In my continuing quest to listen to everything, once in a while I happen upon something that I really wish I'd known about when it came out.  The latest of these revelations is ManBREAK, a British group often compared to Rage Against the Machine.  It's true that there are elements of RATM in their sound: rockified funk beats, distorted guitar, left-wing rapping; but their sound is not as hard, the anger not as raw, and there's a strain of the more party-oriented dance-rock of EMF in there.  It all adds up to something I've listened to over and over this week, specifically their 1999 album Come and See.  The set opens strongly with "Ready Or Not" from the Mortal Kombat soundtrack, then gets even better with "Kop Karma"--

02 Kop Karma

ManBREAK

Did you catch the Big Audio Dynamite reference?  That's what I get out of "These are the things that drive me crazy / These are the things that drive me mad," at least.  (Now there's a band that could've used a jolt of something or other: for all their hip appearance and melting-pot musical style, they sure were bland.)  Working backwards, I learned that ManBREAK frontman Swindelli fronted a similar band, The Twenty Fifth of May, earlier in the 90s (as Stephen Swindelli).  Their lone album, Lenin and McCarthy (haha), is even better than Come and See, or maybe I just think that because it has more fast breakbeat tracks and I'm a sucker for fast breakbeat.  This is one of those albums where I have a hard time picking a single track; "Solid State Logic" won out for its "Mission: Impossible" lick, but it's just one of several excellent songs on Lenin and McCarthy--

12-Solid state logic

The 25th of May

ManBREAK's name, by the way, comes from "the after-effects of a covert action by the British government which involved the dispensing of untested drugs to unwitting soldiers during the cold war."  They were active as recently as last year, when they released the "Dark Age" single; however, poor reviews of that record make it doubtful that I'll seek it out.  Their 2001 album Asphalt Culture, on the other hand, seems worth tracking down.

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The online resurrection of the great Slab! that I blogged about on April 30 continues in fits and starts; the latest development is that two Slab! videos have just been posted to YouTube by Ikon Video.  That means I can plug them in right here! 

Slab! - People Pie

Slab! - Death's Head Soup

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A highlight of our trip to Maryland last week was seeing Peter Murphy in Baltimore, though the less said about the club (and the opening act) the better.  The last time we saw him as a solo act was at the 9:30 Club in 2004, when he was being forced into the old tour-to-promote-album-sales paradigm, and the album he was promoting (Unshattered) was just not up to snuff.  Consequently he only played a few of his older hits ("They've told me this is not a nostalgia show, " he said).  Today everyone knows (except the major labels) that the money is in live performance and merchandising, and the recorded music is more or less a giveaway to promote the shows.  So this time he played the hits, though by a twist of fate the ticket price was about half that of the 2004 show.  But the songs were glorious: "All Night Long," "Indigo Eyes," "Strange Kind of Love," "Gliding Like a Whale," "Huuvola," even "The Sweetest Drop," a few Bauhaus numbers, a bit of Bowie, and for the final encore, "Cuts You Up."  Plus a whole bunch of songs I'm less familiar with.  Peter is beginning to show his age as his face wrinkles and his hair thins; he is still spry, though, pogoing at times, even moonwalking (!), and his voice is as effortlessly lovely as ever.  He seems quite at home in the role of Elder Statesman of Goth.  It was a completely satisfying set.  But if I could pick one song from Peter Murphy's catalog to be added to his live repertoire, it would be "Let Me Love You" from Holy Smoke.  The slow, mysterious verses just open up and resolve so beautifully into the dreamy major-chord chorus, and who can argue with a sentiment like "Let me love you"?  This song always makes me visualize Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête, so I've used a graphic from that instead of the traditional album cover:

06-Let Me Love You

Peter Murphy

And if I could choose a second, it would be "The Scarlet Thing In You"--

Peter Murphy - The Scarlet Thing In You

What would you pick?

