Blade - The Lion Goes from Strength to Strength (1993)

Blade should require no introduction, but then we live in a far from perfect world and it's been nearly thirty years since this album, fifteen since his most recent - unless there's been one which nobody told me about. It's not that he was the first rapper with a British passport, but he was in on the ground floor and maintained enduring visibility back before anyone took UK rap seriously on any kind of scale. He achieved some mainstream success with The Unknown recorded with the late Mark B, even landing an appearance on Top of the Pops, but this was his second album, the one which apparently remains his own personal favourite; which itself reveals him to be a good judge of his own work because it really is his best, at least so far as I'm concerned.

This is a CD reissue I'm listening to, but I can still recall the moment when I lowered the needle onto the first white vinyl disc of the original double, and I recall that moment because what comes out of the speaker is as astonishing as a kick up the arse - the adrenaline rush of organised noise, musical information overload somehow tamed to a funky as fuck beat duplicating the intensity of the Bomb Squad without simply copying the moves; and while we're on the subject of Public Enemy, Blade himself betrays the influence of - guessing here - both Chuck D and Rakim, but his own personality overpowers the delivery to the point that you couldn't really mistake him for anyone else.

As with much of Blade's work, the whole thing was pulled together by the man himself - recorded, pressed, distributed, everything, and the sleeve notes describe our man picking the pockets of teenagers in arcades to finance the release of his debut, arguing that they would only have spunked the money away on nothing. Accordingly you can really feel the graft that's gone into this one, fueled by fried chicken, Lucozade, and sleepless nights sweating over the beats and rhymes - gritty as New Cross, posture free, angry and funny, and refreshingly outspoken in terms of authority and our man's refusal to jump through the usual music biz hoops. Were it not for the fried chicken, The Lion Goes from Strength to Strength is one of the few rap albums which would have made sense on the Crass label, which is no bad thing.

Jethro Tull - This Was (1968)

I'm still trying to work out how I feel about Jethro Tull. Having once been an agricultural youth, I was initially well disposed towards a  band who named their albums after shire horses and who presumably had some kind of affinity with soil, plus Stormwatch had a pleasantly ominous cover. I didn't actually encounter their music until the nineties when I chanced upon a boggle-eyed performance of Witch's Promise from that Top of the Pops repeat show, which I thought was great. My friend Carl gave me a copy of the Twenty Years of Jethro Tull triple CD thing on the grounds that he'd designed the artwork and had a spare knocking around; which was also great, or mostly great. I was in a sort of prog rock punk band at the time, albeit prog with a small p because funny time signatures definitely hadn't figured in the job description and were frankly proving a bit of a chore; but our glorious leader, somehow mistaking my polite enthusiasm for studious obsession, took it upon himself to advance my education despite that I was perfectly happy with my copy of Machine Gun Etiquette, thank you very much. Soon I was in possession of This Was, Living In the Past, Thick as a Brick, A Passion Play, Bursting Out, Stormwatch, A, Nightcap, The Jethro Tull Christmas Album and some greatest hits thing. Our glorious leader had written on the covers, giving tracks marks out of ten or adding notes about associated singles, then presumably copied those songs scoring above a certain rating of excellence onto a CDR which would take up less space in his collection and therefore be more efficient.

I've really tried with these albums but they just aren't for me. I didn't particularly enjoy playing guitar riffs which required that I count out an ostentatious thirteen beats before repeating the bar or launching into a chorus, and if I'm to listen to music as a mathematical exercise, then it really needs to do more than just showing off whilst a nice overachieving grammar school boy doth politely croon something about maidens fair; and but for the silly time signatures, Stormwatch wouldn't have sounded out of place on Radio 2 back in the days of Sing Something Simple.

And yet there's this.

This Was so named in acknowledgement of it having captured an era of Jethro Tull from which the band were moving on even as the record hit the stores. This Was dates from when they were worth listening to, when they sounded like a band rather than a series of twee equations scrawled upon a blackboard in between betwixt sips goodly swigs from a pewter tankard. What the fuck went wrong?

This Was is sixties blues rock as interpreted by educated white guys, but significantly influenced by the wilder end of jazz and with scant trace of either folky or psychedelic influence - possibly excepting certain parallels heard on the thoroughly gorgeous Move on Alone. What really differentiates this bunch from most later Tull - at least that I've heard - is the low recording budget having prevented too much pissing about, leaving us with a band so live and raw and at one with their own vibe as to foreshadow a Steve Albini production, albeit one without quite such menace. Song for Jeffrey and Love Story particularly seem to oblige the listener to crank it the fuck up and rock out, despite an otherwise relatively polite production; and I'm not suggesting Love Story sounds even remotely like anything from the first three albums by the Damned, but I can imagine what the Damned version would sound like without giving myself too much of a headache.

