This album has given me all kinds of ideas about the DNA of Pop and the DNA of Britain and how the kinky fault-line running between them can be traced in all kinds of crazy, quirky directions. Eugene is in that lineage somewhere - fighting for attention with Adam Ant and Madness and Scott Walker and whomever else. Jive Bunny!
There's a taste of Shakespeare in the air around him. (I know I'm probably getting quite carried away.) I don't feel I can quite do the album justice; but I've given it quite a few listens the last week or so. And there's a hunger to the lyrics to stitch as many things together as he can. I like that popological approach to shit. And there's a solid grasp of the ridiculousness of his situation on "Lion" - "My disgraceful quest for immortality/An adventure in an airship inflated by my ego". And in his other hand, an invisible knack for the pop hook, slapping me around the head.
I get a whiff of The Horrors and Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, and these are whiffs I breathe in with big lungs. And while Jack White and the like whinge and do the blues thing about the love interest, Eugene stakes a claim for a bit more of a complicated appraisal on "Thunderbolt", over sliding jazz-like noises. Chamber pop with a great many trimmings. "Joshua" likewise has a wider scope with backing vocals that sounds as though they could be from a sentimental black & white movie from the Forties.
"Japanese Cars" shows there's a bit of discordant keytar funk to hand as well, if needed. Closes out the album nicely, it does. Although it does have a "She's evil" lyric, so perhaps he isn't splitting away from the misogynist tree that far after all.
Another Peel Archive treasure, this time from 2001. They are looking to evoke some experimental funk from forty or so years earlier. Part of the Soul Fire collection, of whom I know next to nothing. But whatever their plans, this is some heavy business. And who can argue with a title like "Beer, (So Nice) Right On"? Except perhaps with the punctuation.
There is a heavy vein of very dark alcohol running through this. "My Beach, My Waves, Fuck Off!" also has a point it wants to make in style. The darker and hurtier the better on this album. Some of it is very funky; other tunes are more at the freaky end. Some tracks manage to mangle the both together - like "Backwards Intentions" with its fuzzy flute. Sounds like the kind of loops that Beastie Boys would use on Ill Communication. "Everglades Part 2" will one day be looped under some fresh CocOen rhymes. Whenever that sweet day comes.
But for now - enjoy the scuzzy majesty of this unsung fucking gem of an album. And all hail John Peel and the Internet!
Rating: King Kong out of Gigantic Lethal Cocktails
Inspired by recent nostalgia TV over the bank holiday weekend and Public Enemy's current Paralympic-inspired mini-Renaissance, I've decided to give their last studio album proper a go. (Or at least the only one I can hear; "Most of my Heroes Still Don't Appear on No Stamps" cannot be found streaming anywhere. That'll have to wait.) The usual unwieldy title is still there: check. It's twenty tracks long, and that is hard to forgive of anyone.
"Black is Back" has the rock guitar involved, but it sounds pretty lumpen by Bomb Squad standards of the glorious years. Then there's the Channel 4 Paralympics theme and the only single off this album, I think - "Harder Than You Think". It features plenty of Flav and even by Chuck D standards it sounds like statement of who and where he is after twenty years - as it was in 2007 - in the business. And, of course, exactly what time it is. It's a tune that belongs in the PE canon, but it still lacks edge even though it has a brassy and affirmative power.
There's almost a Dre/Eminem feel to "Sex, Drugs and Violence", which is strange bearing in mind KRS-One is also booming his stentorian business at the same time. He and Chuck D are heavyweight and the beats are just cheap and silly. And there's kids singing on it. This is not the molten jazz-soul-rock guitar bomb blast of classic PE. "Amerikan Gangster" sounds like a budget version of Fifty Cent. It shouldn't matter if Chuck is still bossing the mic; but it makes me unhappy. A few tracks sample "Black Planet" or "Nation of Millions" as if to acknowledge this; there are definitely glances back.
"Head Wide Shut" touches on that old collage might here and there; but "Flavor Man" sounds pretty thin - just a reedy electric guitar and it's a wee bit pedestrian by Flav's schizophrenic standards too. "Col-leepin" is a weird update of "Cold Lampin'" with bits of Dizzee Rascal churning over some happy clappy disco thing. It's too sparse.
Having been following Chuck on Twitter for a while now, I can't believe he's any less paranoid now than he was back in the day. But the music isn't backing him up. He's in a more reflective mood, I think. "In a world gone wrong/Here's another love song" he sings on "Long and Whining Road", which is another reflection on Public Enemy's path in and out of popular consciousness, weaving most of their most famous track titles into the lyrics.He says they arrived in London in 1987 and then toured non-stop for three years - maybe that was there secret; what gave their music such momentum.
"Eve of Destruction" is the only tune on the album I can imagine the S1Ws spinning on their heels to. "The airwaves are poisonous with this gibberish" he spits on "How to Sell Out". "Why are the dead teaching the dead?"
