GREEN VELVET
Groove, 2001
From Basement Jaxx and the French filter-disco sound to the rediscovery of vocals by everyone from Herbert to Luomo to Photek, the last few years have seen a remarkable renaissance of interest in house music on the part of hipsters. And the primary drive behind this, I think, was a craving for pleasantness, for music that doesn't want to hurt the listener but makes you feel.... nice. With techno locked in grinding hairshirt minimalism and drum'n'bass becoming ever more oriented around distorted bass-riffs (to the point of sounding like headbanging heavy metal or old Killing Joke records), house's sensuousness beckoned hipsters like a quenching oasis.
But the glitterball dazzle of filter disco, the warm, organic musicality of Body 'N Soul and Nuphonic, these represent only one side of house music. In truth, house can be as mechanistic, punishing, and dehumanized as the hardest-core techno, the darkest drum 'n'bass. Right from the start, there's been a schism, or more accurately, a vital tension, within house culture: "songs" versus "tracks"; diva passion and gospel-descended uplift versus treadmill beats, trippy FX, and slimy blurts of inorganic synthesiser.
Called "tracky" or "trackhead" by cognoscenti, this side of house began with the mid-Eighties jack tracks (palsied vamps, stutter-afflicted vocal-riffs, mind-evacuating "jack your body" chants), then mutated into acid house in 1987. Acid contained its own micro-genre of vocal-based tracks, a world away from the melisma-drenched fabulousness of Ultra Nate and Robert Owens. On the flipside of Phuture's "Acid Tracks," the very first house tune to deploy the fractal wibbles of the Roland 303 bass-synthesizer, the astonishing "Your Only Friend" personified cocaine as a robot-voiced tyrant: "I'll make you lie for me, I'll make you die for me/In the end, I'll be your only friend." Then there was Sleezy D's ""I've Lost Control," a Sabbath-inspired Marshall Jefferson track featuring an "Iron Man" vocal and padded-cell-as-dub-chamber screams. Other classics of this micro-genre include Adonis's "No Way Back", Bam Bam's "Where's Your Child?" and Pierre's Pfantasy Club's "Dream Girl", all themed around disorientation, mindwreck, abduction, and sexual paranoia.
Green Velvet's Curtis Jones singlehandedly brought the creepy monologue back to house in the mid-Nineties. This Berkeley drop-out founded two Chicago labels: Cajual, for effervescent disco cut-ups (including his own Cajmere releases), and Relief, for cranium-denting beats and drug-noise delirium. Jones first made an impact with 1995's "Flash". Over a battery of rivet-gun snares, Jones played a slurred-voiced guide escorting a tour group of worried parents armed with cameras through "Club Bad" and revealing all the decadent things their teenage kids get up to. Like sucking on balloons of nitrous oxide---"laughing gas, but this is no laughing matter". Slyly playing on the wired paranoia of ravers ("ohmigod, what if mom and dad really do arrive and see me all out of my head?!?!"), the chorus "cameras ready, prepare to flash" transforms the club's occult murk into a Panopticon space of exposed and documented delinquency.
"Flash" was apparently intended as an anti-drug song, Jones talking about some of the fucked-up freaky shit he saw going on in clubs where he was doing PAs. But the song is cunningly pitched so that it works just as well as an anthem for drug-fiends. (For a long while, until I listened to the lyrics closely, I thought the "prepare to flash" chorus was a drug exhortation, referencing the "flash" or total-body rush some amphetamine users experience, or "flash" as in an LSD flashback). "La La Land", a standout track on the new Green Velvet album Whatever, is similarly ambiguous. Reviving all those classic early rave metaphors that involve imagery of madness, brain damage, derangement, the pursuit of oblivion through concussive bliss, "La La Land" is sung by a hardcore hedonist who's always "looking for the after-party to begin." The chorus is brilliantly catchy--"something about those little pills/unreal/the thrills/they yield/until/they kill/a mill/ion brain cells" (the rhymes work better if you adopt a black American accent, with the 'd' in 'yield' left unpronounced). But if that chorus sounds like a "Just Say No" warning, the lines "la la land is the place I need to be/the place that sets me free" contradict them. Is this profoundly ambivalent, or just a cowardly refusal to adopt a consistent standpoint? Does Jones accept that drug-abusers are seeking things the real world can't offer, escaping an intolerable world into a chemical utopia? Or does he simply not want to alienate his primary market, drugged up ravers, by unreservedly condemning their self-destructive pleasures?
Up until now, Green Velvet's emphasis has been on black humour, like "Answering Machine" with its a litany of bad news deposited on some luckless fellow's incoming message cassette: a landlord's eviction notice, his fiancee announcing that the baby is not his, a "psychic" fortune teller advising him to "stay in your house today, tomorrrow, and FOREVER". Or "Abduction", a simultaneously hilarious and disturbing ditty about being molested by alien beings midway through washing the dishes: Jones delivers lines like "they touched a part of me that I didn't know existed" in the faded, faltering voice of a survivor's confessional, with a feel for conversational cadence that's method acting in excelsis. Then there's the tripped-out whimsy of songs like "Water Molecule" (off the 1999 debut album Constant Chaos), where a zonked-out Jones imagines being reincarnated as H2O. The appeal? Water's access-all-areas privileges: "I would be a part of all different types of people, 'cos I would travel around in my vapor state, and I would turn into my liquid state and enter their glass and they would swallow me and I'd be part of their bodies".
