Swell Maps-Jane From Occupied Europe (1980)

"Death in the computer age has beget the Internet wake: teary, funeral parlor eulogies splayed across message boards, long-time chums and one-time companions expressing their perfectly formatted grief with a quick “submit.”

When Nikki Sudden passed away unexpectedly in March of 2006, I found myself perusing various fan sites, Sudden’s infinite number of collaborators and cohorts—most of whom had never met in person—comforting one another with disjointed, yet earnest, epistles honoring the singer-songwriter’s solo years, as well as his work with Swell Maps and the Jacobites. My favorite came from Phil Shoenfelt, member of the post-punk outfit Southern Cross. Shoenfelt wrote of an unusual recording session with Sudden (born Adrian Nicholas Godfrey) atop a Moravian mountain, the secluded studio located in the back room of a pub. Shoenfelt’s green Skoda conked out a kilometer short of the studio, forcing folks to lug gear the rest of the distance—merely adding to the sense of lunacy that typically harried any recording session involving Sudden.

Shoenfelt’s memory remains with me because it could have detailed the recording of Jane from Occupied Europe, an album by Sudden’s Swell Maps. Bandmates cloistered atop a mountain peak, battling one another and the itchy agitation that comes with cabin fever, dabbling in the practice of bricolage to both survive and work (gathering whatever one finds for fuel and food, taping whatever one hears to four-track), writing bustling pop-punk tracks by day, claustrophobic lunacy by night—it’s imagery that gambols through my mind whenever I give this work of sonic bedlam a listen.

Sudden and his brother, Epic Soundtracks (born Kevin Paul Godfrey), founded Swell Maps in 1972. Its primary function? To conquer West Midlands boredom with titillating noise. As Sudden sang in “Green Shield Stamps” years later, “Dave [Barrington], Epic, and I got together a band or two / Recorded in our bedrooms / What else were we gonna do?”

Swell Maps were DIY disciples from the onset, kicking at the chins of bravura by employing anything (books) and everything (boxes) as percussion. Little changed when the band became more purposeful. The first single, “Read About Seymour,” was self-produced and self-released in January of 1978 on the band’s Rather Records. Checking in at 86 seconds short, the crunchy punk track exhibited true amateur panache. Naturally, it caused Rough Trade shop owner Geoff Travis to come sniffing; the group’s ensuing three singles and two albums would be issued on the label.

Jane from Occupied Europe was the last of these releases (hitting racks in August of 1980), an exhausting, bipolar, and voluminous swan song for a blink-and-it’s-gone pop career. It’s chaos committed to tape, when quite honestly, it’s the band that should have been committed. One imagines Sudden, Soundtracks, and crew expelling an enormous, chest-sinking sigh when production was finished; the listener is compelled to do the same.

Years later, teenagers named Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg were two such listeners, falling under the sway of Swell Maps’ half-caste sound, which slovenly combined the alien hypnotism of Can with the snarly, animalistic rock of T. Rex. Later, as members of Pavement, the pair released the EP Slay Tracks (1933-1969) and paid tribute to their fractured, lo-fi heroes by adopting their own pseudonyms: Malkmus as S.M., Kannberg as Spiral Stairs.

Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore was also an ardent fan, once claiming, “Swell Maps had a lot to do with my upbringing.” The band’s incendiary pop-noise blend was later crafted into something more dynamic in his hands. Dinosaur Jr., R.E.M., and Evan Dando (who later struck up a working relationship and friendship with Epic Soundtracks) were on board, as well.

Honestly, it’s remarkable Jane from Occupied Europe inspired anyone. Anarchic records always implement some form of pop conscription, giving a band its own army of committed grunts. Swell Maps were anarchic, sure—they were also abrasive, invading, and panoptic, ever shifting and transforming. Listeners typically came away with a warm sense of accomplishment rather than prickly tingles of inspiration.

The album’s first side features a string of punk and post-punk numbers: the No-Wave inspired “Let’s Buy a Bridge,” where Sudden sounds simply Dylanesque; “Border Country” and its saloon piano; the three-chord rocker “Cake Shop” with its brilliant, out-of-place synth melody; and “The Helicopter Spies,” which shows Swell Maps could spit out great punk ditties when it wanted. Of course, doing so meant being toe-tagged with a genre, a very notion the band disliked. Thus, we have the music that follows.

“Big Maz in the Desert” flirts with industrial; Swell Maps were interested in the urban brutality (they did grow up outside Birmingham, after all) often depicted in this music, but were never willing to fully cross over to the world of tape loops and processing. Tracks such as “Big Empty Field” and the opener, “Robot Factory,” meanwhile, can be classified as mechanized ambient—music Brian Eno would have crafted had he been kidnapped and forced to toil in a Ward End automobile plant, grease staining his pastel feather boa.

The album wraps up with the minimalist “Raining in the Room,” a reverb-drenched number replete with nostalgia-inducing piano. It’s an ode to Sudden and Soundtrack’s pre-Swell Maps days: writing originals because they couldn’t play anything by anyone else, recording in their bedroom on reel-to-reel, thinking a pop career was impossible on account of their lack of quid for studio time and lack of general music acumen.

Swell Maps yearned to be different, but in neither a calculated nor pretentious way. Being grandiloquent meant you were full of shit. As a result, Swell Maps produced music both ahead and outside of its time."

Whooooaaaaaa. This band is insane. Just when you think they're about to go off on some poppy, Damned-esque punk tune then BLAM! Let's do something weird with it. This has been dominating my soul lately which is good cause it's cold and bleak outside and this keeps some pep in my step. Blah blah blah. Get yer kicks.

