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They've been coming back for quite some time now (since 1990), of course, but now my 1980s are coming back. Since my recent post on Slab!, band member Stephen Dray has announced their imminent reformation (in the comments on this blog post), or resumption rather, since he maintains they never officially broke up. Woo-hoo! And now Portion Control have announced a new album, Slug, to be released May 31. Portion Control's early recordings, originally released on cassettes, were obviously inspired by Throbbing Gristle. But by their first proper album, I Staggered Mentally (1982), they had settled on a more beat-oriented sound, or as they billed it, "Hard, Rhythmic Electronics." Their 80s career peaked in 1985 with their most successful single, the industrial dancefloor staple "The Great Divide"--
There's some nice percussion in there; I'm finally learning to play a bit in a local drum circle. It hurts after a while, but it's great to actually make the sounds I've enjoyed listening to for so long.
Portion Control ceased operations after their 1986 album, Psycho-Bod Saves the World, but returned with a new album, Wellcome, in 2002, and Filthy White Guy in 2004. So their reactivation isn't exactly news, but Slug is, which is a good enough reason to dig out my old Portion Control records for another listen.
Here I am saying The Slip is the best Nine Inch Nails album since the first one when I haven't really listened to any of them since Broken. So I've been trying to catch up, going from recent to older; Year Zero and With Teeth are actually better than I thought, but neither are reach-out-and-grabby like The Slip, and both suffer from album bloat. I am especially impressed with the opener from With Teeth, "All the Love in the World," which starts with a dub beat before morphing into a piano ballad (with falsetto, even!) and then finally an arena rocker:
Trent is relentless with his morbidly dour lyrics, though; it becomes overbearing after a while. I think I can place them all into three categories:
- I have low self-esteem.
- We live in a dystopia.
- Living in a dystopia has given me low self-esteem.
Did I miss anything? What would Nine Inch Nails sound like if fronted by, say, Tom Waits and his morbidly gleeful lyrics? Like this, I bet:
This song contains one of my all-time favorite weird couplets:
Turn the dust out, oh clear a way
When the injury swells up, it will not be contained
Yeah! What the hell does that mean? I don't know, but it sure is catchy! Peter Hope first emerged in 1983 as the lead singer for The Box, a Sheffield band made up of former ClockDVA members. Mick Fish give some details in his book about Cabaret Voltaire, Industrial Evolution:
The Box tried a number of singers, one who sort of whooped like a Red Indian chief but couldn't sing in tune. They even played two gigs with Mal [Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire] on vocals -- a marriage of styles that was quite successful in its own way.... The Box eventually advertised for a singer. By far the best response came from Pete Hope from Hertford. Vocally somewhere between Tom Waits and Howlin' Wolf, he moved up to Sheffield with his young family.
Hope's inventive lyrics and unbridled singing style perfectly complemented The Box's no-wave skronk. Although they released several records, The Box never broke out, and they disbanded in 1985. Peter Hope then embarked on a series of one-off collaborations: this EP with synth whiz David Harrow (now known as James Hardway), an album with Cabaret Voltaire's Richard H. Kirk, an album with Jonathan S. Podmore (now known as Jono Podmore a.k.a. Kumo), and a 12" single with studio engineer Mark Estdale as Chain:
I just adore that gothic-industrial-funk sound; if only that had caught on in the way Nine Inch Nails did. Maybe it'll come back... Peter Hope, where are you?
I'm a Nine Inch Nails fan from way back. I was hanging out with my pal $ean at the original Kemp Mill Records where he was assistant manager the day Pretty Hate Machine came out; I bought one right out of the shipping box. I listened to it and knew immediately that "Head Like a Hole" was a future classic. It wasn't as hard as the stuff on Wax Trax! or KK, so there were plenty of haters who derided it as watered-down industrial; too bad for them. I saw NIN on the Pretty Hate Machine tour, at the Grog and Tankard in Baltimore, with Meat Beat Manifesto opening. I still have the t-shirt from the show. Come to think of it, I still have the SPK t-shirt I wore to the show; talk about threadbare! But since then I haven't really connected with NIN; Trent took a long hiatus, I started listening to different music, and I just skipped over everything else he put out. I really dug "The Perfect Drug," but not enough to buy it. So now he's free of record label ties and is giving away his new music; I downloaded Ghosts I-IV, but it didn't hook me. Yesterday I downloaded The Slip, and it did hook me! I've listened to "1,000,000" three times so far today! My initial reaction is that this is Trent's best album since Pretty Hate Machine. This is the new music buzz I remember from my youth!
The Slip has the feel of Trent's live-on-the-radio performances with Peter Murphy: no more futzing around in the studio with umpteen overdubs trying to get everything just perfect, he's just laying down a few tracks and rocking out! And it works beautifully!