The new album, though, is surprisingly serious, even militant. "When?" is straightforward anti-racist protest, a "don't judge me" plea to purge from your mind the prejudices and ethnic stereotypes caused by media brainwashing. The only hint of comedy here is his anti-humanist quip "we're all inferior". Propelled by a harsh, scouring riff, "When?" is a bit like if Mad Mike let his anger come out through a vocal tirade rather than just song-titles and slogans etched into the vinyl. Elsewhere, the spirit is pure punk rock: the staccato, accusatory "Stop Lyin'", the "don't mess with my mind" aggression of "Dank", the searing instrumental "Minimum Rage" with its title punning on the bottom-level income earned by American 16 year olds at fast-food restaurants and similar dead end jobs. "GAT (The Great American Tragedy)" is an anthem for teenage freaks who start dressing weird and acting out, only to get the condescending "you're just going through a phase" treatment from parents and elders. Jones delivers the chorus-howl "THIS IS NOT A FUCKING PHASE!!" with the percussive phrasing of arly Eighties US hardcore punk bands like Black Flag, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and Negative Approach. This is slamdancing techno, moshpit rave.
None of this would work so well if the backing tracks weren't so compulsive, deranging, and, well, tracky. Green Velvet's sound reactivates a forgotten branch of house's family tree: not the symphonic sashay of Philly and Salsoul, but post-Moroder artpunk--the panting, guttural vocals and kinky pulsations of DAF and Liaisons Dangereuses (both huge on Chicago's early Eighties dancefloors), the soiled electronics of Throbbing Gristle, The Normal, and Suicide. Whatever's sound has a retro-Eighties feel, at times closer to industrial and EBM than even the most tracky of modern house. Songs like "Stop Lyin'" are clockwork mechanisms pulsating in strict time, all square-sounding, stiff beats and 16th note sequenced bassline patterns that chatter and pummel. "Gendefekt" is a rigid grid of quantized drums and eerily spiralling synth-noises that make you think of the DNA helix; Kraftwerk's Computer World lost in a ketamine void. Propelled by slinky bass-riffs that writhe and squirm through your ears like frantic mind-worms in a hurry to get to the chewy center of your brain, "Sleepwalking"--the new album's absolute killer tune--is like Cabaret Voltaire on amyl nitrate.
Jones has described what he does as "folk music for the rave scene". Like that other pioneer of story-telling techno The Horrorist a/k/a Oliver Chesler, he's adept at finding narratives that fit the abstract emotions and weird energies generated by electronic music but that don't detract from its posthuman intensity. Jones also stands out in a faceless scene as one of the few live performers in electronica whose physical presence really adds something to the records. His live show is not to be missed, involving costume changes, voice-warping FX, auto-destruction theatrics (he's wont to fake-smash an Eighties shoulder-strap synth as if it were an electric guitar), and loads of charisma. The guy's a star.
SIMON REYNOLDS
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
THE PRODIGY, The Fat of the Land
Village Voice, July 8th 1997
Some say the Prodigy have betrayed the bright promise of the "electronica revolution", resulting in a techno-rock hybrid that's not so much kick-ass as half-assed. But the Prodigy have always been a rave 'n' roll band rather than "proper" techno. The crucial distinction to grasp here is that techno and rave are not synonymous, and that in some respects rave has more in common with rock than with club culture.
In the USA, rave is regarded as the epitome of fashion-plate Europhile trendiness, but in Britain dance music is the mainstream of pop culture, and rave specifically has a decidedly lumpen, un-cool aura. "Raves were mass, teenage, one didn't go to them," is how a veteran of London's 1988 acid house club Shoom explained it to me recently. Purists, who believe the music is properly experienced in clubs, where DJs play long, varied, "educational" sets to an allegedly discriminating audience, see raves as alarming close to arena rock concerts. Ravers's rowdy rituals of abandon and joyous uniformity of attire suggest the very herd mentality that clubbers define themselves against.
By 1990, huge-scale one-off raves were transforming house and techno into bombastic spectacles full of lights and lasers, fun-fair attractions, and stellar DJ lineups. Where a club might have one or two DJs, raves featured ten DJs playing a bare hour each, sometimes less. To avoid being blown away by the other jocks, the DJs played crowd-pleasing anthems with their turntables cranked up to plus-8. Then DJ-producers started making music to fit this full-on tempest. Detroit techno was "debased", or so the official history goes, into the hyperkinetic drug-noise called 'ardkore (which was when my ears pricked up).
