Armageddon Bored Of John Lydon

I thought that this was a very disappointing record.  I suppose the best way to spin it is to say that it wasn't made for you or for me, but for someone who is now dead.  I respect that...but I still think this is pretty crap.

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD. - END OF WORLD (PiL Official) 

If clairvoyants and oracles were real, there’d be proper proof. Instead of telling us that Brazil would win another World Cup, or that there’d be further conflict in the Middle East, if just one seer in 1977 had said “You know that Johnny Rotten? One day he’ll ask to do Eurovision with a soft croon about love and loss” the Society for Psychical Research would have a billion members today. Of course, PiL were not successful in their bid to present Ireland in Liverpool this year with Hawaii, and it’s not the sort of thing liable to win the contest in the twenty-first century (although it can’t have fared worse than the tedious bluster of the Kelly-green Keane they did send), but the song remains a tiny gem, and closes End Of World, their eleventh studio album. For those of us used to Lydon the trickster imp, it’s a surprisingly sincere song, with glistening guitar and an undulating bass softly ebbing and flowing like waves lapping a calm shore, the line “remember me, I’ll remember you” landing especially poignantly once you know the song is about Lydon’s wife Nora who lived with Alzheimer’s. Nora died in April, and the album is dedicated to her memory. 

The intimacy of Lydon’s vocal on Hawaii isn’t repeated on the album, which is full of his familiar trademarked style where stentorian pronouncements teeter at the edge of becoming a yelp, like an ironic carnival barker, or a muppet doing high priest cosplay. Lydon sounds cracking for the most part, but the music is rather less consistent. The album starts with the pirate-rock romp of Penge, and if the relevance of that part of south London to a lyric about harbours and longships is a mystery, the song rollocks along in fine fettle, as does Car Chase, a glam disco stomp – “a smash and grab of a song” as Lydon puts it – about a mental institution resident escaping and going on minor nocturnal sprees. But there’s rather too much uninspired vamping on the album, and tracks that sound half-finished: the title track has a doughty Thin Lizzy guitar line, but it's tethered to an unedifying and dumpy rock rhythm, and Down On The Clown (nothing to do with circus fellatio, incidentally) is similarly lead-footed. There’s nothing hugely wrong with this, but it’s a long way from the paranoid, febrile dub skirmishes of the majestic Metal Box, or even the stadium fist-pump of mid-eighties hit Rise.  

Being Stupid Again has a strong groove, with a phased guitar sliding io and out of focus, as if a wasp circling your picnic were playing How Soon Is Now, but is let down by the lyrics, all about students espousing left-wing causes. People, especially iconoclastic antistars like Lydon, should be able to ridicule whatever part of the society they want, but it has to be interesting. Only the pronouncement “All maths is racist!” has any satiric bite here, unlike repeating “Ban the bomb” in a silly voice. The real message comes out near the track’s end, the Daily Express mantra of “I’m not paying for that” - if anger is an energy, snide moans about public expenditure would barely power a glimpse of your commemorative God Save The Queen NFT*. On an album where ex-Pistols are labelled “liars, fakes, cheats and frauds” Lydon is beginning to resemble Morrissey, harping on old grievances and a nebulous social malaise - it’s hilarious how much Lydon sounds like one of Mark Heap’s self-important windbag characters when he announces “Your ignorance shall be your fall from grace” at the start of Walls. There’s material on this album that’s fun, from the bouncy Blondie backing vocals on Pretty Awful, to the yob jazz of Dirty Mucky Delight, but it’s hard to make a case for most of it being essential listening. Apparently, Nora loved the album. Actually, that’s probably justification enough. 

*Yes, this exists: ‘GOD SAVE THE QUEEN’ COMMEMORATIVE COIN + BONUS NFT! - Sex Pistols | The Official Website (sexpistolsofficial.com) 

 

So Not Now Here?

Some frankly purple prose about a bunch of fuzzy noises, but I do think that Lee is excellent.  Even people who would never listen to drones and noise tend to find that they like his stuff, especially live.