Boy, that's a swell map

Laddio Bolocko-The Life and Times of Laddio Bolocko (2005)

"NYC's Laddio Bolocko were borne of the ashes of classic early 90s post-rock. Formed in 1996 by members of Dazzling Killmen, Mars Volta, Panicsville, Craw and Chalk, they began as the next logical step for hardcore bands wanting just a bit more to chew on than shards of metallic noise and haphazard speed-beat. However, where most musicians with the cumulative pedigree of this quartet would either be playing straight jazz or make a nice livings as mercenary session men, LB channeled their muso energies into a tightly wound ball of steel rods.

As a group, they effortlessly converged at the service of drive and trance, occasionally jutting out unpredictably into harsher realms. Live, they were a powerhouse (perhaps drummer Blake Fleming learned a few things during his tenure with Zeni Geva), and though their recorded history is brief, it demonstrates a remarkable range of expression, precision and raw power. I've read comparisons to This Heat, Can and Albert Ayler, and while dropping names is usually a quick, cheap way to avoid describing music, in this case I think it really does pay tribute to the quality of their stuff. In short, Laddio Bolocko were fucking awesome.

And now, they're gone. Sorry, you missed them. The guys are still playing (Fleming and Marcus DeGrazia in Electric Turn to Me; Drew St. Ivany and Ben Armstrong in The Psychic Paramount), but if you want to see LB now, you'll have to check out the video clip for "As If By Remote" on Life & Times of Laddio Bolocko. This two-disc set collects the entire recorded legacy of a band that might very well have become the premiere representatives of the noise/prog/kraut/jazz legacy as put forth by the aforementioned legends, and host of others currently receiving mega props (Flying Luttenbachers, Lightning Bolt, Ruins).

The first disc of Life & Times contains 1997's Strange Warmings of Laddio Bolocko, and is the more rambunctious of the two. "Goat Lips" opens on a pseudo-fanfare of guitar and drums, sun-beaming riffs reaching toward the sky like a bizarro universe prog band that didn't realize they were supposed to insert a keyboard solo in the middle of all that commotion. Before things get too stagnant-- and they never do; one of LB's strengths was they were able to play repetitive music that didn't seem redundant-- they launch a kinetic, jackhammer groove that might fit well on a new Boredoms CD if it was just a tad less funky. They change again, playing an emergency-siren guitar riff while Fleming slams anything in sight. It's a beautiful sound, and they're just getting started.

"Call Me Jesus" and "Nurser" emphasize the pure noise aspects of LB's sound, though still with enough a sense of pulse as to grant them post-rock membership on a technicality. Again, though they tend to hit a beat and stick with it, the small details-- DeGrazia's horn interjections in the right speaker, or the vaguely King Crimson-esque "chorus" blasts-- make very little go a long way. This pays major dividends on the unthinkably massive "Y Toros", which finds a few hundred ways to play the same three notes during its 34-minute tour. In much the same way This Heat played with rhythm on "Repeat", LB very rarely let a phrase go by the same way twice. Furthermore, they take almost ten minutes to climax; that may sound gratuitous, and I'm sure some folks are going to run screaming from the room during parts of the second half of the piece, but if extended foreplay with a messy peak is your game, this band wants to love you.

The second disc collects 1998's In Real Time and 1999's As If By Remote, documenting the band's considerable growth over its short lifespan. "As If By Remote" is exotic drone, full of disparate sound-bites, jungle bounce and a Middle Eastern guitar riff that leaves a dreamy haze over the entire tune-- a state perfected on the practically untouchable "The Going Gong". "A Passing State of Well-Being" serves up the sunny organ chords, similar to the vibe of the first tune on the other disc, but adds flute and a metronomic funk beat to transform what would be run-of-the-mill Chicago post-rock into muscular psychedelia. Similarly, "Laddio's Money (Death of A Popsong)" takes two chords and half a riff to construct what should be the world's most inept attempt at a Ted Nugent song into avant-garage greatness.

Obviously, if instrumental freak-outs of any variety aren't your bag, Laddio Bolocko might induce migraines. Yet this is rarely "noisy" music: where their would-be peers are going for the loudest and fastest riffs imaginable, pushing boundaries of sound into thresholds of pain, LB seemed to have been heading in a more textured direction. It's too bad we won't get to hear where they might have ended up, because bands that can craft delicate stones as well as rocky rave-ups aren't terribly common. In any case, Life & Times comes very recommended for those in need of a jam."

Awesome album for certain. Kick these jamz homie geez.

Call me Jesus

Boris & Michio Kurihara-Rainbow (2007)

"In general, there are two kinds of Boris records: 1) The fearless, focused, concept album that fully commits to a single idea (Absolutego, Feedbacker, Sun Baked Snow Cave, Altar) 2) The hybridized, genre-obliterating, “rock” record (Akuma No Uta, Pink). Rainbow is the latter; a record that crystallizes the band’s blissed-out moments into a glorious platter of epic guitar-anthems, psych-rockers, and hushed instrumentals.

2006’s Pink was a watershed moment for the band both commercially and musically. It introduced Boris to a new generation of western fans and distilled their Melvins-derived sludgecore into a concise, rock framework. Rainbow plays like a sequel to Pink in its further condensation of the Boris sound, but most of the swaggering cock-rock is gone and in its place are a mysterious batch of contemplative, moody, art songs.

“Shine” and “Rafflesia” are the epic focal points of the record and their histrionic swells recall the psych-tinged shoegaze of Slowdive and Ride—minus the latter band’s Brit-pop posturing. Wata and Kurihara’s guitars ascend wildly while Takeshi and Atsuo ground the rhythm section in a steady pulse of bass and drums. Boris’s interpretation of shoegaze is grander and more dissonant than most of the bands typically associated with the genre, reflecting their early drone-rock explorations and doom-metal tendencies.