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Casting about for new music to listen to I came across the Phenomenauts, and the description sounded all right (something like "pop-punk with some synths"), and sure enough, they're pretty fun (and unlike so many pop-punk bands, they don't sound like whiny teenagers).  The track list for their album, For All Mankind, lists "Make a Circuit With Me" as track 4.  Could it be the Polecats' song from way back in the 80s?, I wondered.  It is!  The Phenomenauts have made a small change to the classic chorus of "I need a diode, cathode, electrode, overload, generator, oscillator -- Make a circuit with me": they've replaced "electrode" with "nematode" (roundworm?!) for some reason.  And otherwise they've cranked up the speed, volume, and guitar distortion and made the song fit right into the musical landscape of today.  Here is the Polecats' original rockabilly-robotica video, followed by a stream of the Phenomenauts' version:

The Polecats-Make a circuit with me

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Mrs. V. and I are big fans of Zero 7; that is, of the Zero 7 songs that they did not invite Sia Furler to vandalize with her breathy, pouty, "ghetto twee*" vocal stylings.  Verily, she is the Jar Jar Binks of downtempo.  We're okay with the other guest singers, but it's the Fender Rhodes-laden instrumentals that really melt us into the upholstery in a mellow swoon.  If I had bothered to read the liner notes sooner I would have known that the Rhodes-tinkler, Neil Cowley, is not part of the Zero 7 duo, but is a guest as well.  So now I'm catching up with Cowley's other work: his own synth duo Fragile State, and the creamy Rhodes goodness of Soundcastles, his 2006 album as Pretz.

02-pretz-chapel_stile

pretz

All with zero percent Sia!  Speaking of electronic chillout duos, it was Air's Premiers Symptômes CD that put the Rhodes on my downtempo map way back in the late 90s; no other album evokes 70s-era romantic softcore porn nearly as well.  Patrick Woodcock's tuba is the secret ingredient that helps make it so deliciously dreamy.

03 - Les Professionnels

Air

Finally, from this side of the Atlantic there is (was?) Spool, the duo of John Ridenour and "Jhno" (John Eichenseer), who are at their best when Jhno busts out the Rhodes:

02-Algo

Spool

I had a Rhodes once, and it did not sound like that!  Apparently you need the right kind of amp or effects pedal or whatever, but I could never be bothered to get into hardware.  Now you can just download a VST plugin to get a decent Rhodes sound.  Come to think of it, I should do that.

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Why oh why has Whitesnake's "Fool For Your Loving" been running through my head for the last week?  It's not that I have any affinity for the lyrics: "A hard-lovin' woman like you just makes a hard-lovin' man."  What the hell does that even mean, anyway?  I think it's just that it's such a well-put-together song, with two great guitar riffs, David Coverdale's better-than-most blues-rock vocals, the way he plunges right into the second verse after the chorus, the guitar solo section, a good bridge; everything just clicks.  Coverdale must think so too, since he's recorded it so many times.  I spent Sunday evening listening to five different versions.  The original studio version in on Ready an' Willing from 1980; it has the high-hat mixed really loud so that it sounds like a choo-choo train, or Squeeze's music-hall number "Cool For Cats," which kind of undermines the rock-and-roll swagger.  On the other hand, Neil Murray's bass is very crisp in the mix and it really moves the song along; he has a punchy style like Boz Burrell but with more flourishes and note-bending.  The definitive version is still the first one I ever heard, the live version (also from 1980) with the same band, which at that time was the classic line-up: half of Deep Purple (Coverdale, Jon Lord, and Ian Paice), Murray, and guitarists Mick Moody and Bernie Marsden:

05 - Fool for your loving

Whitesnake

That Murray's style is similar to Burrell's was probably no accident, as Whitesnake was often accused of being a Bad Company copycat band.  In 1987 Coverdale retooled Whitesnake into a Led Zeppelin copycat band, prompting Robert Plant to call him "David Coverversion."  Or maybe he was already calling him that, I don't know.  The move paid off, though, as the Whitesnake album went multiplatinum thanks to the Zeppelinesque "Still of the Night" and a remake of the power ballad "Here I Go Again" from the 1982 Saints and Sinners album.  (And did you ever notice that in the original version, he sings "Like a hobo I was born to walk alone," while on subsequent versions "hobo" has been changed to "drifter"?  Sounds like the hobo lobby got to him.  John Hodgman is onto something.)  Coverdale loves remaking his own songs, and on the followup to Whitesnake, Slip of the Tongue, he remade "Fool For Your Loving", giving it the full 80s mushy-synth-and-sledgehammer-snare sound for what is easily the worst version of the song.*  Now by this time Coverdale had disbanded the original Whitesnake band and would build a band around himself in response to what he saw as the dictates of the market.  Moody, Marsden, and Murray would regroup in the 90s as Company of Snakes.  In 2001 Company of Snakes put out a live album, Here They Go Again, with a new version of both "Fool For Your Loving" (and "Here I Go Again," of course) sung by Norwegian singer Jørn Lande.  It's good, but a little too fast; Murray's bass still sounds great.  Finally, David Coverdale and his Whitesnake-of-the-moment released a live album in 2006, Live in the Shadow of the Blues, and the update of "Fool For Your Loving" cranks up the rock even above the original, obliterating that lame 1989 version.  The guitarists this time are Doug Aldrich and Reb Beach, and I've never heard of them before but they sure do energize "Fool"--

11 - Fool For Your Loving

Whitesnake

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I must stop beginning blog entries with "I must"--there's nothing like seeing identical openings stacked up in an RSS reader to point out a rut.  My last UK skronk entry covered Clock DVA and Biting Tongues, both from 1981.  Now we'll move on to Blurt, a three-piece band centered around Ted Milton's sax and vocal exhortations (he uses several vocal styles, not one of which could really be called "singing").  Milton started Blurt in 1980, with his brother Jake on drums and Peter Creese on guitar, in Stroud, Gloucestershire.  For audio illustration I have selected "Bullets For You"  from the 1984 album of the same name (and also from the Best of Blurt CD, as you can see):

09 bullets for you

Blurt

Amazingly, Ted Milton is still at; though "The Last Blurt Tour" wrapped up in March, he did a tour of the Netherlands in April, and played a show in Paris just this past Sunday.  No sense in stopping if they'll still come to see you.

To wrap up this mini-survey of UK skronk we'll go north to Scotland and the no wave noise of Edinburgh's Fire Engines.  The Fire Engines stand out here by not having a saxophone, but their guitars approximate one throughout their body of work.  Singer/guitarist David Henderson went on to perform actual pop music in Win, then quirkier music in The Nectarine No. 9, and his new band is called The Sexual Objects,  From 1980, here is the Fire Engines' first single, "Get Up and Use Me" (as taken from the Lubricate Your Living Room LP):

02 - Get Up & Use Me

Fire Engines

Skronk is in the air: just last night Boing Boing did a post on No Wave, "a new photo and oral history book documenting the highly-influential art-punk scene in New York City from 1976-1980."  That's probably worth a read.  That period was just before my own divergence from the musical mainstream, which is why I caught on to the early-80s UK version rather than the earlier New York version.  Both locations were equally out of reach for me at the time anyway; being part of either scene was out of the question, but at least I got some vicarious enjoyment out of the records.

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I must come to terms with the fact that a blog entry is not a book, so instead of a definitive history of skronk in the UK, here is a brief survey of it.  "Skronk" is a term attributed to Robert Christgau (by Lester Bangs) to refer to a certain kind of music being made in New York in the late 70s: bands bringing punk's do-it-yourself attitude (which does not necessarily mean "sloppy" but that was often the result) to new interpretations of jazz and funk, and of course rock.  The quintessential skronk album is the 1978 No New York collection compiled by Brian Eno for Antilles Records, featuring James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (with Lydia Lunch), Mars, and D.N.A. (with Arto Lindsay).  "No Wave" is another term applied to roughly the same music (nice photo archive here). 

