PiL's METAL BOX @ 45

The first track is called Albatross. Bass notes as thick as any dub track pulse and are joined by a solid drum pattern peppered with snare fills. High guitar squeaks and noodles sound constant and discordant. Lydon comes in on one side of the stereo image, subdued, singing fragments of a limited range melody. The lines are about albatrosses and an unbearable second person, sowing seeds of discontent, running away and killing the spirit of '68. This was an improv track concocted in the studio but the lines suggest unfinished business with the self-proclaimed manipulator of The Sex Pistols, Malcolm McClaren. The stabs on the first album were clearly not sufficient. The bird is the bringer of ill-fortune from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner whose narrator roams the earth, repeating his story of woe. The situationist students of the May '68 revolt in Paris provided McClaren with more non-comic stan-up material than Lydon found digestible. Sure, this ten minute long dirge might well have been off the cuff but Lydon was never shy of opining and if it fit then it was chosen. As significant is the same kind of outsize grind on an idee fixe might remind us of Theme that opened the first album but this time it is not an onslaught but quiet and relentless, clear to the point of being spacey. The lines float back past our ears the thoughts that stop us from sleeping, murmurs of worry.

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. 

THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE @ 45

If you've heard Cars from this album (and hours of hits and memories radio), you already know this record's sonic pallet: a crunching rhythm clanks below an ethereal screaming synthesiser playing a cooling modal motif overhead. Between the two, the voice of Gary Numan, melodic in shape but emotionally flat. Repeated listens will distinguish one arrangement from the next and the emotion in the vocal will advance. But it will take those listens.

For brevity, I'm going to refer to the rhythm tracks of this album as the machine. This will alleviate having to repeat the description of the beds of almost every song on this record. So one song gives way to another and the machine is already working. That kind of thing.

Airlane

A slight wisp high on the synthesiser and the machine starts with a clanking rhythm track with the wisp becoming an industrial scream overhead. The motif is altered here and there and several gear shifts and turns but the process keeps working. This is tinned Gary Numan and is as luscious as it is cold. Not just emotionally static, physically cold, as though the aircon has been turned a degree too low. It's an instrumental but with this artist there is no tokenism to it as there would be with any other rock artist. Well, maybe that should read any other rock artist before him. This album opener from the last year of the '70s, released on the brink of the term post punk gaining currency in the consumer base, is of a time when the demarcation between mainstream and alternative was essential. Here is an instrumental told in bold strokes by an artist that, be the stadium ever so big, was not going to ask his audience if they felt alright, or if they could clap their hands (mind you, some of these tracks almost force you to do that). If you are not with this record by the end of its few minutes' duration, you might as well take it off and try something else. When this asks you in, it will lock the door behind you.

Metal

The machine kicks into operation. A hammering synth snare. Then the whole floor, bass, kit and rhythm, starts. Numan comes in as an android. It observes the ways of his engineers as they fit its circuitry and polish his outer finish. A solid synth wail rises and spread. "Picture this, if I could make the change, I'd love to pull the wires from the wall..." Perhaps his assemblers are aware of its aspirational daydreams. The song stops developing after the last line about confusing love with need. And then a solid electronic drone plays over and then through the closing rhythm. No more riffs for this operative. It's all down to the process completing. That's what this sounds like. A quick scare of a thought and then it's back to the assembly and programming. And the process just continues.

Complex

The formula is put on hold for this one. A viscous soup of electric slides and piano, the filters on the synthesiser frequently teeter into distortion. And then a mighty figure rises in the keyboards and a voice we'll hear again on the record, viola. The figure is intense, heartrending is a way difficult to define. The vocal has a familiar broken dejection with halting lines about betrayal and isolation. With the perfect blend of bowed strings and synthesised string sections, Numan's plaintive voice and the big space created around it, this remains the most beautiful and affecting track he has ever done.

 

Films

A drum pattern is joined by a perky bass rhythm before the scream riff enters, expanding the scale to airliner hangar size. The vocals enter with a statements of approval or disapproval about elements of cinema like the film itself, the actors etc. but reverses it with paranoid utterances about being exposed. We're not talking movies so much as living as though we move through our own or, even worse, someone else's. As the ugly beautiful synth riff soars and takes control we are yet again in a song-borne world where one change of perspective in a line will alter our own movement through a song. One of the most epically industrial of Numan tracks.

M.E.

Numan's vocal is the highest on the album or anything on Replicas or the self-titled debut. Clear, clean notes that describe arcs of melodic phrases. The lines are brief: "And M.E. I eat dust!" "I'll only fade away and I hate to fade alone." The title is an abbreviation of Mechanical Engineering. The suggested narrative is an old sci-fi staple in which a massive computer fixes humanity's problems by getting rid of the humans. The riff will be known to more recent generations as sampled by Basement Jaxx in Where's Your Head At? Here, it is one of the machine tracks, driving down as the warm lower synthesisers rise around it. And then, unexpectedly, in a reiteration after the first vocals, the riff is augmented by plucked viola strings, one of the woodiest and most human-like sounds available, adding a blunt texture but also a real fingertip on string. In a later instrumental passage the viola adds Celtic trills and melismas to the phrase adding a palpable yearning to the sound. The electronic keyboards rise to a height of modal figuring as the machine gears up again, alone, screaming over the wasteland. 