The Japanese underground has a very distinct way of manufacturing western rock ‘n’ roll forms, often emphasizing the music’s mystical and spiritual elements instead of its sleek, outward accessibility. Bands like Ghost and Nagisa Ni Te have spent their careers exploring a more hallucinatory version of stoner rock and their influence is tangible throughout Rainbow. “Fuzzy Reactor” builds its groove upon a layered foundation of feedback and spliced, backwards guitar. Its pulse and drone are quintessential ’60s psychedelia and the buried vocal chants take from traditional Indian forms.

“You Laughed Like a Water Mark” is Rainbow’s definitive pop song. Its sleepy groove and listless vocal delivery evoke the late night subway rides and beer-soaked barrooms of downtown Tokyo. Kurihara plays the role of Neil Young, foiling Boris’s Crazy Horse simplicity and injecting the song with a heroin-shot of distortion and icy dissonance. “You Laughed” is the most effortless and instantly rewarding composition in the Boris canon and it is evidence of their rapid maturation as traditional songwriters.

Or is it simply the addition of Michio Kurihara? His influence on the overall sound and execution of Rainbow is enormous. His years of experience in the Japanese underground have made him a venerated elder statesman of the scene, and Boris seems to be soaking in all of his wisdom and worldly knowledge. The influence of Kurihara’s wonderful and frustratingly overlooked 2005 solo album Sunset Notes, manifests itself in Rainbow’s contemplative title track and chiming instrumentals (“My Rain” “…And. I Want”). There is a focus to this album that is clearly born of the collaboration between a disciplined veteran and a wildly experimental younger band."

Ah, this album holds a special place in my heart. By the time "Rafflesia" blasts into your face, you know it's one of THOSE albums. Great for sitting down and relaxing and stunning in its dynamic heaviness.

...And I Want

Mayo Thompson-Corky's Debt to His Father (1969)

"Although this, to put it mildly, is not a record for mainstream tastes, it nevertheless may be more palatable to pop ears than any of Thompson's numerous Red Krayola records. With a folkier bent than his group projects, Thompson projects himself as a lovable oddball of sorts, stringing together free-associative, non-sequitur lyrics against chord progressions and time signatures that, as is his wont, refuse to adhere to accepted norms. Much of it's rather catchy (if not hummable), though, with a whimsical sense of fun that makes it impossible to dismiss as pretentious artsiness."

Whoa. Folksy, off-kilter, quirky psychedelic blues. Take Red Krayola's awkwardness, Beefheart's weirdness, a real love for John Fahey with some very Jack Bruce-like vocals and you get this incredible concoction. Not to be missed.

Venus in the morning

Shit and Shine-Jealous of Shit and Shine (2006)

"Return of the mighty Shit And Shine, a massive sprawling noise rock collective from the UK. Multiple drummers, LOTS of guitars, even some lawnmowers and other noisemakers. This new disc takes their caustic freaked out psych-noise in a whole new direction, channeling their energy into blissed out sort-of krautrocky grooves, albeit still drenched in thick grinding crumbling grit with the needle ALL the way in the red. In fact -most- of the tracks here are some sort of hypnotic stripped down rhythm, just completely damaged and dinged up and pelted with thick slabs of hissy fuzz. Vocals struggly desperately to be heard, even the drums keep getting sucked under the massive swells of acidic sound, swirls of buzzing glitch and super blown out melodies are all draped over the endlessly propulsive rhythms, as they struggle to keep moving forward with layer after layer after layer of dense prickly buzz and drone piled atop them. A gloriously cacophonous caterwaul of rhythmic chaos.
Imagine the Psychic Paramount filtered through a Merzbow production and mastered by Masonna, pressed onto a lathe cut, then played a thousand times until the grooves all began to run together, then play it on a turntable made from an old microwave using a rusty nail as a stylus, and broadcast it through the blown out speakers in that junked car that's been sitting in your neighbor's yard for the last ten years. The record THAT sound, and broadcast it through a HUGE tuba shaped loud speaker with your head stuck all the way into the horn. Kinda like that. Imagine some Aufgehoben No Process, some Laddio Bolocko, some Wolf Eyes, some Butthole Surfers, even some Whitehouse and eighties no wave, but mix in a serious dose of Can and Faust and then douse it in thick swaths of noise, freeze it and shatter it into a million pieces. It all comes together on the album's 30 minute centerpiece "Practicing To Be A Doctor", a simple rock and roll drum beat, a million pounds of grinding low end, some grungy sludgy garage rock riffing, some buried mumbled vocals, and set the whole thing to just sort of lazily unfurl over the course of a lurching, druggy, damaged half hour. Suddenly we're also hearing some Brainbombs, some Terminal Cheesecake, even a bit of the Melvins, all wrapped up into endlessly motorik spaced out tribal sludge rock nirvana."

This is some seriously caustic music. If you like a total assault on the senses, I would highly recommend letting this album skullfuck your consciousness. Great distorted grooves as well. Grab it.

When extreme dogs go wrong

This Heat-Deceit (1981)

" Judged by its cover alone, Deceit (1981) is the great prophetic record of the era – the front depicts a scream beneath a mask that is a collage of: Mushroom-Cloud between-the-eyes; JFK & Khruschev shaking hands; Stars & Stripes across the tongue; Ron & Nancy on the forehead. These are the images still familiar in 2008. The lyric-sheet is scattered with the same clippings, and some more helpful captions. Much of this is identical to the collage ingredients for OK Computer (1997) and its singles: what to do in the event of a bomb, or when the siren sounds; where tactical nukes are deployed, worldwide; those oddly dehumanizing line-drawings of how to prepare your fall-out shelter. Deceit came out in 1981, though – a couple of years before Star Wars (the Strategic Defense Initiative); before Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein; before the first massacre of the Kurds. Ten years later, GW1; ten years further on, 9/11; then the War for Oil, then the Credit Crunch; and only this week can we see real hope of a decline in Republican war-mongering and financial mismanagement (the legacy of Milton Friedman, via Reagan & Thatcher). You know most of this; the point is, to get a sense of history… but also a sense of "prophecy" as a meaningful term in the context of avant-garde music.