In England, Bristol band The Pop Group was an early proponent of the no wave melting pot, previously seen here.  Another early UK skronk band was Sheffield's Clock DVA, formed by Adi Newton after he quit The Human League (in their first incarnation as The Future) because of their emphasis on electronics.  (Ironic, then, that Newton would later transform Clock DVA into one of the purest electronic bands of the 80s and 90s.)  Clock DVA's first great album, 1981's Thirst, contains lots of saxophone wailing by Charlie Collins and scratchy guitar playing by Paul Widger, plus energetic if not quite nimble bass playing from the late, much-maligned Stephen "Judd" Turner.  It's more conventional than most US skronk, but there is a greater dynamic range (especially on the stately, measured "Impressions of an African Winter").  On occasion, though, they do work up quite a racket, as on "Piano Pain"--

04 - Piano Pain

Clock DVA

(Great early album cover by design superstar Neville Brody.)  Newton decided to pursue a more accessible sound and fired the Thirst band, an unpopular move which nevertheless paid off, as the next Clock DVA album, Advantage, is one of the best of the decade.  Collins, Widger, and drummer Roger Quail stayed together as The Box (previously seen here) with new vocalist Peter Hope and bassist Terry Todd, producing an unsurpassed catalog of British skronk.

Meanwhile in Manchester, Biting Tongues were dishing out the skronk.  The band's origin is described on the Biting Tongues website:

Then came Tony Wilson's Factory Club (at the Russell Club in Hulme) offering an open invitation to experiment that was taken up when Ken Hollings, Howard Walmsley, Eddie Sherwood and a few others decided to make some noise to accompany their 16mm silent epic Biting Tongues. A further performance followed a few weeks later, when Colin Seddon and Graham Massey disbanded their Post Natals project and joined up. The film itself, a flashing series of negative images, became a memory; the name remained.

(Massey would later be a founding member of 808 State.)  Biting Tongues' first album, Don't Heal (also 1981), was the first record on the Beggars Banquet offshoot label Situation Two.  The vocals are mostly spoken recitations of found texts, often cut up in the grandest surrealist tradition.  Here is "You Can Choke Like That"--

06.Biting Tongues - you can choke like that

Biting Tongues

More UK skronk on the way!

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Having had access to the college radio station record library during the 80s, not to mention the constant stream of new releases that came in, and then spending all my disposable income (plus future income, once I got a credit card) on imported British records, I felt sure I must have uncovered everything I could possibly like.  But the sharity blogs keep dishing up records that I somehow overlooked, and occasionally one will make me go, "Damn, I wish I'd heard that back then, I would have been totally into it!"  Given my Sheffield band fandom, I was surprised to find I'd missed one: Leitmotiv.  Their "Big Money" single is not quite as hard as my favorite Sheffield bands, but has a big, muscular beat that I would have loved anyway:

01 - big money

Leitmotiv

So I missed it the first time around, but at least I can dig it now!  Another band I missed out on was FourWayCross, a California band who, coincidentally, also were on the same label as Drowning Pool (recently seen here).  "Apologize" from their Product One album should appeal to the Killing Joke fan in anyone:

03 - Apologize

Fourwaycross

Actually, that sounds more like Play Dead than Killing Joke.  That reminds me, I've got to get some Play Dead on here, I just don't know what to pick.  Anyway, thanks to the sharity blogosphere for helping me fill in the gaps!

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or just plain "breaks," as I was last time: The Prodigy is generally considered to be the definitive breaks act, and they have been the most visible, thanks to several videos centered around frontman Keith Flint's evil-clown persona.  But Prodigy mastermind Liam Howlett's music underneath Flint's antics is top-notch, with driving beats and klaxon-like synths that unilaterally impel dancefloor action.

The Prodigy - Firestarter

My favorite breaks tracks, though, are four songs by Cirrus from their 2002 album Counterfeit.  They hit four home runs that surpass even The Prodigy for danceability, though their lyrics can be pretty awful, e.g. "Breakbeat suckers, we're the real motherf*ckers"--

03 Breakbeat Suckers

Cirrus

But those beats!  And those drop-outs, and phase-shifts, and synth hooks, and everything!  Aww, yeah... file under Guilty Pleasures.  Nothing Cirrus has done before or since has matched the core of Counterfeit, and they might not ever match it again, but "Breakbeat Suckers," "Dragon Lounge," "Ghetto Blaster," and "Unbreakable" should hold up for generations (as well as any electronic dance music can be expected to).

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