And by 1991, the UK had a massive circuit of commercial, fully licensed raves, with promoters booking rave bands as well as DJs. Alongside N-Joi, Bizarre Inc, and Shades of Rhythm, the Prodigy were the most popular hardcore rave act. Musically, the Prodigy fit techno's standard syndrome--the boffin (Liam Howlett) knob twiddling alone in his studio lab. But live and on video, the Prodigy were always a band, with three other members--MC Maxim Reality, and dancers Keith Flint and Leeroy--taking up the visual slack.
At the height of this golden age of rave, the Prodigy encapsulated the contradictions of 'ardkore: this music was simultaneously an underground phenomenon and solidly pop. Apart from their first, "Android", every Prodigy single released to date has made the top 15; their second, "Charley", got to Number Three in the summer of '91, while the follow-up, "Everybody in the Place", was kept off the Number One spot only by Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody". All the more remarkable since these brilliant early singles offer an only slightly more polished version of breakbeat hardcore, the music that evolved into jungle. Techno purists sniffed, but I always saw it as the new garage punk: riffs, noise, amphetamine-frenzy freakbeats, a sort of aggressive euphoria – the spirit of 1966 and 1977 channeled through the body of hip hop. When the Prodigy stepped onstage at Irving Plaza a month ago, they were introduced as something "for all you punk rockers, hip hoppers, and pill poppers." No mention of techno headz or house bods; indeed, Liam Howlett has been proclaiming in interviews that he never liked Kraftwerk, the sacred source for Detroit techno.
Starting with 1994's sophomore album Music for the Jilted Generation, the Prodigy repositioned themselves as rock, partly by using electric guitar on a couple of tracks, and partly by the vague conceptual/protest angle to the album. The jilted generation, explained Howlett, was kids who'd grown up under Thatcher, had little to live for but drugs and dance music, and now found even their weekend utopia threatened as authorities targeted raves. The UK equivalent, in other words, of the American grunge audience: Generation E.
All that remained was to bring the noise to America. Step One: turning dancer Keith Flint into the video-genic vocalist on "Firestarter". OK, the promo is corny: Flint's Mohican and psycho-youth grimaces. But sonically, "Firestarter" is sampler-wielding cyber-Stooges, a Dionysian hymn to destruction. Appearing at the MTV Europe Awards to pick up a trophy for Best Dance Video, the Prodigy greeted EC youth with "Hold it down!" a vintage '92 rave rallying cry--as if to confirm 'ardkore's historical victory and vindication. No matter that out of the early rave bands only the Prodigy had survived the collapse of the 1990-92 circuit; the music had become what it had always secretly been – the new rock.
"Firestarter" looked like a dead cert as electronica's ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, but inexplicably stumbled at the threshold of the Billboard top 30. Maybe "Breathe"--a jungle-punk duet between Flint and Maxim--will bust down the door, what with its abjection-chic video à la Tool and Marilyn Manson. Enjoyably reminiscent of Oi! bands like Angelic Upstarts, the song was a highlight of the Prodigy's otherwise patchy performance at Irving Plaza. There's rock, and then there's rawk; too often the Prodge crossed the line. When they dragged onstage a "real" guitarist, nor only did he look like a ye olde punke relic from the King's Road, but the overall effect was a tad Rage Against the Machine. Sans politics, of course: the Prodigy's brand of vacant menace and quasi-insurrectionary mayhem slots into the illustrious plastic punk lineage that runs Alice Cooper/Sweet/Billy Idol/Adam and the Ants. (The Prodge even feature an insect in their logo.)
Talking of insects, Keith Flint has described the Prodigy as "buzz music." The song titles are mostly self-reflexive, referring only to the music's own sensations: "Hyperspeed", "Pandemonium", "G-Force", "Full Throttle", "The Heat (The Energy)". 'Ardkore always did belong to a burgeoning "rush culture" that includes video games, roller-blading, extreme sports like snow-boarding (a hobby of the band's), and bungee jumping (a popular sideshow at raves), as well as the obvious illegal stimulants.
The Fat of the Land is no departure: it's all teenage rampage, cheap thrills, and adrenalin OD. Fat kicks off well with the boom-bastic ‘Smack My Bitch Up’. Shame about the obnoxious title/chorus--teenage boys hardly need any more excuses to strike pimp poses. In mitigation, it must be said that the Prodigy are not a group that repays close lyrical analysis; their forte isn't deep and meaningful, but the profoundly superficial (not a dis by any means). Howlett is a supreme organizer of dynamics, bridges, and breakdowns, tension and release. "Diesel Power", a pumping midtempo collaboration with rapper Kool Keith, nods to Howlett's pre-rave past as a British B-boy. "Funky Shit"--old-school 'ardkore, more or less--is one of the few non-vocal tracks.
Fat's use of "real" singers is an indication of the band's eagerness to meet post-grunge America halfway. But it means the Prodigy have to get around the fact that they have nothing much to say-– "this is dangerous/open up your head/feel the shellshock" is typical--which didn't matter when the music was just breakbeats, riffs, and samples.