Back in 1979, punk in the sense of scuzzed-up glam or sped-up blues had already exhausted its capacity for subversion. Nonetheless, a door had clearly been opened for the experimentalism of post-punk (in a loose sense), and within that (or overlapping), a kind of proto-industrial music that has little to do with Ministry, NIN, or Front 242. Alongside Lydon's definitive nail-in-the-coffin of the Pistols – Metal Box (1979) – This Heat's debut was the sound of re-invention and refutation, both musical and ideological. Heavier than Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire, the industrial analogies (at the time) require some contextualizing: industrial as a simile (metal on metal), industrial as a reflection of process (customized machines), industrial as an allusion to critiques of the "military industrial complex". The best (or worst) was yet to come, however…

Deceit (1981) is prophetic, for a start, in that it's glossolalic – it's gibberish, it's speaking in tongues, it's too many ideas at once, and if you throw them at the wall, some of them are bound to stick, and look like a warning three decades later, if not like Revelations. Thing is, prophecy often attracts the wrong people, and gets ignored by the rest, when they assume it must refer to some specific event in the future (i.e. Kabbalism), rather than referring to the horror here and now, but visibly imminent to those who can see the historic patterns (…which is one aspect of Gnosticism). Track 5, 'Cenotaph' spells this out: "his-tory / his-tory / repeats itself / repeats itself / Poppy Day – remember poppies are red / and the fields are full of poppies" – it's literally a song about decoding symbols, and not letting the signal become noise; it's not a Fuck You to the jingoism and self-righteousness of the generation who "served" (as Sid, Siouxsie, and others claimed their Nazi regalia was meant to suggest), nor does this song disrespect the dead, but it does demand that we re-consider our values. The most recognizably "punk" track on the album, 'SPQR' (Track 4), identifies another repetition, and how we're taught by rote to repeat the values, and sometimes the mistakes, of our parents – right back to the imperialism and centralized government of 2,000 years ago: "we're all Romans / we know all about straight roads / every road leads home / home to Rome / amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant."

The devastating industrial freak-out, 'Makeshift Swahili' (Track 8), condenses most of these ideas into one song, although you wouldn't know it at first from the Dalek-voice: "…makeshift she sings / in her native German / you try to understand / what she's trying to say / she says 'You're only as good / as the words you understand / and you, you don't understand / the words.' / CHORUS: Tower of Babel!!! / Swaaaaaaahili!!! / It's all Greek to me!" The middle-eight introduces a pretty guitar figure, and a second voice relates a fragment of history that might have been dropped in as a sample, years later: " 'we give you firewater / you give us your land' / 'white-man speak with forked tongues / but it's too late now / to start complaining…'" The sinister drones resume almost immediately, and then the song explodes with an intensity surpassing punk at its most violent – Charles Hayward shrieking "Rhubarb! Rhubarb! Rhubarb!" Granted, this track may not be the most obvious demonstration of the genius of This Heat – Yes, Babel remains the best-known parable of the dangers of imperialism (if not globalization) collapsing under the weight of its ambition; there are also hints that language is power, and literacy was an instrument of subjugation, in the case of the Native Americans, rather than being the gift of enlightenment (see also, Gang of Four's contemporaneous Entertainment!). These allusions operate according to the collage-principles of juxtaposition and partial-tearing to create new meanings – collage being the best known Dadaist strategy – but This Heat also employ sound-poetry and a kind of automatic-speaking akin to channelling and possession (these being associated with Dadaism's loopier, more magic(k)al experiments, pre-WWI). Art-history lesson almost done, it remains to point out that when inter-war Surrealism re-visited Dadaism, it used the slogan "Surrealism in the service of the revolution", and was firmly Marxist in its orientation. If 1970s English Progressive Rock was a debased surrealism in the service of trippiness, This Heat brought the revolutionary spirit back.

What of the rest of the album? It's a complex beast, whose intra-textualities are as numerous as the inter-textualities. The use of loops, drones, found-sounds, and unusual percussion (girders, dummy-heads) was so elaborate that you have to look to The Beatles' 'Tomorrow Never Knows' for a precursor, and as far ahead as Aphex Twin when describing the more danceable and abrasive tracks. A guitarist as evil – but subtle – as Charles Bullen wouldn't be found until Dave Pajo (of Slint), and if you want a comparison for the first album, only Liars have come close, with Drum's not Dead (2006). Personally, I can hear the ghost of Nico channelled into This Heat's weird mix of fucked-up lullabies (Track 1: 'Sleep'), and drone-based proto-industrial nightmares. The drawing of parallels between the End of Rome & the Cold War Era is also very Nico, and the phrase "the sound of explosions" on 'A New Kind of Water' (Track 10) feels like a reference to Eno's "bomb-noises" for Nico's The End. (Eno also recorded Manzanera's pre-Roxy band, Quiet Sun, who included one Charles Hayward, later of This Heat. Rhubarb Rhubarb.)

