by Vinyl301 -

Tenpole Tudor: Let The Four Winds Blow

front

Stiff 1981.  SEEZ42

Discogs

Another surprisingly inspired purchase from my pre-Peel school days, bought on the back of a very entertaining appearance by the band on Top Of The Pops.  The band defied being pigeonholed with this bizarrely eclectic album – punk, rockabilly, music hall, pop, rock etc etc.  They’re usually labelled punk, but that’s only because singer Eddie Tudor-Pole appeared in the Great Rock N Roll Swindle with the Pistols.  Full marks for the strange medieval thing going on, complete with ye olde brylcreme and sunglasses.

This album is really silly but it contains some great moments, especially the ludicrously catchy What You Doing In Bombay.  Play it loud and you’ll end up leaping around the room like Eddie did back in the day.

I bought this in Cyclops records in Brum which Brummies of a certain age will remember.  It was run by the most miserable bloke imaginable, and I have the rare distinction of never being thrown out of the shop like everyone else I knew was, although he maintained a continuous scowl all the time I was in there.  It was an odd shop in what was then a run-down Victorian arcade, but which is now very chi-chi.  It stocked all sorts of weird stuff which was otherwise completely unavailable, assumed deleted, and was cheaper than pretty much everywhere else in town.

by Vinyl301 -

Big Black: Il Duce

front

Homestead Records 1985.  HMS042

Discogs

More from the mighty Steve Albini – a slightly perplexing homage to Benito Mussolini which I assume is tongue-in-cheek.

I’ve always thought this was an odd choice for a single.  It’s better than most bands manage in a career, but it doesn’t really stand out against the other stuff they did that year.

The B side is from the Atomizer LP which I think is their best.  It sounds like the same version to me, but haven’t bothered to check.

I never quite came to terms with the drum machine Big Black use.  Of course it was a big part of the revered Big Black sound, but really I prefer Shellac with their human drummer.  Criticising Big Black for that is unfair though – they produced some of the best guitar based music of the 80s which I played to death.

Apparently Steve Albini had one of his customary hissy fits when Homestead issued this as a 12″ against his wishes.  They left the label as a result.  This however is the common as muck 7″.

I may add to this tomorrow – been to the pub and am struggling to string anything meaningful together.

by Vinyl301 -

UT: In Gut’s House

R-2284071-1365902115-4069

Blast First! 1987.  BFFP17

Discogs

I had a long chat the other day to a woman in a local punk band, and it reminded me that there are nowhere near enough women making noisy records.  Actually, there aren’t enough women making records of any description, but noise seems especially badly served.

So it seemed like a good time to post some women making a glorious racket – and UT sprung to mind.  They’ve appeared here before on the Devil’s Jukebox, but they deserve more than that.  UT were part of the New York No Wave scene, but although they were big at the time, they seem to have been forgotten about, for reasons which aren’t obvious listening to this album.

Their debt to the Velvets is obvious, and Sonic Youth’s debt to them is equally obvious, but UT don’t really sound like either of them – they’re more like a discordant version of The Slits.  Maybe that has to do with how they made their records – the songs are built around improvisation, and the women swap instruments regularly, including a violin which is sadly under-appreciated in rock music (King Of The Slums being a notable exception as well as the obvious Velvets stuff).  Other bands I’ve seen do that have been, as a result, laughably incompetent, but that couldn’t be further from the truth with UT.  As you’d expect, this isn’t an easy listen (it’s often shouty and quite an assault on the eardrums) but there’s some great playing here and some superb material.  As you’d expect their radical politics go down well with me too, but I guess that’s not for everyone.

by Vinyl301 -

The Beatnigs: Television

Folder

Alternative Tentacles 1988.  VIRUS 71T

Discogs

The Beatnigs were a short lived project led by Michael Franti who went on to form the Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy.  They made only one album, from which this single was taken.  It’s an interesting mix of punk, hip-hop and industrial, and while it is very much of its time, it still works 25 years after the event.  The single version was reworked by Adrian Sherwood and the On-U crew.

I miss politics in music.  I remember during the Iraq war the intense irritation of Neil Young when he felt obliged to make an angry album about it because no-one else had.  OK, it wasn’t a great album, but the anger politics can inspire has made as much great music as it has bad.  This track deals with a theme that is as important now as it was then and is an old one in media studies.  Television it argues, fills so much of our lives with its banal garbage that it crowds out what’s important.  While the rich fleece us for every penny we’ve got, instead of doing something about it, we obsess over X Factor.  I don’t really watch TV, but I obsess over music and maybe that’s as bad.

by Vinyl301 -

Various Artists: The Devil’s Jukebox

R-679122-1205112695

Blast First! 1989. BFDJ 1 – 10

Discogs

Ripping this boxed set of 10 7″ singles was a job for a rainy day, and since it rained yesterday, it got done at last.  It’s a compilation from the heyday of Paul Smith’s consistently excellent Blast First! label, containing mostly exclusive tracks from bands which are too important to ignore.  Detailed info is hard to come by, but there’s only one track here (by Sun Ra) which I know is definately available elsewhere.  To add to the confusion, this also came out on CD, cassette and LP as Nothing Short Of Total War with a different tracklisting on each format.

Sonic Youth are at their chaotic best, mixing the fairly conventional rock sound they perfected on Daydream Nation with the more experimental material they were better known for back then.  They also appear as their bizarre Ciccone Youth alter ego.  For me though, Steve Albini’s contributions; 2 tracks as Big Black and another as, well, I can’t bring myself to type it, are the highlight here.  There’s an electrifying version of Kerosene, a truly depressing track about small town nihilism and a surprisingly laid back take on He’s A Whore.  Dutch Courage by the unmentionable band is a shockingly badly recorded live version, but oddly, all the better for it.  Big Stick contribute a version of their classic Drag Racing, which frankly is the only thing they did really worth hearing. UT, the all women New York noise monsters are here with a re-recording of Evangelist, the stand-out from their In Gut’s House album which I’ll post another time.  Dinosaur Jr. are reliable as always, and there’s a suitably unhinged live version of a track from Locust Abortion Technician by the Butthole Surfers, slightly ruined by being way too long to fit on a 7″.