Ironically, given their desire to be taken as a futuristic rock band, the Prodigy's taste in yer actual contemporary guitar bands is poor. "Serial Thrilla" samples Skunk Anansie; "Narayan", a nine-minute collaboration with Crispian Mills of the god-awful Kula Shaker, is a poor man's "Setting Sun" (the Chemical Brothers' Britpop/breakbeat merger). The L7 cover "Fuel My Fire" would normally count as more bad taste by my lights, but I must admit it's an exciting finale, with a heavily distorted Flint tirade and Republica's Saffron providing baleful backing sneers. The song fits perfectly into the Prodigy's shtick: depoliticized punk offering youth a sort of aerobic workout for their frustration and aggression.
Fat packs enough big beats, bass-quake, and flechette-insidious hooks to do the required job (conquering America), but as an album-length experience it sags somewhat in the middle. In true punk tradition, the Prodigy are really a singles band, which is why the 1992 debut Experience (in effect a collection of greatest hits up to that point) remains their most consistently exciting album. But as opposed to "proper" techno, where there's no brand loyalty and artists are only as good as their latest 12-inch, I'll keep faith with the Prodigy. They're a rave 'n' roll band, and I'm a fan.
SIMON REYNOLDS
Village Voice, July 8th 1997
Some say the Prodigy have betrayed the bright promise of the "electronica revolution", resulting in a techno-rock hybrid that's not so much kick-ass as half-assed. But the Prodigy have always been a rave 'n' roll band rather than "proper" techno. The crucial distinction to grasp here is that techno and rave are not synonymous, and that in some respects rave has more in common with rock than with club culture.
In the USA, rave is regarded as the epitome of fashion-plate Europhile trendiness, but in Britain dance music is the mainstream of pop culture, and rave specifically has a decidedly lumpen, un-cool aura. "Raves were mass, teenage, one didn't go to them," is how a veteran of London's 1988 acid house club Shoom explained it to me recently. Purists, who believe the music is properly experienced in clubs, where DJs play long, varied, "educational" sets to an allegedly discriminating audience, see raves as alarming close to arena rock concerts. Ravers's rowdy rituals of abandon and joyous uniformity of attire suggest the very herd mentality that clubbers define themselves against.
By 1990, huge-scale one-off raves were transforming house and techno into bombastic spectacles full of lights and lasers, fun-fair attractions, and stellar DJ lineups. Where a club might have one or two DJs, raves featured ten DJs playing a bare hour each, sometimes less. To avoid being blown away by the other jocks, the DJs played crowd-pleasing anthems with their turntables cranked up to plus-8. Then DJ-producers started making music to fit this full-on tempest. Detroit techno was "debased", or so the official history goes, into the hyperkinetic drug-noise called 'ardkore (which was when my ears pricked up).
And by 1991, the UK had a massive circuit of commercial, fully licensed raves, with promoters booking rave bands as well as DJs. Alongside N-Joi, Bizarre Inc, and Shades of Rhythm, the Prodigy were the most popular hardcore rave act. Musically, the Prodigy fit techno's standard syndrome--the boffin (Liam Howlett) knob twiddling alone in his studio lab. But live and on video, the Prodigy were always a band, with three other members--MC Maxim Reality, and dancers Keith Flint and Leeroy--taking up the visual slack.
At the height of this golden age of rave, the Prodigy encapsulated the contradictions of 'ardkore: this music was simultaneously an underground phenomenon and solidly pop. Apart from their first, "Android", every Prodigy single released to date has made the top 15; their second, "Charley", got to Number Three in the summer of '91, while the follow-up, "Everybody in the Place", was kept off the Number One spot only by Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody". All the more remarkable since these brilliant early singles offer an only slightly more polished version of breakbeat hardcore, the music that evolved into jungle. Techno purists sniffed, but I always saw it as the new garage punk: riffs, noise, amphetamine-frenzy freakbeats, a sort of aggressive euphoria – the spirit of 1966 and 1977 channeled through the body of hip hop. When the Prodigy stepped onstage at Irving Plaza a month ago, they were introduced as something "for all you punk rockers, hip hoppers, and pill poppers." No mention of techno headz or house bods; indeed, Liam Howlett has been proclaiming in interviews that he never liked Kraftwerk, the sacred source for Detroit techno.
Starting with 1994's sophomore album Music for the Jilted Generation, the Prodigy repositioned themselves as rock, partly by using electric guitar on a couple of tracks, and partly by the vague conceptual/protest angle to the album. The jilted generation, explained Howlett, was kids who'd grown up under Thatcher, had little to live for but drugs and dance music, and now found even their weekend utopia threatened as authorities targeted raves. The UK equivalent, in other words, of the American grunge audience: Generation E.
