Lemon Kittens - 'We Buy a Hammer for Daddy' (United Dairies Produce)

The Lemon Kittens only made two records before disbanding, though Danielle Dax went on to a somewhat more renowned solo career. It's a shame, because their art-school outbursts feel remarkably prescient in 2019, and (to my ears, today) especially British. United Dairies released this, and there's certainly a feel that is closer to early Nurse With Wound than anything appearing on Rough Trade at the time, although it's far more song-based and rock in nature than Chance Meeting. I hear the undeniable influence of the Residents, at least in tone and instrumental interplay ('The American Cousin' and 'Rome Burning' could be featuring Snakefinger as a guest musician, though everything played on this record was either Blake or Dax), and there's an energy in the more madcap tracks that definitely is fuelled by some frustration, even there aren't overtly social-leaning tendencies in the lyrics. More reference points can be teased out (Beefheart, early electronic composition, probably Throbbing Gristle) but it's not necessary to place this into a lineage, even though that's my vestigial habit. Time has been extremely kind to We Buy a Hammer for Daddy, and this feels like a crucial piece in that wonderful, fertile period of British music where the avant-garde collapsed onto rock forms and a lot of weird stuff snuck through the cracks. Today's pop scene, at least the kind of pop that gets written about in publications such as The Quietus, surely has the same sense of freedom and juxtaposition, though I feel far closer to older material, personally. And there's just so much going on here, vocally especially ('Motet' is just magic, where Dax/Blake have a pretty great interplay that complemented each other well). Even the loose and exploratory parts (side two opens with 'Pain Topics', which flutters around under the shouted vocals and razorblade guitars, which eventually cascade into a wall of sound) feel like they have a vision, a pathway towards something that is never without consequence. Furthermore, it feels like a balanced duo – I don't know enough about either musician outside of this record, so I shouldn't make this declaration, but I feel like this is a pure 50/50 mix between their two personalities. There's a wonderful world envisioned here, and I want to explore it.

The Jesus and Mary Chain - 'Psychocandy' (Reprise)

The sun don't shine, the stars don't shine, the walls fall down, the fish get drowned – it's bleak on the surface, but I never took the Jesus and Mary Chain all that seriously. At least not when it came to their goth posturing; what were they trying to be, druggie weirdos, retro rockers, or post-new wave shoegazers? Many people never cared for anything they did as much as this debut LP, and maybe I'm included - I certainly don't own any other recordings by them, though I used to have Honey's Dead on tape. Psychocandy is wonderfully simple, and I didn't realise that Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie was the drummer on it but the beautiful monotony of the rhythms made me look at who it was, and wouldn't you know it, it was him – which makes sense, in a way. The unforgettable drumbeat is the opening one, on 'Just Like Honey', still the J&MC song that seems to turn up the most on soundtracks and over the sound system at bars and clubs. That beat may just be the key, since it might as well be sampled from 'Be My Baby', and the 'candy' aspect is all I can hear today. That almost the exact same beat opens 'Sowing Seeds' doesn't seem to matter; Psychocandy is 14 songs but somehow feels short. A lot of drama can be packed into those songs; when it sounds like it can't get any more full-on, they can still stomp on a different set of effects pedals and kick things up to another level, as heard on 'My Little Underground'. In high school this music sounded so nihilistic and pushy to me, even though the melodies are undeniable (the 'uh-uh-oh's in 'Taste of Cindy' seemed ironic to me then, but now they sound to be bathed in as much adoration as they are in feedback). Really, this is the Ramones through one more iteration, or just using (slightly) different drugs. The guitar feedback squeals bathe everything with a greater sense of chaos than the shoegazer bands would dare try just a few years later; that's when it really sounds great, turned up loud - 'Inside Me' can even sound a bit scary on the right system. Sometimes all a band needs to do is figure out how to combine two things no one else was combining; in this case it was poofy hair + feedback. For awhile it seemed like trends in pop music came in regular waves, so it was logical that a 60s pop revival would happen in the 80s, though filtered through 80s aesthetics; that 70s folk-rock would get another wave in the 00s, etc. Now, things are too fragmented (subculturally and in terms of influence) so there's just everything all of the time, which means there will always be bands worshipping at the altar of Phil Spector and approaching it with whatever affects of the contemporary milieu are around. Just like there will always be bands worshipping at the altar of Hasil Adkins or the Stooges or Malaria or whatever.  I can't see a pop artist like the Jesus and Mary Chain ever achieving much chart success again, even in the UK, but the same is true for anyone that bases music around guitars now. I don't mourn this change, but rather enjoy the next wave which sounds very much of the moment – bands influenced by the J&MC as much as the J&MC were influenced by the Ronettes. This includes Merchandise and Cometa Fever and a lot of other stuff and while it starts to run together for me at some point, it's a sound that's always enjoyable, maybe because it brings back a sense of teenage cool so otherwise lacking in my life.