LEE RILEY – FROM HERE WE ARE NOWHERE (Eyeless) 

It’s common to talk about textures and colours in music, but this new EP from Oxford’s leading experimental musician is more likely to make you think of space and volume: chasms of unfathomable depth, or vast corridors without end. The title track, a complex and fuzzily capacious drone, sounds like Zeno playing a cello with an infinitely long bow that will never finish its stroke, and the following track, ‘Lifting Undertow’, pits rumbling bass against what we can only describe as a hollow hiss, and feels like swimming slowly across the ocean’s murky floor on a manta ray the size of a city. Like many of the six tracks, in place of thematic development in the standard musical sense, this piece progresses towards a change in focus, with an intense sombre rattling stealing the attention (imagine the sound of a corpulent spectre dragging its chains through a paddling pool full of gravel). 

But not everything here is ominous or oppressive, and ‘Undoing These Knotted Times’ creates a warm cocooning atmosphere by adding airy sonic wisps to a deeply resonant hum, and is probably what you’d hear if Brian Eno and David Lynch tried to teach an industrial ventilation system the ocarina. By the time you get to the gritty scouring noise of final track ‘No One Knows What’s Inside’, which feels as though you’re trying to clean a desert with your ears, you’ll be surprised that half an hour has gone by.  Although there’s often no sense of traditional pitch to this music, let alone melody, it feels structured, varied and immensely satisfying. This release is arguably Lee’s finest work to date and we advise you to get on board...or at least tumble in and get lost. 

 

Bear Bum?

And today, on Albums By Bands I'd Never Heard of That I Reviewed Because Of The Name...

MOON PANDA – SING SPACESHIP, SING (Fierce Panda) 

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy addresses the question of what’s unpleasant about being drunk: “Ask a glass of water”. Similarly, listen to the second album by Danish/Californian dream pop duo Moon Panda and you might get a taste of sultry summery parties from the perspective of a melting ice lolly. Every one of these twelve tracks is sweet, sticky, and liable to evaporate before your ears. A track like 'Machina Sky' lets a breathy pop vocal lounge across a shuffling beat, whilst synth and bass sink slowly into a treacle well of reverb – there are even languorous choppy guitar chords that have wandered in from Spandau Ballet’s 'True', but stopped for a few sangrias on the way and are now a bit sleepy. Elsewhere, 'Mixed Up' is the sort of sophisticated groove-pop which lies equidistant between Sade and Brand New Heavies, but instead of swaggering through the urban night it seems content to sag contentedly in the afternoon sun – is this the start of a new flaccid jazz movement?  

Maddy Myers’s vocals are charming throughout, warm, soft and intimately aspirated as if Wendy Smith from Prefab Sprout had swapped the literate angst in chilly County Durham for lunchtime cocktails by an LA pool. The music is lush and lazy and every track, from opener 'Come Outside'’s shimmering mix of glossy keys and smiling staccato vocals – think Space meets early Moloko – is a sunshiny delight, but isn’t all wilting synths and heat-haze guitars. There are some snaky basslines scattered throughout that might have come from one of Thundercat’s slinkier outings, whilst 'CURRENT'is one of a few tracks with a hiccoughing rhythm that is clearly influenced by the intricately controlled stumbling of a J Dilla beat (or perhaps by DOMi & JD BECK’s adaptations of the style). But perhaps Sing Spaceship, Sing’s pleasures can cloy over a dozen tracks, and by penultimate number, 'Rain Mouth', you might long for something other than a woozy lope. Closing track, 'Dance', really breaks the spell, an agonisingly sluggish weeping guitar part sounding like a half-arsed take on the knowing airhead schlock of Willie J Healey, or George Harrison: The Benylin Years. This is a collection of beautifully produced songs, ripe for sampling on playlists and dipping into for loving compiled mixtapes, but maybe doesn’t have the variety to truly satisfy as an entire album. After all, man cannot live by Calippos alone.