After he'd been a fixture of the British new wave/punk/underground/alternative scene since the late '70s, 1994's Take Me to God marked Jah Wobble's first major commercial success as a solo artist, reaching number 13 in the U.K. The use of numerous guest musicians (including Can drummer Jaki Leibezeit) gives this a feel of a rotating collective, with Wobble (who plays several instruments here in addition to the one he's most known for, bass) the constant. Quite a few singers contribute, giving this more of a song-oriented feel than some of his other work, some of the more celebrated including Gavin Friday, Dolores O'Riordan of the Cranberries, Senegalese vocalist Baaba Maal, and top world music artist Najma Akhtar. The 66-minute length of these sprawling excursions almost inevitably means the program will drag at times, according to your musical inclinations. Lyrically, too, it's so varied as to make it difficult to connect with a pronounced attitude or viewpoint, the concerns ranging from the almost indecipherably frivolous ("Yoga of the Nightclub") to the numerous references to God that pepper the song titles. But it's an interesting assortment of tracks combining currents flowing through mid-'90s alternative rock, world music, reggae, club beats, dub, and African pop, adding up to an extremely heterogeneous whole.
While the goth scene in England was picking up commercial steam in the mid-'80s, the Sisters of Mercy may have seemed quiet, but they roared back with 1987's Floodland. Opening with the driving two-part hymn "Dominion/Mother Russia," Sisters leader Andrew Eldritch (along with bassist Patricia Morrison) creates a black soundscape that is majestic and vast. While the earlier Sisters releases were noisy, sometimes harsh affairs, Floodland is filled with lush production (thanks to Meat Loaf writer/producer Jim Steinman and the New York Choral Society) and lyric imagery that is both scary and glorious. The slower tracks, like "Flood" and "1959," are some of the best ethereal sounds goth has to offer, and the downright regal "This Corrosion" is one of the best songs of the genre. A definite milestone.
Though the years have deadened its impact somewhat, there is still a visceral thrill to be drawn from replaying the first Love and Rockets album, a sense of the first step taken towards a brave new world, and a miasmic whirl of psychedelic intent that masks intents even darker than the preceding Bauhaus ever envisioned. Recorded and released in 1985, riding to club acclaim on the back of the "Ball of Confusion" remake, and aligning its makers with a destiny and fame that no one could ever have predicted, Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven ranks among the most deceptive debut albums of the 1980s. The keys to the album remain the same, of course -- the churning guitar soup of "The Dog-End of a Day Gone By," the sibilant glam sexuality of the title track, the chilling nursery rhyme pendulum of "The Game." But the opiate atmosphere that chokes the wide open spaces leavened within every song only thickens by the time you hit the closing acoustics of "Saudade," and Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven emerges as profound an experience as any of the lauded trips of the original psychedelic era. It rounds out the experience with dramatic flair, pinpointing the sheer creativity that was sparking around Love and Rockets at the dawn of their decade-long career -- and reminding you that that decade was over all too quickly.
A barnstorming compilation of greatest hits, live favourites, rare cuts and two exclusive tracks, Run Devils and Demons starts at the beginning with 1991's anthemic 'Temple head' and comes bang up to date with new Moonshout-derived single Dancehall Operator, and a belting live glow lighters-in-the-air account of Drums of Navaron' from last year's Châlons-en-Champagne festival.
There isn't a single weak song on this intelligently programmed 26-track survey. The decade-old vinyl version of 70s' disco homage, Scorc', still bewitches; the earlier collision of Rajastani and Indian influences in Ali Mullah, complete with the awesome vocals of Natacha Atlas, continues to exert its own parched pull on the senses; 2003's 'Kingsland Meltdown' remains a magnificent aural portrait of London's Dalston Junction; and the much sought-after Lionrock kick da flavour remix of International Times, previously only available on a Spanish import, is here in all its seriously funky glory.
It's impossible not to get caught up in the swirling blend of Bengali and Big Beat in the thumping Body Machine or to resist the scorched intoxications of the sitar-saturated The Khaleegi Stomp. And from very early TGU days, The Army Of Forgotten Souls still sways, swoons and sweats its way through a Moroccan train journey to skin-prickling effect.