On the whole, slower and no less wise; but it cannot touch the unmatched glory of 1988-1991.
Rating: Slow Reflections out of Twenty Year Stance
Some "underground" hip hop. It could be right under the surface and known from Somalia to Sunderland as far as I know, so far is my thumb from the pulses. I know clips from The A-Team and The Departed and Rocky when I hear them, mind. Stu is the producer and he isn't scooping too far from any trees. It's pretty solid stuff - R&B, touches of soulful jazz and some big Eighties keyboards.
"Where I'm from you either flip grams or be a janitor."
I don't know any of the MCs. Wais P on "Okay, Player" has a nice raspy edge to his rhymes. Blacastan on "Spyhunter" has some flow, but sounds like an auld fella, talking about MP3s like he hasn't quite caught up with the tech yet. ILL Bill also knows his way round a word or two; he's the same age as me. On "Vikings", one of the MCs actually says "Mind your own beeswax". Not something I thought I'd ever hear on a hip hop album. For all the title suggests some heavy crate-digging, the sounds aren't heading in any new directions; but maybe again that's the point. That other hypermasculine trajectory - change nothing, be no different.
But I don't have any insights to offer. These lads seem so keen to tell the same story as everyone else; the more they tell, the less they're saying. Time is tight. No-one has leapt out of the box so far. It's that dark, masculine talk in that same stressed not-shouting/not-talking register with needling synths steepling in the backdrop. My head might nod, but nothing sparks it off.
Even though we're all middle aged men that seem to have seen the same movies and TV shows.
So, still in an emotional folky mode with Fifer James, although there isn't the same Millenial fear of the end of days. It's on a much more domestic scale, but then that is where most people's dramas come about - at the kitchen table, under the duvets, in the bathroom mirror. It's the Fence Collective again and the power is there in his voice and in the slow-moving chamber strings and the lyrics about "crooked laughs" and lines like "Sometimes the act of giving love can fool you into believing that you're receiving love".
Kathryn Williams offers some counterpoint on a couple of tunes, including the very prosaically titled "Kath with Rhodes". Soft, cracking vocals up very, very close. "The Fire & the Flames" is very close by. And not an especially happy piece of music - uplifting and gorgeous, yes; happy, no. "Two" is about two birds with claws and songs and is about him and someone else. "I Can Take This All" is a bit too uptempo for my immediate liking - despite lines that "Remember I have a tender side/That can't be fucked around". It reminds me of that music from Omaha, Nebraska that was all the rage ten or years ago.
It can't be any coincidence that so much of his and Fence Collective video work features the seaside. It is the sound of a wild seaside, of circling seagulls and staring out with grey eyes over grey waves and thinking about the bits of life that people save for occasions like that.
Black and white photo cover, big tramp beard and an obvious sense of, well, persecution. There aren't as many lyrics about Jesus and reconciliation, but this might be because those things weren't as immediate for young Bill then as they are for auld Bill now. Trite but it makes sense.
So "Plan D". "Soon Plan D/Will be released/And the seas will rise/And the skies open" it starts. "Is that not some cause/For worship/Being born/Among those trees/Though the Beast/Is lurking?" he says. His are windows out which things definitely happen, windows through which I would be nervous to look. When he sings about "Pictures of Adolph" on TV and in papers "again", he could be writing about Channel 5, but he opens up onto a more cosmic level - that there's a choice that will have to be made between Christ and Hitler, or "Christ or all the Caesars to come". It's like a great comic book, the way history and thought move out on a lateral plane. Can't quite summon the words to wrap it up.
"When you stand and face the gas masks and truncheons/You must know what it all really means." It's all about revelation and persecution and time and history jumbled into kaleidoscopic shapes. And Bill feels he's stood on the shores of Lake Antichrist. There's some tangled jazzy guitar, piano and sax mess boiling underneath his mournful song as well. You can see how all this wore the shit out of him. This is the astounding stuff; "Life Is People" is the washback, the galactic echo of this black hole being formed from bright star matter, the tidemark of a life lived with difficulty.
Rating: Galaxial Kaleidoscope out of Lake Antichrist
This is a bit of a double header. An banner ad popped up for this album with a one word review along the lines of "astounding", and I thought I would give it a whirl.
It's pretty downbeat. It sounds as though there has been quite a lot of suffering and guilt and wrestling with demons in his life. There's the feeling of a life obscured. Lyrically, there seems to be a lot of talk of God and Jesus and plenty of goodbyes: it's not really my bag. Musically, I keep thinking of Chris Rea and a soft, tinkling piano wash that somehow puts me in mind of the Eighties.
Spotify carries on into a two-disc collection called "Still Some Light", on which Bill sounds much younger and a little funkier and scratchy, still careworn but not worn down nearly as far. One particular tune called "Plan D" is quite arrestingly apocalyptic. And I get more of a sense of the ramblingly poetic. So I decide to listen to his 1971 album, "Time of the Last Persecution" to see where that might take me.