Opening track 'Sleep' tells us we're all unconscious, lulled by commercials (hence "softness is a thing called Comfort"), and these operate on us like Pavlov's dogs (CHORUS: "stimulus and response"). 'Triumph' might be suggesting a parallel between Neighbourhood Watch (imported from the US in 1982 – a landmark in the history of surveillance), and the early years of Nazism, when Riefenstahl assembled her filmic montage Triumph of the Will. 'SPQR' is sung in the first person plural and refers to the supposedly democratic electorate as "unconscious collective" – Cold War propaganda and sci-fi alike often fantasized the enemy as an insectile hive-mind, but this song isn't about an external enemy: the enemy is now internal. 'Independence' (Track 9) is, quite literally, the Declaration of Independence. Ask yourself, as a UK-citizen, have you ever read it? Do you know what it says? Could you imagine trying to implement its ideals now? Doesn't its endorsement of revolution sound – well, "un-American" (as the Patriot Act defines "American")? The climax is post-punk masterpiece and personal favourite, 'A New Kind of Water', which layers un-synchronized drums, bass, and a chiming guitar line – a distant siren that hasn't yet been recognized as a warning signal. As the parts cycle, and change in volume, the notes interact differently. The initial chorus vocals are those of impotent, infantilized consumers ("we were told to expect more / and now that we've got more / we want more"). After that, the vocal delivery is soulless and hollow – Winston Smith at the end of 1984 – we have hope, it says: 'a cure for cancer / we've got men on the job.' Urgency increases… the drums begin to pound… you realize the apocalypse is here and you wish you were in Neverland ("fly away Peter / hideaway Paul…"). The title of the final track is written in Japanese characters, transliterated into Romaji ('Hi Baku Shyo'), and then translated into English ('Suffer Bomb Disease'). There are no words in this murky, marshy soundscape – maybe this is the world in which only cockroaches have survived. Maybe English-speakers are only tolerated as slaves of the victorious "Yellow Peril" (hence the Romaji-script). Then again, maybe the bomb has already dropped, and we became insects without realizing it."

So this is what forward thinking music is all about. The very spirit you can hear flowing in and out of these songs is equaled by only the most groundbreaking and thoughtful bands. What a clusterfuck of noise, chaos, atonal melody, pulsating tribal rythym, chords that cut across your face like freshly sharpened blades, sounds whizzing in and out, abrupt changes, a message as dark as that ominous record cover...this band was in total control of what they were doing and what they wanted this mass of angst to sound like. So unbelievably essential in an industry (and blog) that probably uses that word to much. Though made in a different time, it sounds as fresh and urgent as any band still trying to push the proverbial envelope. You need this.

"The whole speak, 'Little Boy', 'Big Boy' [sic], calling missiles cute little names. The whole period was mad! We had a firm belief that we were going to die and the record was made on those terms.… The whole thing was designed to express this sort of fear, angst, which the group was all about really."-Charles Hayward

The Pop Group-We Are All Prostitutes (1980s/1998)

"It could have something to do with the fact that this is a compilation, but I still don’t buy it: judging from the tracklist of the other Pop Group LPs and comps, there’s not much of a difference here in terms of creating false cohesion, of bridging the lapses in a band’s output through the usual selective-memory procedures (Swell Maps, I’m looking in your direction)—everything seems to come from the same year or so, there’s a B-side here, but not much in the way of alternate mixes or singles-only tracks. In other words, there’s nothing that says the band couldn’t have put out this exact collection sometime before they imploded in 1980 or 1981. Therefore I have to conclude that this band just got a lot better: judging, after all, from the sporadically incoherent yet consistently bewildering Y, I was not sure if another Pop Group release was what I needed, at least right now. But here’s the incredible thing: whether it was because they spent more time hanging out with the Slits, or less listening to Crass and more listening to King Tubby, listening to this record is like watching the stoner in the back of your high school physics class suddenly start throwing out incisive questions about grand unified field theory. In short, it’s a tighter, far more accessible album that has the effect of retaining the righteous-activist’s indignation of Y while fusing the band’s unstable compound of disparate elements together into a listenable whole, intelligent enough not to fixate on the mirage of radical implications that often surround making inaccessible noise for its own sake.

The record certainly starts out letting one think the band’s succumbed to the seductions of fucking around: the indecipherable spoken sample and clattering rhythm track that begins “We Are All Prostitutes” in an appropriately extreme and caustic fashion is just deranged and alienating enough to make all who probably couldn’t make it through this album bail out immediately. But a minute into the track, a straightforward and well-conceived lyrical assault (“Aggression / Competition / Consumer fascism! / Capitalism is the most barbaric of our religions!”) rides atop what becomes a gutted-out disco bounce, replete with touches of scraping violin.

“Blind Faith” features an acute, head-spinning bass-and-drums groove that finally seems to realize the band’s promise of hybridizing JB’s, Gang of Four, and murky Kraut-inspired avant-ism: as Spartan yet instantly propulsive as anything recorded by ESG, the sinisterly muttered lyrics and threnodic horns take things in a grisly direction, yet the gradual acceleration of the track allows the ever-tight musicianship to expand itself in several directions at once without degenerating; an unexpectedly lovely percussive guitar coda that recalls Steve Reich is a welcome addition. “Justice,” another funk-driven track that’s heavy on the hi-hats, wah-pedal, and mind-bending noise effects in equal measure, features Mark Stewart’s most effectively, specifically exasperated vocal yet, railing against kangaroo courts, military aggression, imperialistic measures taken against Zimbabwe and Ireland. His saddened, I’ve-been-teargassed-too-many-times cries of “Who polices the police?” even echo Fela Kuti.

“Amnesty Report” sets just that—a report from Amnesty International of atrocities inflicted by the British on IRA members taken prisoner—atop an endlessly mutating, twitchy funk-and-percussion track that, while a tad Zappaesque and heavy on the found-sound spew, is one of the band’s most creative. Stewart here sounds colder, more sure of his convictions, than ever; if there was a campy and Jello-Biafra-like bemusement to be found in his previous vocals, there is, understandably, not a touch of it here. After that track grinds to a sudden halt, “Feed the Hungry” kicks in with an effective mixture of dancefloor groove and Remain in Light keyboard-drone psychedelia; Stewart again namechecks geographical locations of atrocity, all of which has is tersely broken down for the listener as follows: “The rape of the third world / World Bankers decide / Who lives and who dies.” (Even though the Illuminati is invoked, we can overlook it in this case.)