All that remained was to bring the noise to America. Step One: turning dancer Keith Flint into the video-genic vocalist on "Firestarter". OK, the promo is corny: Flint's Mohican and psycho-youth grimaces. But sonically, "Firestarter" is sampler-wielding cyber-Stooges, a Dionysian hymn to destruction. Appearing at the MTV Europe Awards to pick up a trophy for Best Dance Video, the Prodigy greeted EC youth with "Hold it down!" a vintage '92 rave rallying cry--as if to confirm 'ardkore's historical victory and vindication. No matter that out of the early rave bands only the Prodigy had survived the collapse of the 1990-92 circuit; the music had become what it had always secretly been – the new rock.
"Firestarter" looked like a dead cert as electronica's ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, but inexplicably stumbled at the threshold of the Billboard top 30. Maybe "Breathe"--a jungle-punk duet between Flint and Maxim--will bust down the door, what with its abjection-chic video à la Tool and Marilyn Manson. Enjoyably reminiscent of Oi! bands like Angelic Upstarts, the song was a highlight of the Prodigy's otherwise patchy performance at Irving Plaza. There's rock, and then there's rawk; too often the Prodge crossed the line. When they dragged onstage a "real" guitarist, nor only did he look like a ye olde punke relic from the King's Road, but the overall effect was a tad Rage Against the Machine. Sans politics, of course: the Prodigy's brand of vacant menace and quasi-insurrectionary mayhem slots into the illustrious plastic punk lineage that runs Alice Cooper/Sweet/Billy Idol/Adam and the Ants. (The Prodge even feature an insect in their logo.)
Talking of insects, Keith Flint has described the Prodigy as "buzz music." The song titles are mostly self-reflexive, referring only to the music's own sensations: "Hyperspeed", "Pandemonium", "G-Force", "Full Throttle", "The Heat (The Energy)". 'Ardkore always did belong to a burgeoning "rush culture" that includes video games, roller-blading, extreme sports like snow-boarding (a hobby of the band's), and bungee jumping (a popular sideshow at raves), as well as the obvious illegal stimulants.
The Fat of the Land is no departure: it's all teenage rampage, cheap thrills, and adrenalin OD. Fat kicks off well with the boom-bastic ‘Smack My Bitch Up’. Shame about the obnoxious title/chorus--teenage boys hardly need any more excuses to strike pimp poses. In mitigation, it must be said that the Prodigy are not a group that repays close lyrical analysis; their forte isn't deep and meaningful, but the profoundly superficial (not a dis by any means). Howlett is a supreme organizer of dynamics, bridges, and breakdowns, tension and release. "Diesel Power", a pumping midtempo collaboration with rapper Kool Keith, nods to Howlett's pre-rave past as a British B-boy. "Funky Shit"--old-school 'ardkore, more or less--is one of the few non-vocal tracks.
Fat's use of "real" singers is an indication of the band's eagerness to meet post-grunge America halfway. But it means the Prodigy have to get around the fact that they have nothing much to say-– "this is dangerous/open up your head/feel the shellshock" is typical--which didn't matter when the music was just breakbeats, riffs, and samples.
Ironically, given their desire to be taken as a futuristic rock band, the Prodigy's taste in yer actual contemporary guitar bands is poor. "Serial Thrilla" samples Skunk Anansie; "Narayan", a nine-minute collaboration with Crispian Mills of the god-awful Kula Shaker, is a poor man's "Setting Sun" (the Chemical Brothers' Britpop/breakbeat merger). The L7 cover "Fuel My Fire" would normally count as more bad taste by my lights, but I must admit it's an exciting finale, with a heavily distorted Flint tirade and Republica's Saffron providing baleful backing sneers. The song fits perfectly into the Prodigy's shtick: depoliticized punk offering youth a sort of aerobic workout for their frustration and aggression.
Fat packs enough big beats, bass-quake, and flechette-insidious hooks to do the required job (conquering America), but as an album-length experience it sags somewhat in the middle. In true punk tradition, the Prodigy are really a singles band, which is why the 1992 debut Experience (in effect a collection of greatest hits up to that point) remains their most consistently exciting album. But as opposed to "proper" techno, where there's no brand loyalty and artists are only as good as their latest 12-inch, I'll keep faith with the Prodigy. They're a rave 'n' roll band, and I'm a fan.
SIMON REYNOLDS
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
VARIOUS ARTISTS, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968
Spin, 1998
Whatever way you define the essence of rock'n'roll--sex or dance or drugs, rage to live or rage against the machine--the common denominator shared by all these body/mind states is intensity. Rock'n'roll doesn't have to be fast or loud, but it's gotta have that feeling of incandescent immersion in the here-and-now.
Perhaps there's never been rock music so consumed by a tense present as mid-Sixties garage punk--that shambolic movement of white American teen bands who bastardised the already crude caricature of black rhythm-and-blues perpetrated by Brit Invaders such as The Kinks and The Yardbirds. The result was a comically exaggerated hypermachismo whose barely concealed subtext was virginity blues. Hence the volcano-of-pent-up-sperm that is "Action Woman" by The Litter, whose singer threatens to trade in his current girl for a more compliant model who'll provide "satisfaction" (that highly-charged buzzword of the mid-Sixties). But although its motor is usually sex and/or sexism, the greatest music of the "punkadelic" era achieves a kind of abstract urgency; "content" spontaneously combusts in an energy-flash of lust without object or objective.
