bowie's greatest work, even if it's easily forgotten once you get to spinning later, less patently ludicrous offerings.

I never quite got the idea that Bowie was attempting to bring about a marriage of pop music and theatre because it sounded like one of those meaningless juxtapositions persons such as myself suggest without actually having thought about it - imagine Splodgenessabounds covering the Swans, and so on and so forth. Additionally, it has long been my contention that theatre is mostly wank, and mime in particular - so that's a side of Bowie to which I've never really paid much attention, which is probably why I never noticed despite it having been staring me in the face all along.

Most of these tracks are novelty records, which isn't in itself a bad thing, but which I've tended to regard as Dave desperately trying to squeeze out a crowd pleaser and secure fame and fortune prior to taking himself more seriously with Space Oddity and all which came after; but the form is no more opportunist than anything he did later, despite sounding like it wouldn't have been out of place on the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang soundtrack. That's the theatrical quality he was talking about, I guess - songs as short stories, but stories told by multiple characters in ludicrous situations as distinct from, She loves you yeah yeah yeah, or even the more prosaic storytelling of country music which tends towards the autobiographical or is at least less likely to wear an orange wig whilst pretending to be from outer space. I suppose you could argue that Sgt. Pepper's inhabits roughly the same territory, but this phase of Bowie's career owes more to variety, even sixties lounge music than to rock and roll, which is in turn reduced to just one of a number of costumes worn when the narrative requires; and yes, I have indeed heard of Anthony Newley, obviously.

That which distinguishes this music from pure novelty is the sheer range. Beyond the chocolate box psychedelia of Come and Buy My Toys or She's Got Medals - none of which are to be sniffed at, I might add - we have the likes of London Boys - which just plain tears your fucking heart out - We Are Hungry Men - which somehow tackles eugenics and population with such incongruous and chilling effect that I'm sort of surprised Von Thronstahl haven't covered it, and which presumably foreshadows The Supermen, Bewlay Brothers and others of its thematic type - the Pinteresque Tony Day, and of course The Laughing Gnome, which is just fucking brilliant and I don't care what anyone says. Yet everything here superficially sounds like something which should feature a bowler hatted sixties cat winking and grinning at the camera with that lush big band production, all sweeping strings and pizzicato for emphasis.

We forget this material was as good as it is because we often forget, in our rush to be all grown up, that great art can be cheery, populist and silly without subtracting from whatever the hell it's trying to say; and so these songs have spent most of their collective existence as the pissing about from before the good stuff with no-one quite sure whether it was an album or a stack of singles or a compilation or a greatest hits without any actual hits and a photo of some completely different glam rock bloke on the cover. This is a shame because, as I say, I've a feeling this may actually have been his greatest work. Listen to the opening bars of She's Got Medals and tell me different.

Paranoise - Ishq (2001)

This was originally submitted to Ed Pinsent's Sound Projector for review, but I get the impression Ed found it a bit fishy and so passed it onto me for target practice, along with pages of off-putting photocopied press material explaining just how amazing the band were. Sure enough, it looked like something in need of a good clip around the ear - world music earnestly sampled over prog rock, guitar solos, Terrance fucking McKenna, and five white guys cradling cute ethnic instruments on the back cover doing that face which Sting sometimes does to let you know that he's in touch with the ancient rhythm of the spheres and just recently met this really amazing old guy halfway up a mountain in Baja California…

Oh - and the full name given on the cover is the Ancient Ecstatic Brotherhood of Π, with the Π presumably being mystic shorthand for Paranoise. Anyway, that was a whole two decades ago and Ishq gets a second go because, against the most dour expectations I've possibly ever harboured, it still sounds fucking amazing. I doubt there has ever been such a gap between what I anticipated and what I actually experienced. Musically Paranoise are competent as fuck and fairly proggy with all sorts of funny time signatures, but with killer songs, really beautiful stuff which, just as the press release claimed, invoke Led Zeppelin's Kashmir amongst other things. In fact a lot of Ishq reminds me of that era of Led Zeppelin, back when heavy rock really was heavy rock rather than metal, but there's an occasional hint of something jazzier, maybe the more new-agey end of the Killing Joke back catalogue, even fucking Styx on the particularly monumental I Own; and what differentiates these songs from anything else to which that description may loosely apply, is the use of samples. Ethnic wails selotaped to a beat are nothing new, as the Severed Heads, Moby and a thousand others are my witness, and as with others who've been down the same road, I have to wonder about this sort of thing which, at worst, seems like cultural tourism with traditional vocals sourced from Kenya, Bulgaria, Morocco, Afghanistan and elsewhere, united seemingly by their lack of electricity and plumbing. I believe othering is the term, but I'll refrain because it's a neologism favoured mainly by complete wankers, and because Paranoise at least credit those they've sampled as co-writers, and because the blend of pounding mathematically weird rock and native voice is frankly fucking dynamite. If you're going to do this sort of thing, you really have to get it right, and Paranoise absolutely nailed it on this record.

Of course, the message of Ishq is ecological, anti-corporate and aspires to revolution, so the use of indigenous voices - those most trampled upon by the guys we're singing about - is appropriate, even bringing a balance to the narrative it might not have had were it just five white dudes from Connecticut singing about how they don't like Nestlé. Additionally, great use is made of spoken pieces by Noam Chomsky and environmental activist Vandana Shiva, with only Terrence McKenna's drippy Woody Allen impersonation letting the side down - not that what he says is without value, but as usual he seasons his testimony with psychobabble. Still, a minute of rolling eyes and pulling faces is easily overlooked in context of something which rocks this hard for a full hour, which states its case with such conviction and confidence, and which doesn't really sound quite like any other record I can think of. I somehow imagined one of the more self-important of Sting's solo works, but got a more worldly Physical Grafitti without the kiddy fiddling.