Iran (Vulgar Tango)

I used to have this on CD but 'upgraded' to the LP, which comes with a bonus 45 rpm 10", recorded about a year later and having zero presence on the usually infallible discogs.com. Iran are a group I know essentially nothing about except I received this to review for something, as a CD back in the early 00s, and always liked its warped, art-rock approach. At a time when I was looking to both drone/minimalism, textural approaches to composition, and collage material such as The Faust Tapes, it seemed to tick a lot of boxes. No one would ever describe Iran's sound as 'precise', but it's not a giant mess either. There's not a total abandonment of guitar-based indie rock, clearly their roots, but they were obviously looking to push forward beyond that sound. There's noise without chaos; tracks like 'Radio Galaxy' revel in static, hiss and its variable possibilities, but stay aware of space, time, and pace. 'The Music Plays Itself' (found on the bonus 10") continues the interplay of radiowaves and guitar, on a bed of tremolo and with some delicately expressed singing for just a second before a wave of thicker buzzing takes over. Though the guitar playing in 'Sailors' sounds like someone falling down the stairs, it's herky-jerky for good reason, and the various layers of buzzing guitars, static, and electronics throughout it (and other tracks) all seem to be there for a common purpose. It's not a kitchen-sink band, but rather a band that was seeking a way out of the easy disharmony of the spacey jam. We get flavours of genres - 'Spherical Cockpit' is one such example, a deconstruction of anthemic guitar post-rock, which by '98 when this came out was already pretty tiresome. Here, the chords build up, but there's zany synth sounds challenging the rigidity, like a shortwave radio broadcast of Mogwai or something. "Deconstruction" is such an easy term to throw into music writing, and it's often used to describe approaching a song from the inside-out, but Iran is actually more about construction - about choosing layers to mean something and combine for important textural form. It's lo-fi hi-fi, if that makes any sense - there's a clear soundstage on 'Crickets', Western Avenger', and even the hissy static of 'Yellow Tiger Lemons'. When vocals are present they're often processed beyond intelligibility, adding to the overall aesthetic with just enough odd words slipping out to steer things; or in 'Goodnight, Goodnight' they're delivered conventionally but with everything else out of balance to make it a parodic pop song, and a solid album closer.'San Diego' is the shortest incursion into this direction, with crisp acoustic guitars and even ending with a clearly emoted lyric!  'Drugs' and 'DC', the 33rpm side of the bonus 10", don't appear on the CD version of this album and are rendered in glorious fidelity, with the indie/post-rock presence of 'DC' a bit like if Bedhead got taken over by a computer virus. Overall it's a great assemblage that stood a bit ahead of its time – this type of experimentation felt a bit more common a few years later, by which point Iran had moved on to their second and third albums. I'm not sure where they are now, if anywhere.

Hüsker Dü - 'Metal Circus' (SST)

My copy of this classic has a really bad warp, the kind that sends the stylus flying with each of the 45 rotations per minute. It's so bad that it renders the first song on each side unplayable - in fact, unstartable, as the constant pushback of the skip means it can never get into the opening groove for tracking. So 'my' Metal Circus begins with 'Deadly Skies', and an already short EP becomes a bit unsatisfying when two songs shorter. Serves me right for buying this so eagerly at a weird cheap punk shop in Copenhagen - we should always inspect the vinyl, right? 'Deadly Skies' is a fucking great song though, where the lead guitar lines and Bob Mould's voice work perfectly together. I never thought of the title of this record in terms of 'heavy metal' as this sounds properly like early mid-period Dü, but there is a way that lead guitar/voice combo sounds like a banshee screaming, plus the shredding on 'Out on a Limb' has a few pinch harmonics inside. Grant Hart bats 1.000 here, with 'It's Not Funny Anymore' and 'Diane' being two of his greatest songs. The latter of these may actually objectively terrible, if music could be objectively anything, but I love it; it's creepy, built around a simple, plodding rhythm, and with a strange violence that definitively ties this to the earlier, more adolescent period of the band. The drumming throughout this record is mixed really high, and something feels really imprecise about it; I don't think Hüsker Dü would ever again sound (at least on record) like a bunch of midwestern freaks jamming in a garage, and that's another reason to love this. Minus two songs, it's a shame, really just like a good 7". It's almost hard to believe that Zen Arcade was about to follow, but that's also part of the charm of this.