This Was a band who had a ton of fucking fun playing this stuff by the sound of it, as distinct from the subsequent entity which introduced live versions of its old standards with footnotes explaining how the lads had since added more twiddly bits to keep it interesting for themselves. My former musical boss presumably kept the decent albums to himself when passing on his cast offs, hence the absence of Aqualung and others in the above list; So there's doubtless much that I haven't heard and maybe should, but for the moment I prefer to remember them this way. Given that everything I like about this album seems to have been down to Mick Abrahams who left soon after, this leaves me with the peculiar realisation that I probably need to listen to Blodwyn Pig.

Hard-Fi - Stars of CCTV (2005)

Here's another one about which I've never bothered writing, having assumed I'd already done so at some point; the reason for the assumption being that I listen to it quite a lot and that it's probably one of the greatest albums of all time, at least to my ears.

At least based on what I recall hearing on the radio at work, rock music was pretty much a complete waste of time by 2005, a vast Glastonbury shaped sludgepit full of grinning NME-sponsored idiots channelling the Kinks through a fuzzbox in hope of landing a car insurance advert as Jo Whiley stood to one side pretending to be your mate. Somehow Hard-Fi couldn't fail to shine because they sounded like a real band rather than something which crops up during the closing credits of an edgy Channel 4 sitcom about teenagers smoking crack during a media studies degree.

Stars of CCTV sounds a little like it may have happened as a result of my generation having kids, kids which were then raised in houses featuring a dad who still listened to the Jam on a daily basis. It's not quite the Jam, but there's something of Down in the Tube Station at Midnight in there - the smells if not quite the sounds - a little power pop, maybe even a few old Motors records, and of course the name comes from Lee 'Scratch' Perry; so it's all those things and yet not quite any one of them, because it does something different which isn't reliant upon nostalgia.

The first time I heard Hard to Beat it seemed to suggest what the Jam would have sounded like had they formed two decades later as some filter disco act; and the rave, or possibly post-rave aspect is part of the wallpaper which nailed Stars of CCTV to the place it was coming from, and the place it was coming from wasn't much different to where I was living so I was seriously feeling this shit, as the saying goes. Stars of CCTV sounded like a genuinely working class voice in a world turned over to consumer satisfaction surveys and focus groups. I recognised the stench of south London fried chicken, hangovers, post-war housing, belches of beer past the sell by date from Weatherspoons, freezing your bollocks off outside some club in November, estuary English and bills which may or may not get paid on time. This is what it was like living in south-east London in 2005 but without the voyeuristic glamour of wobbly camcorder documentaries, and without even trying to sell the grime as an aesthetic. It's grim, and yet it's mostly a celebration with all the joy of forked fingers waved at a security camera. To be honest, it's actually similar to what many grime acts were doing at the time but for the fact that it's rock music, even mod in an absolutely literal sense. Stars of CCTV is not a happy album, but it's a long way from being a miserable one, and every last track packs a serious punch. This was what it was really like to be young.

Control (2007)

This may be a bit of a digression but I'm sure it figures given that Anton Corbijn's biopic of Ian Curtis attempts to map the still growing legend of Joy Division, roughly speaking. I read Deborah Curtis' autobiography about a million years ago so I was already approximately familiar with the territory when this turned up on Amazon Prime or one of those, meaning I finally got to watch it; and of course I was a massive fan for about six months, specifically the teenage years during which it's only right that one should fixate on the work of a specific pop group as the most important thing ever. I still remember where I was when I heard that Curtis had died. I was on a coach as part of some school trip to the Royal Show at Stoneleigh and had noticed that Love Will Tear Us Apart - which had been one of our things up until that point - kept turning up on wonderful Radio One, which seemed suspicious.

Should my tone here appear to be working its way towards the dismissive, and aside from the aforementioned six month obsession which burned bright without my actually bothering to buy the albums, I still believe their greatest material was the glacial punk of the Warsaw years, of which Unknown Pleasures seemed to represent the most refined expression; and the first New Order album which, for me, represents the best thing ever done by any combination of those people. It was more or less all over once Movement was in the bag, and, honestly, I never understood the praise heaped upon Closer - three or four decent tracks with some other stuff, albeit beautifully produced other stuff. I still see internet dwellers claiming it be the greatest, most emotionally powerful album ever recorded, and I'm happy for them but I can't understand their way of thinking. They may as well be referring to the first Splodgenessabounds album, although I could at least get my head around that as a view to which someone might reasonably subscribe. Closer sounded too much like those bloody awful live bootlegs of Joy Division bum notes, false starts, and band members failing to play the same song at the same time as epitomised by Decades, a song which, at the risk of repeating myself, is distinguished by its sounding the same when you unhook the belt from your turntable and push the record around by hand. My friend Carl saw Joy Division a couple of times as support to other, less introverted acts and has described their stage presence as wispy and underwhelming, or words to that effect. For what it may be worth, my mother saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club in the early sixties and has since described the evening as nothing special.

