Killing Joke (EG/Malicious Damage)

I'm always remembering this record as much more harsh and aggressive than it actually is. I blame the cover artwork, a masterpiece of bleak dystopia, which makes even Crass records seem cuddly by comparison.  The photos are actually taken from actual uprisings in Northern Ireland, so the spirit of unrest is prevalent throughout Killing Joke. This stark monochrome presentation, the weird typeface for the song titles which looks backwards until you squint and see it's not, and the presence of synthesisers are factors which probably cause me to remember this as some sort of Ministry-like wall of industrial noise, or even sounding a little like Big Black. That's not really true, as the opener 'Requiem' actually has some new wave residue and the songs tend to favour soaring, majestic vocals. So each time I listen to this, somewhat less often than once per year, I'm reminded that it's not as scary or nasty as I thought – which is not to say it lacks 'tude. It's a confident debut by a band who amassed a decent career, though I never heard any of their subsequent music, content as I am with my incorrect conception. 'The Wait' is the closest to my memory's image, a punchy stomper with growled vocals, and it's followed up by 'Complications', where the vocalist's English accent is most prevalent, poking out form the echo effects. 'Bloodsport' brings in a somewhat infectious rhythm and the synths punctuate buzzsaw guitars which amass into something, well, rather accessible. It's not hard to imagine this playing in a disco for drunk youngsters, at least in an interesting disco. I am 99% sure I chronicled this anecdote before somewhere on this blog but it's too funny not to mention again: In my high school, there was a kid who wrote band names on his notebook and jacket, to be cool, even though he didn't actually listen to to the bands, which made him the ultimate early 90s sinner - a 'poseur'. Anyway, he would frequently get the band names wrong, mostly just misspellings like 'IRON MAYDEN' or whatever, but I remember he had written 'KILLER JOKE' on either his notebook or jacket, I don't remember which, and, well, that's the whole story. But KILLER JOKE is a great band name, an even better one than Killing Joke. 

Gang of Four - 'Solid Gold' (EMI)

Jon King starts off Solid Gold without even singing, just intoning the poem of 'Paralysed' over a slow, start-stop rock beat that never quite lifts up. If I reviewed the last EP by complaining about how the fun was slowly disappearing from these guys, Solid Gold seems to further that tendency. We get 'Outside the Trains Don't Run on Time' and 'He'd Send in the Army', both from that yellow EP, and a few other memorable tunes, namely the secretly depressing 'Cheeseburger' and the iconic 'What We All Want', a brilliant deconstruction of desire under late capitalism, which slows down the disco fury of Entertainment to a crawl, allowing Gill's searing guitars to be layered in a way which sounds pretty great when turned up loud. No, it's not particularly fun, but there's enough of a hook (the chanted 'Could I be happy with something else?/I need some thing to fill my time', which is great because of the duality of 'something' and 'some thing', which not only questions the whole aspect of commodification but also introduces a sexual element into it) so this ends up being a record I've always kept around and enjoyed perhaps more than I should. A lot of the songs are stuck in the same template - jerky, not as musically satisfying as the hits on their first album, which makes the lyrical slogans stand out more - 'wasting time's a hole in the wallet', 'show me a ditch and i'll dive in it', etc. 'Cheeseburger' is definitely the highpoint, where Gill's harmonics give it a shininess that's ironic juxtaposed with its weary, wage-slave tale lyrics. You'll notice that I often follow the conventional wisdom, which is that after the original rhythm section changed, the band was never quite the same, and while their Marxist posturing was always clearly just posturing (after all this is EMI), it became too obvious to enjoy, as they strived more for pop hits. I don't know if that's actually true at all - I think I only heard Sara Lee-era Gang of Four once or twice - so maybe I should dig into Songs of the Free. We all know that the real radicals were just down the road -- the Mekons -- and yes, I will mention the Mekons approximately 40million more times here before we eventually make it to the Ms (2023?). There's a reason for that, though.

Contortions - 'Buy' (Ze)

They called this stuff "no wave" and I guess that's because it had some nasty sounding guitars and a snarl behind the fun - though I suspect these guys were just as fussy about footwear and hairstyles as their keyboard-soaked peers. I always though the Contortions predated James White and the Blacks, but apparently they operated in parallel, which means this is less of a James White/Chance vehicle then I thought. Guitarist Jody Harris has to get some credit for being integral to this; certianly, his playing is the reason to listen in 2011. This is actually fun party music, with disco beats and fake-free guitar parts; the clanging and dissonance all stays contained and the structures never get too wild. It's a short album, more like a mini-LP, and there's weird bursts of alto sax that make the whole thing sound insanely clean. James Chance sings like an American Mick Jagger but I'm not sure what to compare his sax technique to. There's actually far less sax than I remembered, and it never gets that dissonant except on the last track 'Bedroom Athelete'. The songs are fast and fun, drenched in attitude that fits well when the guitars go wild; 'My Infatuation' is all shreds and slides, removing the traditional role of the guitar entirely, and you can do that when you have such a snappy, solid rhythm section. 'Twice Removed' is my fave because it hints at what the Contortions could do when they held their tendencies at bay; there's a brooding tension remniscent of what Pere Ubu were doing at this same time though it resists the urge to get truly weird. The presence of keyboards is quite minimal, but when they're there, it's cool - more like a fruity 60's organ feel. These currents of youth attitude come and go in waves, because this now reminds me of the Nation of Ulysses in some ways.