Breakneck, coming-apart-at-the-seams punk and bridge-burning funk are approximated on “Forces of Oppression,” which sounds a bit like “Give It Up and Turn It Loose” played by Ornette Coleman’s band circa his funky-catastrophe landmark Body Meta. It’s tracks like this one that require a cooldown like the sinister dub number “No Spectators,” a possibly Situationist-inspired indictment of all whose silent passivity implicates in atrocity. Of course, this is a heady charge to level against one’s audience, and it’s thankfully tempered throughout the course of the album to avoid simple dogmatism. The rousing, unexpectedly upbeat singalong of “Where There’s A Will” may be the highlight among all the offerings here; I can think of no more convincing offering of the post-punk era’s ability to assimilate what would appear to be incongruous idioms. Some delirious, downright Ohio-Players-esque guitar-and-bass runs and oddball Latin percussion keeps things appropriately joyous in the midst of struggle. Even if it’s a bleak one, it’s a party to which everyone’s invited."

Psycho crazy funked up political PUNK? You bet your ass.

EDIT: link fixed. my bad.

Where there's a will

Camberwell Now-All's Well (1992)

"All's Well is an excellent compilation which gathers together nearly everything officially released by The Camberwell Now during their existence from 1983 to 1987 - two 12" singles, an album and stand alone tracks which appeared on compilations - in chronological order. Their music was informed by a strong sense of place (Camberwell is a largely working class area of South London) and time; their lyrics, especially on the Ghost Trade, were highly critical of Mrs Thatcher's Britain.

The first four tracks come from the debut 12" single, Meridian. One track, a brief instrumental called Trade Winds, is not included here, presumably so that everything could fit onto a single CD. The first three songs sound more like Hayward solo than a group effort; he has the sole writing credit, and there is a minimal feel to the arrangements. The common theme is water, a recurring motif in Hayward's lyrics. Cutty Sark opens the proceedings, a song about the famous sailing vessel now moored on the river Thames near Camberwell. The arrangement is simple; a melodica refrain, cymbal and vocal by Hayward with bass and tambourine by ex This Heat colleague Charles Bullen, and the lyrics are about the ship's past as a vessel for trade with outposts of the British empire. Pearl Divers maintains the theme and mood, with keyboards and minimal percussion backing another mournful vocal. Dunkirk Spirit sees the entry of the full drum kit, played with a featherlight jazzman's touch, and an extended scat vocal introduction. Throughout these three tracks there is a feel very similar to Robert Wyatt circa Rock Bottom, and the lyrics reflect the band's left wing political views in an intelligent, understated manner. Resplash is a lengthy instrumental that reworks Splash, the closing track on the original 12" single and which gives the first full flavour of the band; Trefor Goronwy plays some nimble bass and also adds some ukulele, Hayward gets busy behind the kit and adds some simple keyboard motifs and Steven Rickard's loops and manipulations add the same kind of wild card to the mix that Gareth Williams' keyboards and tapes added to This Heat.

Next up is a stand alone track, originally issued only on an obscure and long deleted cassette compilation. Daddy Needs A Throne is effectively a curtain raiser for their album; the backing of the song is played on bass and drums with Trefor Goronwy using the full range of his instrument to play both low end rhythm and high end riffs and solos. Steven Rickard's tape work adds extra textures in the breaks, but it's basically a manic vocal/bass/drums performance with some extremely tight changes of tempo and metre. The Robert Wyatt influence is a lot less noticeable here - the sound is closer to Krautrock, with echoes of Can, Neu! and Faust discernible although the the lyrics and vocals are unmistakably English.

The band's solitary full length album, The Ghost Trade, was a remarkable achievement that demonstrated just how powerful a unit The Camberwell Now had become. Hayward and Goronwy had coalesced into an unbelievably tight, focussed rhyhtm section and the songwriting had found a distinctive, unique voice of its own. There are just 6 comparatively lengthy tracks on the album, and the musicians give themselves plenty of space and scope without degenerating into pointless noodling. The first two tracks, Night Shift and Sitcom, are in the same style as Daddy Needs A Throne - voice, bass and drums carry the bulk of the arrangement, with keyboards or tapes providing simple washes of sound or background drones. Abrupt shifts of rhyhtm and tempo occur throughout, while the lyrics take critical sideswipes at Mrs Thatcher's Britain. The pace slows down with Wheat Futures, which features no drumming for its first half, followed by a lengthy and discordant coda with ritual percussion and dark keyboard figures that recall Univers Zero's more sombre moments. 80s production values are in evidence on Speculative Fiction, which has what sounds like a sequencer generated bass line and a hypnotic bass/snare drum beat, which Hayward and Goronwy play over, around, under, across and through. Portions of the lyrics are spliced together from different voices (friends and neighbours, according to the credits) and the whole thing has bizarre echoes of 80s Pink Floyd. The Green Lantern is the shortest piece on the album, and features some heavy electronic distortion - it wouldn't have sounded out of place on a Can album circa Ege Bamyesi. The album closes with the title track, which clocks in at over eleven minutes. The lyrics hark back to This Heat's mighty SPQR, while the music builds up at its own pace. The instrumental section which closes the piece is carried by a simple motif that sometimes sounds like a glockenspiel, other times like a musical box. The bass and drums weave ever stranger patterns, while a simple electronic drone holds the whole thing together. All in all, The Ghost Trade is a masterful album which repays repeated and careful listening - an essential piece of 80s RIO.