Blast First! was known as a noise label, and so this boxed set is predictably noisy.  There was more to Paul Smith than that though, and like Alan McGee over at Creation, he used the label as a platform for his own musical interests.  That side of him appears on disc 9, which has a rare 60s recording from Sun Ra paired with a Glenn Branca piece from his orchestra of electric guitars project.

As you might imagine, the box is a bit inconsistent in places, but overall the quality of the music is remarkably high.  The essential tracks more than make up for the filler; this was a compilation the label made a real effort with, and it shows.

by Vinyl301 -

Big Black: Sound Of Impact

front

Not 1986.  Not 2 (But 1)

Discogs

This is, without any doubt, the mighty Big Black’s finest hour.  Superb though their studio material is, this live album has a ferocious intensity which takes it to a whole new level.  Such is the quality of the musicianship, it doesn’t trade that intensity for a shambolic performance – this is as tight as anything they recorded.  The tracklisting is superb too – it works well as a career retrospective.

Big Black, in case you don’t know was Steve Albini’s first band, at least the first anyone took notice of.  He is, by some distance my favourite guitarist, and while he’s never an easy listen, he sounds like no-one else before or since.  He’s also known for some pretty offensive lyrics, but he always claimed they existed only out of necessity, and for me the band works better when the lyrics are downplayed and the words indecipherable as they (mostly) are here.  Shock is supposed to be a part of punk, but Albini’s lyrics often go way beyond that into the frankly unbearable.  In a way they fit with the full-on sonic assault of the music, but still…

The album itself has a somewhat curious history.  It was claimed to be a bootleg, but in fact was a disguised official release.  The “label” doesn’t really exist – it was in fact issued by Blast First!, their UK label, and it had normal distribution, although it was rather expensive.  There was an initial pressing of 1000, followed up by another of 500, all numbered.  Blast First! then put out another 500 without the band’s permission which caused a permanent rift.  Out there in internetland, it’s claimed Albini walked away from Blast First! because of it, but clearly he didn’t because his next band, whose name I’m not going to type here, was on the label.  My copy is one of the unauthorised 500.

There’s some attempt to make this look like a bootleg – there’s no mention of the band on the cover, the artwork is very cheap, and the printed track listing is fictitious.  However that’s where the shoddiness ends.  I’ve already described the quality of the performances, but it’s also a really well compiled album.  It derives from three separate soundboard recordings, and it’s obvious a lot of trouble was taken to pick the best from each.  It loses a little as a result – it’s not a continuous performance, but the sheer class of what there is more than makes up for it.

The sound quality is also interesting.  Big Black were never a band to flatter your hi-fi with, nor has Albini ever been in to messing with the sound to make it more palatable.  He sees himself more as an archivist, documenting what bands, including his own actually sound like, which is what he’s done here.  So this album is tiring to listen to, it jarrs, but that’s what the band sounded like…

The title of the album, Sound Of Impact refers to the last element in transcribed conversations of flight crews in the moments before plane crashes.  The back cover is entirely devoted to these conversations, which make for chilling reading.  You can read them here, alongside a typically angry Albini essay.

Further listening? I think the Atomizer LP was their best and is most easily available on the Rich Man’s Eight Track CD.  Songs About Fucking runs it a close second but is harder to find.  I might post a vinyl rip of it at some point if it really is as unavailable as it seems on the web site of everyone’s favourite tax dodgers.

by Vinyl301 -

Scientists: You Only Live Twice

front

Karbon Records 1985.  KAR007

Discogs

This is a request, but I can’t remember where from….

I don’t know much about The Scientists, other than their influence.  They were constantly being referred to by grunge outfits in the late 80s and early 90s – wikipedia specifically mentions Mudhoney but I remember there being others.  Curiosity roused, I bought this 7″ single (which it turns out is very rare) and the Blood Red River LP which I’ll get around to posting at some point.

This is a cover of the well known Nancy Sinatra Bond theme.  I’ve long grown tired of punk acts covering inappropriate songs; it was funny when I was 15, but not any more.  However this single really works – a cacophany of distorted guitars with Cramps style vocals which fits the song better than you’d expect.

by Vinyl301 -

Butthole Surfers: Widowermaker!

Folder

A vinyl rip at last!  This is an old one done before I had my current system, but it still sounds pretty good.

This EP came out in 1992, round about the same time as Piouhgd, when the band’s uncompromising weirdness, especially during their live shows had started to diminish.   They were panned for it of course, and it’s certainly true that compared to their landmark Locust Abortion Technician from 1987, this EP was a bit of a disappointment.

20 years down the line though it stands up pretty well.  It’s not as groundbreaking as their earlier work, but it’s a pretty good slab of psychedelic punk worth of 15 minutes of anyone’s life.

This is ripped from the UK vinyl issue on the achingly cool (back then) Blast First! label, which for reasons unknown is a 10″, unlike the US 12″ issue.  It also came out as a CD.

Further listening?  Well for me Locust Abortion Technician and Hairway To Steven catch the band at their peak.  Both are startlingly inventive and defy categorisation, but are also listenable unlike the chaos of their earlier stuff.  Get them from those delightful tax evaders at Amazon if you really must, but preferably at a proper record shop.  There are also loads of free (low quality) MP3s on their web site.