The Hospitals - 'Hairdryer Peace' (no label)

Sonic Youth already released an album called Washing Machine, but that's a more apt household appliance than a hairdryer for reflecting the music of the Hospitals. The floor tom is the most prominently used drum and it's used in a way that sounds like when you accidentally put a shoe in your washing machine and it bangs around on every rotation; it's not quite the same as Moe Tucker, as it's usually supporting a thick wall of mid-range distortion, which I guess could describe White Light/White Heat which is definitely an antecedent, but, no, it sounds like something else. I don't know anything about these guys but vaguely remembered this record getting a bit of buzz when it came out, so I grabbed a secondhand copy for a few bucks when I saw it and don't think I ever listened to it until now. I'm not sure if the Hospitals were connected to the American noise underground or the garage underground, as the sound is halfway in-between. The fidelity is terrible, but there's a commitment to that terribleness that is somehow admirable and it makes this a compelling listen - well, that and that there are some well above-average song structures behind it all. It took a few songs to emerge - at first I thought this was the missing link between Wolf Eyes and the Not Not Fun/Night People style of homemade lo-fi psych. But then 'Rules For Being Alive' came on, a prominently surf-influenced song that made me guess a few things right - that they're a west coast band (hard not to be when you sound like this), that they might have some connection to Sic Alps (Discogs tells me that Mike Donovan was once a member), and that this record was made far more carefully than it might sound at first listen. The lyrics are clear and audible in places and seem to usually describe getting high, fear, or other states of altered consciousness. Everything else is really buried but it's a pleasure to pick things out; these guys step on the DOD pedals always a bit too early and there's some great vocal sea/sweeps, like if Phil Spector blew his budget on rancid tacos and had to make do with what he could. This is so obviously made for a cassette release which makes the vinyl pressing beautiful and ridiculous at the same time, and there's some really catchy songs ('Scan the Floor for Food', 'BPPV') if you can strain through it. Somehow while listening to this I smelled burnt charcoal, felt a musty wind, and kept thinking of The Bachs. Yet the ragged nature keeps this from being a retro trip, and like many great records it feels like an amalgamation of many underground rock currents circa 2008, when this was recorded. I'm not saying it's the Deceit of its day, but it's an exemplary case of white Dionysia of the time and I think it will stand up to future scrutiny.

Richard Hell & the Voidoids - 'Blank Generation' (Sire)

Far be it from me to care about musical 'authenticity' - to even think such a concept should exist - but I rather affectionately think of this album as an example of 'fake punk'. But what is real, what is punk, yada yada yada - boring conversations, sure. What I mean is that Blank Generation fits a lot more with the genre of 'classic rock' than with Crass or Black Flag or even the Ramones, that's all - it's a bold statement, all attitude, an invented persona glossed up and sold to the kids no different than it was done for early Dylan, Elvis, Iggy, Johnny Cash or any other male greats. That the Voidoids were a solid rock band with great guitar interplay and a knack for anthemic songwriting is often overlooked behind all of the alienation and youthful romanticism, but at this point in history the fun outweighs the sense of posturing (for me). Robert Quine and Ivan Julian are the stars here, the former ending up on Lou Reed's The Blue Mask later; I'm not always sure who is the 'lead' player but they are both aspiring guitar gods, and there's some totally shredding solos here (another reason I've never felt comfortable considering this to be 'punk' - because my punk world is more austere and principled, not so hedonistic in terms of rock and roll's supposed excesses circa-1975). Hell's lyrics are mouthy and sassy, occasionally brilliant ('Another World') and often faux-brilliant, which is a different kind of brilliant but still brilliant (the sex-obsession here is primal and raw, with the first three songs all drenched in sensuality and body-talk). The guitar lines leap out with pierces and stabs, high pitched enough to be slightly annoying and anti-social, at least in terms of mid-70s rock, and Hell's sneer takes centre stage most of the time. I always found the recordings of Hell with Television to be disappointing (or at best, just a curiosity); never heard Destiny Street either. But Blank Generation is a satisfying listen for sure. Best song: 'Betrayal Takes Two' (weirdly covered by King Missile, and they did it well); it's a catchy, uncentered insight into human relationships that's still charged with post-teenage bloodflow passion. Best baller move: (not-)singing the 'blank' (depicted as '_____' in the lyric sheet) on the album's title track, a true anthem of discontent. 'I was sayin' let me out of here before I was even born' is just about goddamn perfect no matter how you look at it.