A couple of significant changes had taken place by the time of Green Fingers, their final recording. The line up was augmented by Maria Lamburn on reeds and viola, and for the first time they were not recording in Cold Storage, the studio established by This Heat ten years previously. The result was something of a mixed success; the title track, apparently an old This Heat song, is a superb piece with extremely powerful bass and drums and some excellent jazzy interjections from Lamburn on soprano sax. The mood is maintained on The Mystery of The Fence, which moves into slightly more discordant territory and which has an extremely busy arrangement. Know How features Goronwy's only lyrical contribution to the Camberwell Now, and is a mournful, oddly inconclusive piece followed by a brief, sombre instrumental. For the first time since the songs which opened Meridian there is a note of uncertainty in evidence, and like the debut 12" single Greenfingers is good but rather patchy.

The Camberwell Now experienced little commercial success in their lifetime, which is odd given the extremely high standard of their output. Their bass/drum/vocal excursions may well ahve been a formative influence on Ruins - Yoshida Tatsuya is a big fan of Hayward's, and Cutty Sark was to remain in Hayward's solo live set. Comparisons with This Heat are inevitable, but they were emphatically not This Heat part 2; this was a band with its own sound and agenda and which developed into an entity as disticnct from its parent band as Art Bears was from Henry Cow or Matching Mole from Soft Machine. On the Ghost Trade they equalled This Heat's considerable achievements with their own, and on their other releases they explored other ideas and styles with varying degrees of success, some of which would inform Charles Hayward's solo career. All's Well is an excellent collection even though not quite complete, and is best listened to in segments corresponding to the original releases. Strongly recommeneded."

I'm a really huge This Heat fan so I can't get enough of them or anything remotely related. This is much more accessible than most of This Heat's work but Charles Hayward is a true musical master as evidenced here. Often straddling the fence between electronic, prog and the like, Camberwell Now is super hard to put your finger on, but that's the beauty of such releases anyway. Wonderful listen, especially "Wheat Futures." Gets me every time.

There's a force field on the front lawn

Pere Ubu-Dub Housing (1978)

"Ehteen years ago, the Minutemen posed a certain unforgettable question to their listeners. “Do you want New Wave or do you want the truth?” they asked us, and even if the first signifier is no longer as potent in inspiring disgust as it once was – given that today’s music, chart-pop and indie, proliferates with New Wave nostalgia – and even if its signpost has yellowed a bit with age, if our vinyl copies of Double Nickels on the Dime (remember, only the double LP has the “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” cover, before you jump down my throat on this one, and no, I don’t own it either) have since harvested their share of crackle and skip, I think this question is as relevant today as ever. Fans of adventurous music make a difficult choice, the same one the early punks made when choosing, in terms of appearance and action, to separate themselves from society and risk ridicule – well, far more than ridicule. I’m sure if you’re reading this, someone’s probably yelled something vague about being a fag at you for the way you dress or because you sucked at gym, but as books like Our Band Could Be Your Life and the typo-ridden, fanatical, weirdly compelling American Hardcore make clear, punks – the one thing street gangs, cops, and fratboys all could agree they hated – got handed beatdowns more often than not in ‘81.


So we can choose what we listen to and what we look like, it’s our decision whether to try to make ourselves acceptable to the people who most likely hate us, to watch bad TV so we have something to discuss over the water cooler, or to go elsewhere. Elsewhere is a lonely place. But I like to think this choice is a rewarding one; I’m not here to pontificate about how all mass cultural product equals grotesquely sexualized, rage-glamorizing offal, and that its purported alternative is often little more than a highbrow or subculture-cachet version of same, but let’s just say that Pere Ubu are the truth and forge ahead.


Of course, the truth – the genuine article, not the instrument of power that Foucault railed against – can be difficult to understand. No more cryptic, disjointed, and unpleasant an album could rightly be called a classic, unless we speak of the perverse fascination we reserve for outsider music. And this could be outsider music in a sense, only created by a band entirely aware of what they’re doing yet seemingly driven to do so. Listen to “Navvy” and you get a bright, almost cheery guitar figure that quickly finds itself in knots beneath squawks of blocky keyboard, and a rhythm that keeps falling to shreds, usually while another vocalist besides the inimitable Dave Thomas (who seems lost amidst the chaos in the childlike idyll of discovering that he’s “got these arms and legs that flip-flop, flip flip-flop”) informs us, “Boy, that sounds swell.” It’s a perverse mess, and a great lead-in to what follows. The surrealistic call-and-response game that propels “On The Surface” – which features the signature Ubu elements of a pulsing bassline, watery, happy-or-on-some-other-plane melody, and found-sound marginalia – presents us with what we’ve come to expect, but seems to end suddenly, giving way to the somewhat troubled title track. Thomas seems to be huddled in the corner of the darkened room he wrecked on the last album’s “Sentimental Journey,” lyrically concerned this time with the humanist Babel of frustrated tenants in a breathing building not without its own torments, its instrumental section, ushered in by an eloquent saxophone and featuring a similar restraint in its guitar-and-piano jumble, is a true highlight.


“Caligari’s Mirror” offers drama and grime in some of Thomas’ most out-there, intoxicated wailing, as well as a thrilling, motley, full-band chorus that seems intent on waking the very neighbors mentioned in the last track. Some unaccompanied, seasick bass-and-guitar figures, which offer a premonition of the obsessive-compulsive album-closer “Codex” (a quick recap: Thomas thinks about a girl all the time, he hangs around his public library copying obituaries from the local papers and articles from the Wall Street Journal, surrounded by bags both paper and plastic, and he thinks about her all the time, all the time, all the time) lend more than a hint of unease to this beery sojourn, however, a grimness that continues in the (overlong) next track, which offers more of the same, plus some off-tempo percussion, sonic horror-film ephemera, fantastic, cartoonish, Ravenstine-supplied monster-chomping sounds, and, well, lord knows what else. It’s called, appropriately enough, “Thriller!” This could’ve easily been an alternate title for an album filled with such an excess of psychic turmoil, but then what would Michael Jackson have done? Besides go crazy, I mean.


