skip to main |
skip to sidebar
One of the reasons I chose this Top 100 list from Pitchfork Magazine instead of, say, Rolling Stone, is that they’re not afraid to include groups like Throbbing Gristle, bands that everybody hates and no one listens to, but which were undeniably important in the development of modern music.
For the record, I don’t hate Throbbing Gristle. I think they’re awesome.
I've already reviewed this album once for this blog, but for the sake of continuity and a fresh pair of ears, I am happy to do so again. Throbbing Gristle emerged out of the English working class, where poverty, post-colonialism, and a declining influence in the world left many young people feeling alienated and disaffected. Throbbing Gristle channeled their misanthropy and hopelessness into making "industrial music for industrial people," melding post-punk and proto-electronica into something that was as bleak and cold as their teenage surroundings.
20 Jazz Funk Greats is the band's third official album, and sees them branching out from their noisy and distorted roots, crafting some pretty sophisticated and moody music. The album obviously owes a debt to early lounge music, as evidenced both by the title track and the similar "Exotica" which recalls some of the sounds popularized by Les Baxter and Martin Denny, albeit in a more perverse way. In contrast to the in your face aggression of the first two albums, this album is more like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet: sinister depravity lurking underneath a seemingly benign exterior.
For example, Beachy Head sounds like a lovely spot to go for a stroll until you realize that it’s a leading spot for suicide jumpers in Britain. Hot on the Heels of Love resembles a perfectly pleasant dance track, but the deadpan delivery of the group's chanteuse, Cosey Fanni Tutti, is almost pleading: “waiting for help from above”. The way the line is said makes it clear that the wished for help is not coming.
Elsewhere, frontman Genesis P-Orridge is in characteristically creepy form, as he sings about "Persuasion" and "Convincing People" to do things it's clear that they're going to regret very soon. In fact, this could be seen as a sort of theme for the record, as it lures you in with its slick and subdued beats only to yield much that is deeply disturbing. Rather than bombard listeners with feedback and growling, 20 Jazz Funk Greats persuades them, although they may not enjoy having themselves persuaded in the long run.
I would be remiss not to talk about Throbbing Gristle's influence. In addition to basically inventing the industrial genre single-handedly, and spawning future acts like Coil, Psychic TV, and Chris & Cosey, the band's electronic experiments and penchant for minimalism and mind-altering substances went a long way towards inspiring trance music, not to mention their contributions to numerous experimental artists who have collaborated with the band members over the years. Throbbing Gristle took punk's anarchy and turned it up to eleven, not in volume, but in anti-establishment aesthetics, leading many of us to question our very notions of what constitutes music. For that alone, they deserve a place in history.
Continuing our Halloween month theme, we turn to masters of post-industrial, electronic brilliance Coil and their Musick to Play in the Dark series. With these albums, Coil announced, they were leaving behind their old style of "sun music" and transitioning towards "moon music." I'm sure that makes sense to someone, but I will not worry too much about it because the music on both these albums,, solar or lunar, is among the strongest of their extremely impressive career.
There's definitely an atmosphere of the sinister here, and they spare no expense in creating spooky atmospherics throughout. The opener, "Something," is just the title word spoken in a whisper again and again, slowly fading in surrounded by wind sounds and subtle electronics. The second track is a full fledged electronic workout that bears all the hallmarks of later-day Coil hired gun and analog synth wizard Thighpaulsandra. His utterly unique approach to playing the synthesizer is endlessly entertaining and a regular feature on most Coil albums from this period. Think of a more demented Tangerine Dream and you get the basic idea.
Te showstopper on the album is the eleven minute "Ether." Its arcane references to the creepy, old-fashioned drug are chilling enough, but towards the end it becomes downright terrifying when John Balance intones the line "I'm going upstairs to turn my mind off... to turn my mind off... to turn my mind off" over a gradual fading backdrop of dark ambient sounds until only his desperate rasping remains. It's tremendously effective and one of the scariest songs I've ever heard.
The rest of the album remains strong throughout. Volume One of the series was a little uneven, and it's nice to see that that mistake has not been repeated here. The closer, another eleven minute track call ed"Batwings: A Limnal Hymn," is oddly the most sedate and straightforward track here, with no vocal processing for Balance and minimal instrumentation, yet it's strangely effective. It's unsettling without being over the top, and send the listener off into the night feeling just a little unnerved and eager to get home to a safe, warm bed.
No other band has ever really sounded like Coil, and it's wonderful that they have such a prodigious and varied discography. It's only a shame that the members died so young and were unable to leave us with even more great music.
This is the first Coil record I ever bought, and as such it holds a rather special place in my collection. It contains a number of remixes and reworkings of one of the band's earliest tracks "How To Destroy Angels." The original piece was made entirely with gongs and other metallic percussion and is one of the landmark achievements of early industrial music. Here, we have a variety of studio manipulations that surpass the earlier version in imagination and atmosphere."The Sleeper," at a mere two minutes, isolates and focuses on a weird pulsing sound like a wet jumprope being swung around. "Dismal Orb" strips away all but the most minimal of textures and simply hangs in the air, like swamp gas. "Tectonic Plates" is a highlight, filled with violent scraping and grinding noises. It lives up to its title completely, as it conjures up images of vast rock formations smashing against each other under the mounting pressure of liquid magma. The vast array of effects the band is able to achieve from such simple source material is astonishing.The album also includes a full length remix of the original sixteen minute "How To Destroy Angels" by Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound.) Unfortunately, the remixing is too subtle to really be noticeable unless you listen to the two side by side. The upside of this is that listeners who have been unable to acquire the the compilation "Unnatural History," on which the original track appears, now have a chance to hear it.The album concludes with one second of silence, entitled "Absolute Elsewhere." This is a reference to the original one-sided vinyl, on which the blank side was labeled with this title. This albums is often referred to as an EP, owing to it's rather specific nature, but its length spans a good fifty minutes. More than satisfactory, considering the quality of the material.
Having had the distinct pleasure of seeing him perform live, I think I can safely say that Thighpaulsandra is the 21st century's answer to Sun Ra. Dressed in costumes so crazy that I doubt even people from Saturn would wear them, and employing a vast array of vintage synthesizers, it was a performance I'll not soon forget.Thighpaulsandra rose to prominence as a member of Coil in that band's later years, and having heard his solo work, it's easy to hear his contributions to most of their later releases.The music on this release sounds improvised, eschewing to a large extent any traditional notions of melody, harmony, or structure, but in reality it was painstakingly composed and rehearsed. While the instrumentation is primarily synth oriented, there are a few odds and ends such as xylophone and French horn that creep in from time to time, as well as some somber recitations in the artist's distinctive Welsh voice.Since there are no melodic or rhythmic motifs to grab on to, the listener is forced to focus on sound for it's own sake, and the sounds Thighpaulsandra gets out of his synth can only be described with one word: weird. Sometimes one can detect similarities to early Tangerine Dream (though without the space rock vibe), but for the most part this music inhabits a world all its own. Over the course of four lengthy tracks, "Chamber Music" traverses a variety of musical terrain from manic to pastoral, giving the disc as a whole a nice flow and a satisfying conclusion.
