ALBUM REVIEWS
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ALBUM REVIEWS |
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Various
DEATH TO TRAD ROCK CHERRY RED RECORDS 12.09 @www.vanguard-online.co.uk
A compilation of acts that weren’t part of the same movement, yet hang together in attitude….. John Robb – post-punk chronicler and frontman of the fabulous Goldblade – was once in The Membranes and devoted the eighties to creating fanzines, running a label, gigging, making records and providing crash space to impecunious bands. The punk movement had grown in the grey days of the late seventies then Thatcher had arrived, along with the collapse of community and the arrival of me music. Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and other shoulder-padded nonsense primped themselves on magazine covers while The Face told us what to wear. Preferring the grey life of towns having industry crushed out of them by the same Thatcherite forces, countless bands made music in the DIY ethic that punk had spawned. Some, like The Membranes offering, are so deliberately crudely recorded it sounds like a great band lost by shoddy technology. Others, like Yorkshire’s The Three Johns, are much clearer but wilfully obscure either lyrically or musically. Some bands you will know, others may be less familiar. The Ex drum up a post-industrial scrapyard clatter with menacing bass. Nightingales tread paths The Wedding Present walked down. Big Flame chuck their Beefheart influences in a bag with Rip Rig And Panic. The Weddoes continue to inspire affection with their jangly tunes. The June Brides are no less busy (this was the era when guitars were worn high so they could be jangle-strummed faster) with the addition of horns. The Wolfhounds were a coulda band – they coulda been something more, with a prevailing wind. A.C. Temple is a shock to the system. Plaintive and sad and not even slightly jangly, it provides the mid-discs pause (this is an eighty minute extravaganza). The fab-named Dog Faced Hermans carry on with the horns, making an indie version of contemporary Leeds band, Bassa Bassa. The disc gets more diverse as it progresses and obscuriantia like Shrug sport fairground organ to rival that of Young Marble Giants. Death By Milkfloat are relentless and the churning jamming gets hypnotic. The Turncoats are as intense as I remember them, while The Ceramic Hobs growl menacingly of leaving a cake out in the rain. MacArthur Park it ain’t. There’s no doubt that a lot of these bands owe a lot to The Fall, in their attitude, the shapes of their sound and the adherence to a Northern spirit of sardonic flatness. In the end the unifying factor is that this is music that can be made with minimal resources beyond a desire to do it and some ability. It’s a collection of get-out-and-do-it-yourself records, a great tradition stretching from the advent of home recording through to today, where a band can release stuff even easier. John has done well in assembling, not the best, but the most definitive, record of what was going on in backstreet Britain in the nineteen-eighties. A commentary booklet would enlighten us on some of the even less well known bands but then, this is the partner release to John’s history of the post-punk underground – so best read the book…… www.cherryred.co.uk |