Nevertheless, we have this big fucking legend to contend with, and so here it is in bold monochrome, for the sake of mood or possibly false modesty, because no-one could possibly live up to that level of hype, which tends to become cemented in place during one's teenage years. Yes, they were briefly amazing, but so were plenty of others at the time. Joy Division distinguished themselves with a genuinely troubled vocalist who wrote ponderously poetic lyrics drawing from outsider literature, tastefully removed from obvious showbiz affectations and the idea that actually this was just a pop band on stage playing their moody songs for your entertainment. Pay no attention to the glittery curtain but just look at that ominously abstract album cover with its ostentatious lack of information or fart jokes. Classy!

Each time I encounter the legend of Joy Division, I remember Jamie Reid's characteristically sarcastic acknowledgment, as reproduced in Fred and Judy Vermorel's Sex Pistols book.

The last few years have seen an increase in this cult of vampirism, of which the Viciousburger is only the latest example. Vampires are noteworthy for consuming star corpses in the form of burgers in the mistaken belief that some of the star's charisma will rub off on them; sadly, as you can see, these attempts are doomed to failure and these cultists deluded. The cult is said to have begun in the fifties with Deanburgers: these were very rare, and contained bits of Porsche wreckage and sunglasses - those cultists still alive who tasted them say they were tough but tasty. Perhaps the worst outbreak of vampirism in recent years before the Viciousburger scandal was the Presley burger scandal of 1977. The scandal was discovered when an attempt was made to steal Presley's body from the grave by occultists: the body was already stolen! It now appears that it was minced down and turned into the bizarre cult food, Presleyburgers. These are said to be very expensive ($1000 a throw) and high on fatty content, but it still didn't deter the thrill seeking showbiz crowd: Mick Jagger was said to have eaten several before his recent Wembley concert. Heavy prison sentences imposed in Canada on Keith Richards, another vampire, stopped the spread of this disgusting cult, but with the present Viciousburger scandals, it seems to be flourishing. And even now, there are unconfirmed reports of Curtisburgers, gristly burgers with hints of rope and marble.

Control attempts to tell the story of a real band - four seventies lads with some knowledge of football who liked a pint, enjoyed sexual intercourse, and went to the toilet just like the rest of us; and it attempts to tell the story in terms of the legend of the same, hence the silly black and white footage; and it attempts to balance the legend of Ian Curtis as damaged, brooding seer with the reality of his actually being a bit of a twat in certain respects - as are we all from time to time. The end result is beautiful in the sense of almost everything the similarly vacuous Ridley Scott has ever produced being beautiful, but as with Ridley Scott, we're essentially watching a Hovis advert that thinks it's Jean Cocteau's Orpheus. It pushes the obvious buttons, beyond which there isn't actually very much there because the band already said all that they had to say on the records.

This isn't to say that Control is a bad film so much as that it's more or less pointless. There are worse ways to spend two long, long hours of your life, but that's hardly a recommendation. As I sat watching this with my wife, Oreo - our free range house bunny - hopped over to the side of the cabinet upon which the flat screen telly is sat, to resume eating a handful of cilantro stems we'd given him earlier. He sat up and stared at us, nose going as always, with one green stem after another slowly disappearing upwards into his face; and somehow his bunny lunchtime seemed more profound and more honest than anything happening on the screen.

It cost six million quid to make too.

Incredible.

Nocturnal Emissions / Frag - Esoteric Sedition (2021)

Frag is the musical organ of Stephen Āh Burroughs, here in collaboration with Nocturnal Emissions with whom I'm going to presume you're all familiar. Frag seems to have been a fairly noisy affair, and is a new one on me, although Burroughs was in Head of David, which should at least indicate some of the general aesthetic to be found here in so much as that it's not massively sunny. Being reasonably familiar with the work of the Emissions, it's tempting to hear the more melodic element as Nigel's doing, sitting on a church organ and moving his bottom up and down the keyboard while Burroughs hoovers the nave, or possibly just jabs a screwdriver angrily into the innards of a transistor radio; but its probably nothing so simple. What we have are twelve relatively short pieces - not quite ambient, not quite noise - contrasting drifting notation with grinding electronic texture to surprisingly emotional effect, working by means of a sort of neoclassical melancholy without necessarily resembling anything you would expect from such a description. Nomical Index in particular reminds me of Górecki's third symphony, for example.