Tracks

A pealing piano figure underlaid with a gurgling synth bass. Numan comes in with a few lines before the machine bursts into gear, the drums catch up and the beat assumes a chug beneath a synth wailing the opening piano figure. In full force, the vocals tell of a swap between the narrator and an older person who then can experience both the past and present. The vocal for the full band body of the song is almost as high as M.E. and just as plaintive. It sounds like the experiment was a disaster. And perhaps time itself remains to witness, ending as a trickling piano arpeggio played high and softly. 

Observer

This is almost entirely instrumental as a high flying keyboard scream flies over and around the parts of the machine as it works and crunches. In this case the figure in the lower instruments is so close to the break figure in Cars that I still think it's an extended album version of that song starting up. But the synth scream flies in and it's its own number. After an intro that goes for half the track it's a surprise to hear the vocal come in. A plain lyric about people watching might, in the right context, be a sinister confession but all we have is the setting of 

Conversation

The riff is built around a brief trill and feels like it's going to be the same all through. When the vocals start it is a series of clipped statements referring to the failure of communication through incapacity. Is Numan referring to his Asperger's? The lines are stubbornly brief and the breaks between them increasingly elaborate, with a deal of warmth added through the violin and viola. The music, the invention internally is busier than his verbal communication could ever be until it swamps the words with a tide of swoonable synthesis soaring above the machines. This is more an acknowledgement of the condition than a cure but its depiction is oddly glorious, controlled, owned.

Cars

People whose parents weren't born when this was released as a single know this song. It gets everywhere, movies, commercials, daytime radio, clubs and deep inside remixes. In 1979 it screamed through the airwaves with a weird grooviness built of machine perfect playing and simple but commanding motifs. If we'd been wowed into silence by Donna Summer's I Feel Love and then shivered at side two of Bowie's Low, we might have just made it past the industrial architecture of Are Friends Electric but nothing prepared us for this hymn to the car as a place to isolate oneself from everyone else as it coursed through the night with lights as white as the elongated keyboards howling above the machine. If it came on the radio as you were getting yourself to a party, your night immediately felt important, not just fun.

Engineers

A theatrical snare roll settles into a locomotive rattle as the machine grunts and clunks. Numan sings high of his and his colleagues' lot as they maintain the lifestyle of the world from a system of conveyor belts underground. "All that we know is hate and machinery. We're engineers." It's the final track and ends as uniform as the opening instrumental. The main riff is more complex than usual and thickens over the top of the machine until that continues  to a finish on the snare drum and a wet, electronic sprinkler. End.

The cover art is of its time but out of time. A reimagined Magritte painting replaces the glowing head of the suited man at the table with Numan's own, eye makeup intact but now in a 1930s style double breasted suit. He sits looking with a worried face at a small pyramid that glows from the top down. The album is one of exploration of the theme of humans and technology dealing with each other in the world to come already beginning as he recorded. Taking inspiration from cinema, Phillip K. Dick and industrial advertising, he filtered his inspirations through his first year of fame with Asperger's. The title is Freud's concept of the Id's drive for self gratification and the forces (largely internal) that seek to prevent its expression.

This record took me a long time to really fold myself into. I picked out the more melodically pleasing tracks and let the others fade into disuse, at first. But then, all I had was a cassette copy so I'd put it on for study and it worked its way. I came to a few conclusions about it, especially in light of knowing it's Tubeway Army predecessor, Replicas.

If you are unused to these sounds and find them quaint and samey you should pause for thought. Yes, this album finds a formula and sticks to it as though the system that it supports would collapse without perfect observance. And you might think, that's not much to build a creative project on. Then, all you will need to do is find an album by an old blues master. It's not the difference between those classic guitar tones and chord progressions played organically that you should be hearing, it's the adherence to a grammar that must be maintained for the music to be blues. Same thing. 

Gary Numan did not emerge from Kraftwerk. Even the cinematic soundscapes of Tangerine Dream could not claim him. Gary Numan came from punk. The self-titled Tubeway Army debut features sparse synthesisers, usually helping out around the rhythm guitars and bass as texture. By the time Replicas was released the guitars were ditched and the approach sealed. Icy screams of synthesis screamed in flight overhead as a factory filled with perfectly maintained automation clanked, hummed and manufactured on the floor below, in a wash of blinding antiseptic fluorescence. Gary Numan made this setting and walked  through it, comfortably at home. 

Here and there he daydreams like any assembly worker, of being a machine himself, just cognisant enough to know he is a robot, or someone altogether more fleshly who prefers the protection of a synthesised skin. Stepping from the thick barre chord riffs of the first album through to this muscular and industrially tooled world building Gary Numan made himself instantly recognisable to the decades to come, needing only know that adventurous listeners of the future would pause and understand.

Listening notes: I listened to the superb hi-res flac downloaded from a online retail outlet. No loudness war compression, here, just the big airy white light soundscapes of the original vision. However, I got a lot of background from the booklet in the 1998 rerelease from Beggar's Banquet. I've found out that the mix on all CD releases of this album are unsullied by loudness mixing so, any you can find will sound very good.