Memories picks up the pace with wobbly flanged guitar and Lydon's voice in a more familiar reedy whine. This suddenly changes as thought someone opened the mix's window. Repeat. Lydon's vocal takes on a kind of unschooled Islamic call to prayer. Lines of doubt and self accusation continue as the mix goes in and out of definition and the squealy electric Flamenco figure warbles onward. Swan Lake had been released as the single Death Disco. The drum pattern is authentically late '70s disco. Lydon wails about his helplessness to cope with his mother's drawn out death. Levene plays figures around the Tchaikovsky ballet theme as the vocal rises to a tireless scream and ghostly wails appear in the distance. The fade has a strange effect in that what sounds like a looped sample of synthesised strings starts at a loud note before toning down, out of rhythm with the rest of the song. Want to suggest something that's out of your control? Make it cross your rhythm patterns whenever it wants to.
Poptones is my favourite track on the album. It starts mid-phrase as the bass and drums provide a bedrock and the guitar plays increasingly hypnotic arpeggiated chords high on the fretboard. Lydon uses his attacking voice to narrate a story from the news about a woman suffering assault after being driven to the country. The detail the victim recalled clearly was that the radio was playing what she described as poptones. Lydon's lyrics are fragmented but build a picture of chilling violence while the music keeps flowing, the guitar figure adds an eerie beauty to the atrocity. Careering has Levene on the synth instead of a guitar and he plays dissonant horror movie chords as Lydon's lyric tells of a gunman in Northern Ireland who lives as a suited city worker in London. A rugged bass and drums punch courses beneath the horrifying juxtaposition. "A face is raining across the border..."
No Birds takes its title from Keats's eerie poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci in which a knight is tempted by a supernatural beauty only to find himself enveloped in evil. Here the effect is transposed to what looks like suburbia. "This could be heaven, shallow spreads of ordered lawns..." But the more he describes it the more plainly static and breathless it appears. Graveyard begins, giving us the same dub groove with spiky guitar that speaks for the album in general But this time it's an instrumental. Levene's shining discords dance above the bedrock like bratty ghosts.
The Suit adds to a short bass figure repeated throughout, a series of snide taunts at conformity to a conventional life where if it's consumable it's good and vice versa. Lydon's vocal is more of a chant, the outsider kid smirking at the playground games and powerplays with observations that rise and fall through his cigarette smoke. Bad Baby pits a fractured drum pattern against an energetic bass groove and Levene's piercing horror synths as Lydon in a creepy high voice mixes the every day in the housing estate with the harrowing image of a baby abandoned in a car park. Everyone who sees it tells themself to ignore it until it vanishes.
Socialist is an upbeat workout of beeping synthesisers with a bass groove. Chant begins with ragged guitar and a downmixed chanting of words love, war, fear, hate. Lydon's vocal snakes above it, distorted sneer. "It's not important. It's not worth a mention in the Guardian." And then he repeats the word chant under the screaming guitar wash. After that study in sour, Radio 4's big warm synth strings wash feels almost sarcastic. Is this what you wanted after all that, it seems to ask. No drums but the bass is busy beneath, spodging around. It sounds improvised and left as is. And guess what, it's really lovely.
Unless you bought the later double vinyl Second Edition release, the bustling uniformity might be hard to take. Designer Dennis Morris' packaging was intended as a taunt to user friendly pop music delivery. The album was released as three twelve inch forty-fives which were stuffed tightly into a metal container that resembled a cine film cannister. The cans were hard to open and the discs were hard to get out without damage. Worse still, the metal used for the case was intended to rust and deteriorate over time and did. Propaganda by deed? Well, I never saw an original copy but I remember how funny I found the idea. The punk wars had failed but in the wake a new critical music was emerging with intent to disrupt and challenge, sometimes with a gleaming smile and sometimes with a guttural curse. Metal Box dissed its own market with this beautiful monstrosity. I wonder if anyone in that fevered era thought to keep their copy safe from its own intended doom?
When the conventional gatefold album came out and followed on from the debut with the title Second Edition, more people heard the music and experienced the one-song band from before was actually making music you could get into. It was a different deal to have to change the disc over and then the disc itself to hear the whole thing and then just to change four times. That strikes me as being a more benign measure. Take it in smaller doses, make each side special enough to go through those (mostly) two songs and think about them. My CD (yes, with a mini metal box which, yes, is rusting) presents everything in one long string and anyone who heard it first like this (I had it on a C-90 cassette, at first) will have come away exhausted. The smaller doses work a lot better. As I listened for this blog I began to split up the old side listings separately. That's when this record makes sense.
Metal Box is often given the accolade of being the apex of post punk. I don't find lists of cultural artefacts that interesting but I don't know if I'd agree, entirely. The anti-consumerist paradox of the packaging is gloriously of its time and the music is a strong consolidation of the tatters of the debut album. However, when you move beyond the purity of the concept, it's the album that it should have been. The big spacey concerns of Albatross tell us that we're in for something more seriously crafted and that is what we get.
Lydon has clearly moved on even as far as to put himself to one side of the stereo field or low in the mix to accommodate the overall project. Keith Levene joined the spiky discord brigade of difficult guitarists like The Banshees' John McKay and Gang of Four's Andy Gill in fashioning a post-rock sound that begged for development after its first few forays. This album of many drummers benefits from diversity and also from Jah Wobble's grounding bass work. It is a great work but to elevate it above a field of similarly great works misses the point, the assured and cool anonymity of it that graced the best of music for about five bristlingly rich years of musical exploration. Yes, it all got swallowed into the big mainstream whale but for that time when you could be scary without pretending you were a vampire, classical without faux-poshness, and music first without the music press, things changed enough to carry into the future and left plenty of archaeology for the curious listeners of nowdays. For the prickly contrarians who made this record, that's a pleasing feat that never has to sell out.
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