“I Will Wait” clocks in at under two minutes, a hopeful slice of hopelessness that nevertheless manages to come across as the rather more affirmative cousin to The Modern Dance’s “Life Stinks,” with its full-band drumrolls replaced by an intense, unwieldy series of synthesizer-led buildups that allow the usually reined-in guitars to reach an approximation of previous Ubu efforts’ maximum volume before teleporting out in a cloud of twisted metal and asbestos. Suddenly, “Drinking Wine Spodyody” and “Ubu Dance Party” arrive in its stead, offering some of the album’s most indescribable moments; the former’s off-kilter near-funk (circling, maddeningly off-time keyboard figures manage to shift things nicely out of focus, as does a brief foray into bass-driven stomp that sounds like the Fall cross-bred with Uncle Meat-era Mothers of Invention) and the latter’s logic-defying and apocalyptic, well, dance-rock (listen to the atonal chorus that provides its finale and try not to think of a 1961 vocal group, only with woefully drug-corroded brains) manage to startle and confuse more often than not. If all punk sounded as anarchic as these two songs, all the media outrage might’ve been warranted.


Another meandering instrumental, “Blow Daddy-O,” with its methodical synth ululation, drum-machine provided click-track and too-painterly-to-be-written-off-as-simply-messy instrumental squall, recalls early Kraftwerk being harassed in an adjoining studio by Faust. Then it’s “Codex,” my pick for the most powerful, unromantic portrayal of mental instability that the band ever committed (no pun intended! Ha!) to tape: booming, slave-ship percussion and mordant chants give way to a minimal yet incredibly effective guitar line, joined again by the absent-just-long-enough-to-make-an-impact Thomas. “I think about you all the time,” he repeats over a haunting soundclash. “The day fades away and the night passes over / And I think about you all the time / I think about you all the time / Here come my shoes / Here comes me.” Does he sound disgusted with himself? Does he sound numb? Is there an ending to this story? Well, no, or at least, there is not one that we don’t have to supply on our own as the guitar lingers, caressing us.


Listening to this song, and of course this whole album, I often feel deliciously imcomplete. I want to play it again. I get obsessive. Maybe this is what “Codex” is about – Thomas could not be thinking about someone all the time but rather about his preoccupations with that someone (thinking about thinking about someone all the time!), or some form of meaning in his life of the sort that someone could or couldn’t provide, or rather about a nonexistent version of himself that possesses the meaning he seeks – and maybe, well, it isn’t. Pere Ubu excelled at sketching out the chasms within, the moments some of us find troubling and others relish in the same way they do the idea that their emotional shipwrecks, the idea that they’re far gone from ever living normal lives. In other words, if you like to lose yourself in art and its complexities, if you like your albums to verge on presenting you with meaning just before they diffuse into some waiting dark, this is the album for you; if you want the abstruse, puzzling truth, this is the album for you. I think it resonates with what Jorge Luis Borges refers to in his famously inconclusive essay “The Wall and the Books.” “Music,” he writes, “states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation that does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.”

This record has been blowing my mind lately. From those glorious uplifiting moments to those moments of sheer terror, this album has it all tied it up in a wonderfully weird and enjoyable package. It's all over the place so if that's your bag, reach on inside. Very highly recommended

Have you heard about this house?

Brainticket-Cottonwoodhill (1971)

"Next time you feel like getting fried, listen to this! But never mind the first two songs on Cottonwoodhill; they are both a rather ho-hum affair. The real brillance on this disc is to be found throughout their 26 minute acid-fueled masterpiece, "Brainticket", the basis of which is a slightly varrying guitar/keyboard lock groove, kinda like Can at their most repetitive. Over this groove pulses all sorts of sound effects, such as machine guns, screams, gargeling, etc. Mostly, though, the overriding sound is their synthesizer, who, although not in the league of Klaus Sculze, nonetheless provides some very entertaining squawks, squeeks, beeps and drones, resulting is a very high-powered burst of aphetimene driven psychosis, dancable and meditative (but meditative in a disturbing, scary way)
But Brainticket the band doesn't stop there, and what really makes "brainticket" the song transcend ordinary greatness in pursuit of nutty brilliance is the voice of Dawn Muir. Sounding very Engish, she freaks out over the whole thing, recounting a very bad acid trip, doubting her exsistence, screaming her LSD-fueled insights, and just generally making a complete mess of herself.
...Suddenly you realize that the insanity is contageous, as the song stops, revealing a weird computer voice going "Brainticket Brainticket Brainticket" and you are left wondering just what the fuck is going on,just what is this I'm listening to? But then the song fades back in, and it's back to where we started...
Poor Dawn Muir, she sounds like a girl being dragged off towards a mental institution, and I wouldn't be surprised if she was still there. Because after this album, everyone in Brainticket freaked out, and only their keyboard player remained. While other Brainticket albums are interesting, none have the sheer grab you by the balls lunancy as witnessed all over Cottonwoodhill, the cover of which carries the helpful warning, "Don't listen to this record more than once a day or your brain will be destroyed!"

Here's a quickie before my computer dies and I'm stranded with no internet for another couple of days. If you like the mind-melting psych that is usually posted round these parts, there's no reason you won't enjoy this.

Pinky and the brain