Rhino's four-CD Nuggets dramatically expands on the original 1972 anthology. Lenny Kaye's feat of creative archivalism simultaneously altered the contours of the rock canon (deposing the Beatles/Cream aristocracy in favor of the disregarded one-hit wonders of the pre-Sgt Pepper's era: Count Five, The Seeds, Thirteenth Floor Elevators, The Standells, Shadows of Knight) and shaped rock's no-future (Nuggets was a primary resource for proto-punkers such as Pere Ubu and Television). Kaye's original double elpee takes up the first
silver disc; the other three scoop up a legion of regional smashes and one-miss blunders.
Although there's a well-produced surfeit of bubblegum-psych and frat-party bop, and not nearly enough of the inspired lo-fi ineptitude you'll find on obscurantist garage comps like Pebbles and Mindrockers, this new Nuggets contains way too many gems to list here: the ear-dazzling flare of Nazz's "Open My Eyes", the lysergic oneupmanship of The Third Bardo's "I'm Five Years Ahead of My Time," the paranoid delirium tremens of The Music Machine's "Talk Talk," the louche swagger of Chocolate Watchband's saliva-drooling Stones pastiche "Sweet Young Thing." My absolute all-time fave spurt of G-punk , though, is We The People's "You Burn Me Up And Down", which you can also find on Sundazed's superb anthology of the band's output, Mirror Of Our Minds. A sensual inferno of turbid fuzztone and jagged riffs, "Burn Me Up" is a hormonally-crazed paean that shifts from the
eros-tormented gasp "baby, you're learnin'" to the era's ultimate
compliment: "you satisfier!"
But this is history, right? Well, no, actually. In "Burn Me Up," I
hear not just the ancestry for My Bloody Valentine's kissed-out "Slow" but the secret spiritual source for The Prodigy's "Firestarter", Big Beat monstertunes such as Fatboy's "Everybody Loves A Filter", and a thousand hardcore rave anthems . Punk to funk, garage bands to computer-in-the-bedroom junglists , you can trace a continuum of teenagers hopped up on stimulants (or fervently pretending to be)
and literally electrified by the latest noise-toys (wah-wah pedals
in '66, samplers in '92). If Nuggets is "educational", it's 'cos it's
an endlessly renewable refresher course in how to live like you're on fire. The guys responsible may now all be bank managers or professors of astronomy (like the singer in Chocolate Watchband!) but right here, right now, they're aliver than you or I will ever be.
SIMON REYNOLDS
VARIOUS ARTISTS, Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From the British Empire & Beyond
Uncut, 2001
Lenny Kaye's 1972 anthology Nuggets was a rock archivist's masterstroke, a feat of canon rewriting that deposed the post-Sgt Pepper's aristocracy and elevated the forgotten garage punks of the mid-Sixties, from The Seeds to Chocolate Watchband. Rhino's 1998 four-CD update of Nuggets dramatically expanded the original double LP. Now this latest instalment extends the Nuggets premise beyond the USA to encompass the one-hit-wonders and never-wozzers of mid-Sixties Britain: that all-too-brief golden age of amphetamine-cranked R&B and mod-on-LSD that's roughly bookended by "My Generation" and Cream's Disraeli Gears. Just the names of these long-lost groups--Dantalion's Chariot, Wimple Winch, Rupert's People, The Idle Race--induces a contact high, before you even play the discs.
Back then, singles made their point and left. This short'n'sweet succinctness allows the compilers to cram 109--that's one hundred and nine--tracks into four discs. Here's just a handful of gems. Tintern Abbey's "Vacuum Cleaner", with the saintly-sounding David MacTavish singing a proto-Spacemen 3 love-as-drug/drug-as-God lyric ("fix me up with your sweet dose/now I'm feeling like a ghost"), splashy cymbals, and a billowing solo of controlled feedback. Them's "I Can Only Give You Everything": Van in I'm-A-Man mode, awesomely surly and swaggering. The Sorrows's "Take A Heart": a Brit-Diddley locked groove of tumbling tribal toms and spaced-out-for-intensified-effect guitar-riffs. The Eyes's "When The Night Falls" takes that drastic use of silence and suspense even further: powerchords like Damocles Swords, caveman tub-thumping, tongues-of-flame harmonica, and an insolent you-done-me-wrong/go-my-own-way vocal. Fire's "Father's Name Was Dad," a classic misunderstood teen anthem: society gets the blame and the kid surveys Squaresville from a lofty vantage, cries "I laugh at it all!"
One group stands out as a "why?-why?!?-were-they-never-MASSIVE?" mystery. Not The Creation, and not The Action--both had terrific songs but were a little characterless. No, I'm talking about John's Children's. Their two offerings here are astoundingly deranged, the monstrously engorged fuzzbass like staring into a furnace, the drums flailing and scything like Keith Moon at his most smashed-blocked. "Desdemona" features the then shocking chorus "lift up your skirt and fly", daft lines about Toulouse-Lautrec painting "some chick in the rude" plus the stutter-bleat of a young Bolan on backing vox. "A Midnight Summer's Scene" captures mod sulphate-mania on the cusp of mutating into flower power acid-bliss: it's a febrile fantasy of Dionysian mayhem in an after-dark park, maenad hippy-chicks with faces "disfigured by love", strewing "petals and flowers," prancing the rites of Pan.
John's Children's merger of cissy and psychotic highlights the major difference between American garage punk and British "freakbeat" (as reissue label Bam Caruso dubbed it for their illustrious Rubble compilation series). The Limey stuff is way fey compared with the Yanks. You can hear a proto-glam androgyny, a "soft boy" continuum that takes in Barrett and Bolan, obviously, but also the queeny-dandy aristocrat persona of Robert Plant. At the same time, because these bands were schooled in R&B and played live constantly, the music has a rhythmic urgency and aggressive thrust that gradually faded over subsequent decades from the psychedelic tradition (think of Spiritualized's drum-phobic ethereality). This, though, was music for dancing as much as wigging out.
Nuggets II isn't solid gold. There's a slight surfeit of boppy shindig-type rave-ups and sub-Yardbirds blues that just ain't bastardized enough. Personally I crave more tunes with truly over-the-top guitar effects, aberrant bass-heavy mixes, phased cymbals, drastic stereo separation, and other psych-era cliches. The "British Empire" part of the subtitle allows in Australia's The Easybeats (godstars for the duration of "Friday On My Mind") while the "Beyond" pulls in groovy Latin American acid-rockers Os Mutantes. But to be honest, a lot of the Commonwealth-and-beyond stuff just ain't that hot. And inevitably one could compile another 2-CDs out of heinous ommissions. Forget the quibbles, though, this box is a treasure chest of vintage dementia.
SIMON REYNOLDS
Spin, 1998
Whatever way you define the essence of rock'n'roll--sex or dance or drugs, rage to live or rage against the machine--the common denominator shared by all these body/mind states is intensity. Rock'n'roll doesn't have to be fast or loud, but it's gotta have that feeling of incandescent immersion in the here-and-now.
Perhaps there's never been rock music so consumed by a tense present as mid-Sixties garage punk--that shambolic movement of white American teen bands who bastardised the already crude caricature of black rhythm-and-blues perpetrated by Brit Invaders such as The Kinks and The Yardbirds. The result was a comically exaggerated hypermachismo whose barely concealed subtext was virginity blues. Hence the volcano-of-pent-up-sperm that is "Action Woman" by The Litter, whose singer threatens to trade in his current girl for a more compliant model who'll provide "satisfaction" (that highly-charged buzzword of the mid-Sixties). But although its motor is usually sex and/or sexism, the greatest music of the "punkadelic" era achieves a kind of abstract urgency; "content" spontaneously combusts in an energy-flash of lust without object or objective.
Rhino's four-CD Nuggets dramatically expands on the original 1972 anthology. Lenny Kaye's feat of creative archivalism simultaneously altered the contours of the rock canon (deposing the Beatles/Cream aristocracy in favor of the disregarded one-hit wonders of the pre-Sgt Pepper's era: Count Five, The Seeds, Thirteenth Floor Elevators, The Standells, Shadows of Knight) and shaped rock's no-future (Nuggets was a primary resource for proto-punkers such as Pere Ubu and Television). Kaye's original double elpee takes up the first
silver disc; the other three scoop up a legion of regional smashes and one-miss blunders.
Although there's a well-produced surfeit of bubblegum-psych and frat-party bop, and not nearly enough of the inspired lo-fi ineptitude you'll find on obscurantist garage comps like Pebbles and Mindrockers, this new Nuggets contains way too many gems to list here: the ear-dazzling flare of Nazz's "Open My Eyes", the lysergic oneupmanship of The Third Bardo's "I'm Five Years Ahead of My Time," the paranoid delirium tremens of The Music Machine's "Talk Talk," the louche swagger of Chocolate Watchband's saliva-drooling Stones pastiche "Sweet Young Thing." My absolute all-time fave spurt of G-punk , though, is We The People's "You Burn Me Up And Down", which you can also find on Sundazed's superb anthology of the band's output, Mirror Of Our Minds. A sensual inferno of turbid fuzztone and jagged riffs, "Burn Me Up" is a hormonally-crazed paean that shifts from the
eros-tormented gasp "baby, you're learnin'" to the era's ultimate
compliment: "you satisfier!"