It's all, of course, a touch nostalgic, with the unlikely combining of evaporating ambient soundscapes and dark, dream-like mid-nineties trip-hop in Ancient Dreams Of The Sky, and the blues-inflected Nile Delta Disco no less evocative than the magnificently drum-laden Sky Giant or, for that matter, much else here.
More Dub-based at heart than anything else, Bengali Bantam Youth Experience shows a musical development from Black Star Liner‘s début Yemen Cutta Connection which results in a more streamlined experience, with crisp production letting the bass reverberate around and under delicate keyboard tones, Bollywood strings and all manner of Eastern percussion. There’s some upbeat skanking beats on tracks like “Low BMW” and the laid-back single “Superfly And Bindi” which exhibit and infectious groove and sardonic vocals which take things well beyond the Asian Cool into the realms of Asian Sarkey. Yep, and there’s a vocoder about alongside the de rigueur samples from the On-U Sound back catalogue too, plus fuzz guitars and sitar twangs as is only to be expected, while there are even some sub-Hank Marvin moments on the chugging “Dark Shadow”.
So maybe the tablas are sometimes used under the influence more of Coldcut than Zakir Hussein, and placed mostly as loops rather than taking on the complexity possible from a master. But there’s still plenty of rhythmic complexity going on, just not restricted to the Eastern mode. If anything, there’s still more of the West Indies or West Yorkshire sound system in the rhythms and vocals, though everything comes together from diverse sources in the relaxed Dub and Filmi tracks “Khatoon,” “Pink Rupee” or “Inder Automatic” – the latter’s vocal track even fails to irritate despite it’s similarity to the singers roped in or sampled for years of Goa Trance records. However, the marvellously hummed samples of the equally well-titled “Ethnic Suicide of the Volga Boatmen,” whose camel-riding feel is accentuated by the crashing-wave cymbals and Mellotron-style cinematic strings stands out as the record’s highlight for its enlivening chant.
"Brainchild" may have informed the title of the Auteurs' sophomore album, Now I'm a Cowboy, but it was the sneering, in-with-the-hip-crowd antics of the opening "Lenny Valentino" which flew in the face of the light retro-pop the band wielded just a year earlier. Rougher, sexier, more slipshod than before, this song had a lot to say, and the band was right behind it. But that's not to imply that the band didn't carry itself with equal aplomb across the rest of the set. The Auteurs blazed through a mixed mutant bag of smoothies and deadlies, where every title read like a trip around the world. Meanwhile, pre-empting all that Pulp would later perfect, Luke Haines' feral lyricism touched on the struggle of upper and lower classes and the horror that falls when they collide. "New French Girlfriend" hashed Haines' vocals to bits with a yummy guitar, while "Chinese Bakery" is an off-kilter rock rampage across streets that slice uptown and downtown, leaving "The Upper Classes" to fill the breach. Elsewhere, both "Life Classes/Life Model" and the sordid claustrophobia of "Underground Movies" emerge as biting commentary. Now I'm a Cowboy served the Auteurs well, becoming an edgily delicious bridge between their immediate past and their enduring future. Dig a little deeper and add a pinch of hindsight, however, and it's also easy to discern the treasure trove of embryonic nuggets that would surface in Haines' Baader Meinhof and Black Box Recorder solo projects.
With the band having already plowed their way to the top of the U.K. charts with their debut album Spartacus, it's no wonder the Farm's follow-up, Love See No Colour, sounds so positively joyous. The 1992 set spun off four Top 50 singles, with the biggest of the batch, the enjoyable but superfluous cover of Human League's "Don't You Want Me," arguably the weakest of them all. Far better were "Mind" and "Rising Sun," both charting dancefloor fillers, the former driven by the same fabulous gospel styled backing vocals that also gives a soulful punch to "Hard Times," a jubilant number that oddly wasn't picked for singledom. Mostly, though, the Farm happily reaped musical seeds that were sown long before, harvesting fields of infectious synth pop, atmospheric New Romanticism, and bright new wave, and cross-breeding these with snippets of contemporary house. "New International" and the more experimental "Suzy Boo" flicker between proto-industrial and trance, "Creepers" crawls from classical to the Renaissance before hustling off to funky town, while "Tooth Fairy" flits between acid house and progressive rock. All told a strong album, equal to its successor, but oddly the set itself didn't chart, perhaps because by the time of its release, everybody considered the Farm a singles band. Their loss.
