Wobbly drums, an insistent chromatic figure on the synthesiser and a tiny clean electric guitar make this sound more like a Birthday Party song. Lydon's sneering vocal is about a an attempted seduction of him by a rock journalist. Eventually, he just says,"right, I'm finihsed" and leaves the track. The guitar gets spindly and spikey and eventually just ends on a noodle.
Phenagen begins with a honking drone and a distant clicking percussion. A meandering figure on something like a hammered dulcimer adds a medieval tone. Lydon's vocal is, like all of them on this album a repeated short melodic phrase with little variation. Phenergan is a strong antihistimine that can be used as a sleeping pill. the narrator of this song has rendered himself barely extant through various forms of opiation. Low piano notes, backward guitar and more of that damn kick drum. A reprise of the last line of snarling ennui brings the dulcimer back before an abrupt end on the kick.
The title track begins with yet more of the snareless drum kit, a high ghostly distant vocal, a string drone with some formless high string bowing. Lydon sings of a relationship in the death spiral. "I'll take the furniture. Start all over again." The violin surfaces for a Turkish sounding circular riff before the song heads, droning and kicking to the end. The lyrics seem unambiguous but put in the setting of the strange hopeless headache that the rest of the song constructs the breakup feels a lot darker than the usual.
Under the House is a horror movie score with jungle drums. Big boomy echoes of slowed vocals and frequent deep choirs as a Lydon vocal, near buried in the mix, chants about seeing a ghost and a kind of claustrophobia and evil that takes over the building. Lydon did claim to have seen a ghost at the Manor recording studios where the band stayed at the offered rooms and spent a week failing to record all but one of the songs used here. Described as a time of frustration and failure by Lydon and guitarist Levene, the accounts include imagery of shadows and people seen in empty rooms and there is a sense of being haunted by gthe frustrations and anger of unfulfilled lives. Quietly and constantly terrifying. A friend at the time said of this track: "that's not a song, that's evil." He was smiling but only just.
Hymie's Him really was intended for the score of a horror movie. Michael Wadleigh had approached Keith Levene to provide a score for his film Wolfen, wanting an urban jungle. That means more of the same drums we've already had but with sound effects and synthesised brass and woodwind playing very cinematic brief chordal figures over the percussion. It wasn't used for the film but it became a great opener for side two of the album.
Restless drums over a huge booming synth drone. Lydon is buried in the mix. Very high vocal as narrator sneers at people trying to get in and the neighbours complaining about the noise. After lists of statements as to why the people knocking should feel ashamed the droning chant keep banging the door insists on a single note. An experience of constant breathless irritation. Lydon's house was besieged by fans who would knock and yell through the letter slot or even camp on the steps outside. This is what he thought of them. It's one of the longer tracks on the record for a reason, the band and their producer found the means to bring this grinding situation to musical life to be compelling but as unlovely as its inspiration.
Go Back has the usual intense drums joined by synthesiser in a chromatic figure eventually joined by Keith Levene at his most spiky on guitar. The lyrics are a kind of political companion piece to Four Enclosed Walls as neo-nazis rap out their mindless chants of the good days to come. If they forget history maybe this time they won't have to repeat the failures and just head for the glory. The flat voiced repetition: don't ever look back, good days ahead. The loopy keyboard riff plays the constantly crazy marching song. Obsession. Horrible. Effective.
Francis Massacre refers to the Irish prison Mountjoy and the prisoner Francis Moran who was doing life for murder. A sprightly but still dark drum pattern bangs on as Lydon wails about keeping out of jail and piano keys are randomly slided or plonked. At the end there is the same guitar sound Bowie got at the end of the marathon Sweet Thing on Diamond Dogs, a kind of sheet metal crashing and stressing. That's how the album ends.
This album heralds the transition of the band from working unit to the various and varying lineups that Lydon put together as the sole original member. Before it was the promise of a musical unit that could come from a ragged debut that mixed filler bullshit with brilliance to an unassailable masterpiece and credible live album to this document of pain and fear.
The change is clear in the first track. There's no bass. Jah Wobble has gone and his contribution not only will be absent from this record but there will be bass only two of the tracks. After this album the instrument was relegated to its standard position in rock bands, back near the drums, leave the personality at home. Until then for PiL's audience there was this big dark monument to a few public phenomena and causes for concern but also a virtual charge sheet of everything tearing at the band's weak spots which would leave them as a brand with a face; the very thing they had originally attacked.
But, think of it, while it's true that this is the end of the group as a cooperative thinking unit it's still pretty effective. Their front covers went from a parody of glossy society magazine photos to a metal can that was intended to rust, to weird representations of the members as cartoon monsters, to someone else. The latter was Jeannette Lee who handled their video art. She managed their extended presence at their gigs but also went on to be a mover and shaker of alternative music at the prestigious Rought Trade label. For this album, she looks like the flamenco dancer from Psycho. It's still funny.
If you liked Metal Box for its cohesion and confident dark mooded anger and its rich arrangements this one might have turned you off, made you fidget waiting for the bass or guitar to break out but it never deviates beyond a few details from the migraine of assaulting percussion, stressed noise and vocals that all seem to end up as endless chants. It's either best taken in as a single relentless run, a song cycle of spite or song by song on different days. It rewards both saturation and quest.
Some might comment on the strange baton passing with this record. The gated and harmonised drum sound is straight out of Peter Gabriel's third album (same engineer) and was adopted buy Flowers' producer by Phil Collins for his next one. So, either the two ex prog rockers were still not talking to each other or only found the joke of this out later but it still fuels the fanciful sillyness that PiL gained some respectablity if only as a conduit to the sound of '80s drums. It's much better than that.
This is the kind of thing that was on alternative radio forty years ago and joined the stream of tape loops, industrial soundscapes that promised to thrill us with new worlds we could find in our own heads, the kind of personal cinema we could make that had nothing to do with the sagging conventions of rock music. Billy Joel thought he was making a new wave album the year before with Glass Houses but just made another Billy Joel album. He must have thought a little edge could get him there but if he'd heard this he would have woken up screaming in the night. That is why the likes of Lydon and Levene were clearly still doing the right thing by their public in this set. While I personally didn't love this record at the time I did enjoy the worlds it offered and, a little at a time, I grew to appreciate its depth and focus and would think of it whenever the old flag about rock being dead was hauled up at the wrong end of parties at the time. Of course rock should have been dead by this time. But none of us counted on the thrill of powerchords for those younger even than we were. However, for a while, just a little while, this was one of those records that gave us hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment