My music on heavy rotation up to October 8
Driven deep(er) into my brain by a few weeks of obsessively repeated listening, are the following five brilliant albums.
Led Zeppelin - ‘Led Zeppelin II’ Many clichés were born on this record, with its swaggering machismo and exaggerated sexuality, but there’s something about it that keeps it the right side of bufoonery. Probably the impeccable musicianship, and the pioneering riff-based composition. This is the very birth of heavy rock (some would call it heavy metal), despite its other antecedents, but it’s full of folk and psychedelia in a way that somehow sounds not at all dated. Words fail me: it’s just one of the best records.
J.G. Thirlwell - ‘The Blue Eyes (soundtrack)’ This album, which is not at all famous, is nevertheless rather better known than the film to which it is the soundtrack. Despite J.G. Thirlwell’s various (prolific) outlandish musical guises, this sounds like the work of soundtrack pro, but given that it’s from a horror movie, it has a nicely expressionistic cast to it. It’s been criticised for not standing up on its own, but I don’t hear that: I hear strange, immersive, and often beautiful moods, strung together with engaging narrative coherence.
Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention - ‘Uncle Meat’ Like most Zappa/Mothers albums of this era, Uncle Meat was assembled from a variety of different studio sessions and live dates: it was intended as the soundtrack album for an unfinished film of the same name. Leaving aside the extensive rehearsal extracts, its the usual combination of spoofed pop and bizarre complexity, formed from rock, jazz and contemporary art music. There’s a lot of tuned percussion, but heterogeneity is the order of the day. Flawed brilliance.
Meshuggah - ‘Nothing’ (Re-release) It’s worth noting that this is the re-release, as the guitar parts (and much of the drums) were entirely re-recorded, once the band managed to get their hands on some functional 8 string guitars (that’s down to a low F#!). The songs have a slower, chunkier groove than earlier releases, but are just as angular and complex: lyrically there is a concern with the fallibility of perception, but there’s no mistaking the thunder in this sound. This is among the most visceral of ‘technical’ metal records.
Pigshackle - ‘Unplug The Sun’ This double album is an extraordinary avant-prog opus, which deploys textural strategies ranging from the attractively melodic to the obnoxiously heavy. Many comparisons have been drawn, but all are partial or transitory – the record is an alchemical attempt to transform its musical materials into something beyond the accepted possibilities of the vocabulary on which they draw. Like alchemy, it both succeeds and fails – an in failing, necessitates its repetition. All this with humour and the Dionysian jouissance of noisy rock. Top whack.
I’ve also been getting up close and personal to some excellent shorter releases from the following: Kibou Records (storming punk compilation), WTCHS (post-sludge math), The Interceptor (lo-fi filmic electronics) and Charles Edison (floaty funky electronics).