I have no idea how Esoteric Sedition figures within the broader span of Burroughs' other work - which seems worthy of investigation on the strength of this - and while Nigel has released a ton of discs of this general type over the years, collaborations included, this is possibly one of the very best.

We Be Echo - Isolation (2021)

Mother of God - I'm sure the previous one came out about three weeks ago, but whatever the case may be, the lad is quite clearly on a roll. Isolation continues on the trajectory begun with Darkness is Home then The Misanthrope with improvements here and there, greater confidence in the vocal department, sharper mixing or whatever. It's difficult to quite say what sets this one apart from the other two, but there's something for sure, and even as Kevin Thorne continues to work with what might seem like a restricted musical palate, he's kept it sounding fresh, very much like a new thing each time another album comes out of the gate. As before, it's mostly drums, bass, and vocals - driving songs, or maybe grooves with some distant kinship to Joy Division or maybe Suicide or Chrome - particularly Into the Eyes of the Zombie King - but not entirely like any of the above. The wall of bass - everything here is played on four strings - is such that it's taken me three albums to really notice what's going on with the percussion, and although it isn't a main feature, this material would be the poorer with just a Doctor Rhythm ticking away in the background. I assume the percussion is programmed but it somehow doesn't quite feel like it, and has an almost John Bonham sense of presence in so much as that it pounds and is doing more than just keep time. One might expect an album called Isolation to sound pretty miserable, particularly when it's the follow up to one called The Misanthrope, but it's actually quite difficult to describe how this album makes me feel - sad, sort of wistful, not actually unhappy, and yet kind of warmed by the cinematic wash of emotion. I know I probably said the previous one was the best yet, but it could actually be this one.

Jay-Z - The Blueprint III (2009)

I kept tabs on Jay-Z right up until just before this album came out, then lost the thread due to moving house, moving country, and a load of other stuff happening all at the same time, not least being marriage. Once the dust had settled, I came across this in CD Exchange. It hadn't even occurred to me that he might have kept on putting out new material in my absence, particularly given the number of times he'd already announced his retirement. My hopes weren't high given that the last two had been pretty underwhelming, but what the fuck? I thought.

It didn't make much of an impression at first, which is why I've had The Blueprint III on my shelves for a couple of years and only now have I come to play it more than twice in the same week; and yet it made some impression because I kept listening, albeit infrequently. I've had both Kingdom Come and American Gangster significantly longer and still couldn't tell you a single thing about either, except that the pillock from Coldplay is on one of them.

I always had the impression Jay-Z was on a mission to record the mythic classic rap album, solid from start to finish, the set which would hold its own alongside Illmatic and the rest. He came close more than once but I'm not convinced either The Blueprint or The Black Album ever quite got there, great though they undoubtedly were. Given how The Blueprint III follows a couple of duds and  represents the third recycling of a winning title, I had a feeling it was going to be one of those in the vein of The Dynasty which just sort of sits there between a couple of better records - not actually bad, but not something you'd necessarily bother including on your CV; but now that I've made the effort, I realise I'm wrong, and The Blueprint III may even have been his best - if not in terms of immediacy.

The standout tracks, What We Talkin' About, Empire State of Mind, and Real As It Gets are easily amongst the lad's greatest for my money, perfecting what I suppose we might as well call stadium trap - cinematic whilst somehow invoking Aaron Copland through the thoroughly contemporary orchestration - at least as of 2009 - of vaguely epic squiggles copied and pasted to different bits of a screen; and it probably helps that the rest of the record does its own thing rather than attempt to capitalise on this winning formula. No ID, Timbaland, the Neptunes and others - notably Kanye West before we all got sick of hearing about the fucker - chop up something extrapolated from that New York sound rooted in DJ Premier and the like, soulful with a lot of kick in the lower end but without necessarily covering old ground. Only Swizz Beatz lets the side down, phoning in another one of those things which sounds as though it came from the soundtrack of Jersey Shore and should rightfully be backing a loop of Deena saying something fucking stupid about how much she likes to party; but never mind. Everybody is allowed at least one clunker when the rest is good.

Lyrically speaking, Jay-Z does what he usually does, namely bigging himself up for an hour or so with a reasonable degree of wit. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, and on this occasion it works really well. Swizz Beatz aside, all the elements here add up to something greater than the sum of their parts, resulting in album of such fresh and breezy composition that it has the feeling of a debut - not bad going for a guy who had just reached the end of his second decade in the biz.