But this is history, right? Well, no, actually. In "Burn Me Up," I
hear not just the ancestry for My Bloody Valentine's kissed-out "Slow" but the secret spiritual source for The Prodigy's "Firestarter", Big Beat monstertunes such as Fatboy's "Everybody Loves A Filter", and a thousand hardcore rave anthems . Punk to funk, garage bands to computer-in-the-bedroom junglists , you can trace a continuum of teenagers hopped up on stimulants (or fervently pretending to be)
and literally electrified by the latest noise-toys (wah-wah pedals
in '66, samplers in '92). If Nuggets is "educational", it's 'cos it's
an endlessly renewable refresher course in how to live like you're on fire. The guys responsible may now all be bank managers or professors of astronomy (like the singer in Chocolate Watchband!) but right here, right now, they're aliver than you or I will ever be.
SIMON REYNOLDS
VARIOUS ARTISTS, Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From the British Empire & Beyond
Uncut, 2001
Lenny Kaye's 1972 anthology Nuggets was a rock archivist's masterstroke, a feat of canon rewriting that deposed the post-Sgt Pepper's aristocracy and elevated the forgotten garage punks of the mid-Sixties, from The Seeds to Chocolate Watchband. Rhino's 1998 four-CD update of Nuggets dramatically expanded the original double LP. Now this latest instalment extends the Nuggets premise beyond the USA to encompass the one-hit-wonders and never-wozzers of mid-Sixties Britain: that all-too-brief golden age of amphetamine-cranked R&B and mod-on-LSD that's roughly bookended by "My Generation" and Cream's Disraeli Gears. Just the names of these long-lost groups--Dantalion's Chariot, Wimple Winch, Rupert's People, The Idle Race--induces a contact high, before you even play the discs.
Back then, singles made their point and left. This short'n'sweet succinctness allows the compilers to cram 109--that's one hundred and nine--tracks into four discs. Here's just a handful of gems. Tintern Abbey's "Vacuum Cleaner", with the saintly-sounding David MacTavish singing a proto-Spacemen 3 love-as-drug/drug-as-God lyric ("fix me up with your sweet dose/now I'm feeling like a ghost"), splashy cymbals, and a billowing solo of controlled feedback. Them's "I Can Only Give You Everything": Van in I'm-A-Man mode, awesomely surly and swaggering. The Sorrows's "Take A Heart": a Brit-Diddley locked groove of tumbling tribal toms and spaced-out-for-intensified-effect guitar-riffs. The Eyes's "When The Night Falls" takes that drastic use of silence and suspense even further: powerchords like Damocles Swords, caveman tub-thumping, tongues-of-flame harmonica, and an insolent you-done-me-wrong/go-my-own-way vocal. Fire's "Father's Name Was Dad," a classic misunderstood teen anthem: society gets the blame and the kid surveys Squaresville from a lofty vantage, cries "I laugh at it all!"
One group stands out as a "why?-why?!?-were-they-never-MASSIVE?" mystery. Not The Creation, and not The Action--both had terrific songs but were a little characterless. No, I'm talking about John's Children's. Their two offerings here are astoundingly deranged, the monstrously engorged fuzzbass like staring into a furnace, the drums flailing and scything like Keith Moon at his most smashed-blocked. "Desdemona" features the then shocking chorus "lift up your skirt and fly", daft lines about Toulouse-Lautrec painting "some chick in the rude" plus the stutter-bleat of a young Bolan on backing vox. "A Midnight Summer's Scene" captures mod sulphate-mania on the cusp of mutating into flower power acid-bliss: it's a febrile fantasy of Dionysian mayhem in an after-dark park, maenad hippy-chicks with faces "disfigured by love", strewing "petals and flowers," prancing the rites of Pan.
John's Children's merger of cissy and psychotic highlights the major difference between American garage punk and British "freakbeat" (as reissue label Bam Caruso dubbed it for their illustrious Rubble compilation series). The Limey stuff is way fey compared with the Yanks. You can hear a proto-glam androgyny, a "soft boy" continuum that takes in Barrett and Bolan, obviously, but also the queeny-dandy aristocrat persona of Robert Plant. At the same time, because these bands were schooled in R&B and played live constantly, the music has a rhythmic urgency and aggressive thrust that gradually faded over subsequent decades from the psychedelic tradition (think of Spiritualized's drum-phobic ethereality). This, though, was music for dancing as much as wigging out.
Nuggets II isn't solid gold. There's a slight surfeit of boppy shindig-type rave-ups and sub-Yardbirds blues that just ain't bastardized enough. Personally I crave more tunes with truly over-the-top guitar effects, aberrant bass-heavy mixes, phased cymbals, drastic stereo separation, and other psych-era cliches. The "British Empire" part of the subtitle allows in Australia's The Easybeats (godstars for the duration of "Friday On My Mind") while the "Beyond" pulls in groovy Latin American acid-rockers Os Mutantes. But to be honest, a lot of the Commonwealth-and-beyond stuff just ain't that hot. And inevitably one could compile another 2-CDs out of heinous ommissions. Forget the quibbles, though, this box is a treasure chest of vintage dementia.
SIMON REYNOLDS
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