Several weeks ago I wrote about Iggy Pop and Peter Murphy sounding nearly the same; just yesterday I discovered the live radio performances that Peter Murphy and Trent Reznor gave during the joint Nine Inch Nails/Bauhaus tour of 2006. Lo and behold, they did an Iggy Pop cover:
And to pile on the coincidences, Trent released a new Nine Inch Nails album today (The Slip), for free!
Ghostland Observatory seem poised to be this year's Big Thing, leading to overexposure and backlash, but a month after listening to their new album, Robotique Majestique, I still have several of the melodies and choruses running through my head. Ghostland Observatory are a synth/vocal duo in the classic mold of Soft Cell, but where Soft Cell looked to 60s female soul hits for influence, G.O. starts with Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." Case in point: the insanely catchy "Heavy Heart"--
Singer Aaron Behrens even brings rock histrionics to the stage show; can he compensate for the lack of any actual instrument-playing onstage through a whole concert? That will be insteresting to see, if I ever get a chance.
Of course I remembered even more Moldy 70s songs immediately after I posted my Moldy 70s video collection, but one of them led to an unanticipated discovery. Looking for Starbuck's "Moonlight Feels Right" on YouTube, I found instead a live performance from 1986 of the same song by Yukihiro Takahashi, the former drummer of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, whose members (Takahashi, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Haruomi Hosono) have a hand in just about every piece of music from Japan that I hear. It's an impressive arrangement with the synth riffs played by a horn section, and the keyboardist even replicates the what is undoubtedly the best marimba solo ever in a pop song:
And for comparison purposes, here's the original:
I don't often listen to so-called "Indie Rock," because when I do I usually find it boring, precious, excessively wordy, and lacking any rock'n'roll gusto, and then I remember why I don't listen to Indie Rock. Sasha Frere-Jones ignited a big debate last fall (if music geeks arguing amongst themselves can be termed a "debate") with his New Yorker article "A Paler Shade of White," in which he argues that indie rock sucks because it's all made by middle-class white college students (and graduates) with little to no influence from Authentic Black Music. (I remember hearing virtually the same argument nearly thirty years ago, explaining why Led Zeppelin was great and Def Leppard sucked.) I think it probably explains why I can't get interested in indie rock. But complaining about it is like complaining that Chick-Fil-A doesn't serve enough hamburgers. If it's a hamburger you want, don't go to Chick-Fil-A! Yesterday, however, I took a trip to the musical Chick-Fil-A, as Ted Leo and the Pharmacists were playing at Cornell's end-of-classes Slope Day celebration. I'd heard good things about Ted Leo from phantom blogger Jeff, and it was free, so I decided to check it out. Well...for the most part it didn't change my opinion of indie rock, but they did unleash the angriest, most passionate anti-war song I've heard in years, the best protest rock since Rage Against the Machine broke up. Here's the video for "Bomb. Repeat. Bomb.", which doesn't begin to capture the power of the live performance (a second guitarist really adds to the punch of the chorus):
Being first is everything. Bolus gets linked to from everywhere for posting videos of cheesy 70s songs as "Hell's iPod." I've been enjoying this crap for years, unironically, having made two "Moldy 70s" CDs during the Napster years. Here is a video sampler of those fine collections of shamefully seductive pop songs. Let's start out watching some chicks beat the shit out of a cowbell and a tambourine while Gary Wright and crew show you how phallic a keyboard can be:
"Geek the light fantastic!", says Mrs. V.
1964? Well, I heard it in the 70s.
"She's gonna get you from behind!" Ow!
You can't beat "Convoy" for the cheeze factor!
"Sweet City Woman" has one of my favorite gag-inducing lines ever: "And she feeds me love and tenderness and macaroons." Gahhhhhhh!
And now for some runners-up:
Just days after discovering the recent resurfacing of a member of long-lost Way of the West, I've found another blast from the past: Slab! Slab's few records, released in the second half of the 80s, are an exhilarating mix of pounding, near-industrial rhythms, fuzzed-out-bass funk, scraping guitars, tape loops, weird lyrics, and, on the early records, a horn section. I have never met another Slab fan that I didn't introduce to Slab, and in fourteen years of web-surfing I still had never found one. Until a couple days ago, when I found this post on the Unfit for Print blog. At last, here was another human enlightened to the cacophonous joys of Slab! Not only that, the post engendered a long comment thread that was joined by actual Slab members! After so many years of silence, I've finally learned "whatever happened to Slab." Of course that means more records added to my wantlist, but isn't that what life is all about, seeking what you want, then when you find it, seeking something else? In celebration of this discovery, here's a Slab! track, selected by being the first one I could find the cover art for:
Hear more Slab! on Muxtape!
I've been spending a lot of my listening time lately back in the 80s and neglecting the funk, so I sought to remedy that today. I started listening to Brownout, the Latin funk band from Austin, and as soon as I heard "African Battle" I was hooked. Deep funk beat, extra percussion, horns, and trombone solos? Yes, please!
