Reviews 'n' Rants

a l b u m s

1. Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures (Factory/WEA) 79
4. Joy Division, Closer (Factory/WEA) 80
40. Joy Division, Still (Factory/WEA) 81
With only two official albums and only a couple dozen performances outside of their hometown of Manchester, Joy Division's legacy grew gradually over time, much like Ian Curtis' beloved Velvet Underground. A relatively small number of hardcore fans took it for granted that one of the best bands of all time would never be heard by most people. Yet thanks to a continued influence on the sound of bands 25 years later, the best part of the movie 24 Hour Party People, and the new feature Control, Joy Division have finally broken into the mainstream. What's remarkable is that they're not at all accessible. Brittle guitars, martial drumbeats tweaked with studio and digital trickery, and Ian Curtis' strangled baritone spewing words of soul crushing despair is not your average pop fan's idea of a good time. Those who read Touched By A Distance by Curtis' widow Debra will find that while Curtis was a budding lyrical genius and focused bandleader, he was also a lying, cheating, manipulative, egomaniacal, misogynist right-wing prick. But what else is new, many great artists were lousy human beings. The fact is that Joy Division's two studio albums are two of the most consistently powerful pieces of rock music ever recorded. Unfortunately, WEA, revived the mistake that is Still, undoing the good work that the 1998 Heart and Soul box set accomplished in assembling all the singles in a logical, chronological order. Rather than add the singles, live shows are slapped on as extra discs instead. With so many good live recordings already available, this was a mistake. Classic songs like "Digital," "Transmission," "Atmosphere," and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" that appeared on the 1988 collection Substance, are missing. But if you don't have the box set, these remastered reissues are a must.

2. Magazine, Real Life (Virgin/EMI) 78
9. Magazine, Secondhand Daylight (Virgin/EMI) 79
10. Magazine, The Correct Use Of Soap (Virgin/EMI) 80
60. Magazine, Magic, Murder and the Weather (Virgin/EMI) 81
Magazine gets only a fraction of the acclaim and attention lavished on Joy Division not for lack of good music, but because rather than off himself, Howard Devoto worked in an office after the breakup of his band (when he wasn't working on underrated solo projects and spinoff bands). The truth is, their music is just as powerful and groundbreaking as their more famous contemporaries. Just as their name can evoke the glamor of fashion rags or the menace of a weapon, the band walked the line between sophistication and violence. Devoto was a key player in the beginning of the punk movement, organizing two early Sex Pistols shows in Manchester and forming the Buzzcocks. Yet before more than a few hundred people even heard of punk, Devoto grew bored with its limitations and moved on. He found like-minded musicians in Scottish guitarist John McGeoch, keyboardist Dave Formula and future Bad Seed Barry Adamson on bass. He intended to expand on what Iggy Pop and Bowie did the previous year on The Idiot and Low. Real Life is one of the earliest and most riveting examples of post-punk, embodying perfectly the tension between Devoto's roots in punk and his desire to stretch out, particularly on "Shot By Both Sides," based on a riff written by his former Buzzcocks mate Pete Shelley. "Definitive Gaze" is a glistening sci-fi chase song that builds upon Eno and Bowie without soundling like copycats. Their definitive song is the glowering "The Light Pours Out Of Me." Bonus tracks include a rougher, original single version of "Shot By Both Sides," second single "Touch and Go" and the James Bond theme "Goldfinger."

If Devoto was the emotionally distant outsider on Real Life, he was a glacier on Secondhand Daylight. While it has highlights such as "Rhythm of Cruelty" and "Permafrost," the album's main accomplishment is its consistently brittle sound and feel, that would influence The Comsat Angels, The Cure and many others. Even the shades of grey production of Martin Hannett was more lively after that album, with The Correct Use Of Soap offering a more varied, energetic menu, starting with the almost-hit "Because You're Frightened" and "A Song From Under The Floorboards." This is the last album with Magazine on top of their game. On their fourth offering they just sound burned out.

3. Young Marble Giants, Colossal Youth & Collected Works (Rough Trade/Domino) 80
Simon Reynolds' liner notes (expanded from his Rip It Up book) compared Colossal Youth's perfection to The Slits' Cut, The Fall's Slates, and Pere Ubu's The Modern Dance and Dub Housing, and "more auspicious and immaculate than even Joy Division's" debut . High praise indeed for post-punk's most understated band. Reacting to punk's walls of distortion, Young Marble Giants developed a sound based on a spindly, trebly guitar, bass, spare electronic percussion, organ and ring modulator (a gizmo developed by the Moxham brothers' cousin Pete Joyce). Alison Statton's voice perfectly complimented this anti-masculine music. Too tightly wound to be considered fey, the music quivered with the kind of suppressed power that Wire would occasionally touch on in their explorations. However, YMG maintained a uniform atmosphere throughout the album along the lines of Eno's Another Green World.

5. Pylon, Gyrate + (DB/DFA) 80
Before the Gyrate reissue for the first time on CD, Pylon were a murky, mysterious entity. I'd heard fleeting bits on a college radio station in the early 80s, and both The B-52's and R.E.M. namechecked them. They were in the documentary of the Athens, GA music scene, Inside Out, which I just watched for the first time twenty years later. Singer Vanessa Briscoe and the rest of the band were art students who never intended to try to be rock stars, and were bemused by the attention they got from the UK post-punk scene, including an opening slot on U2's U.S. tour. Along the same lines as the disco-punk of Gang of Four, Au Pairs and Delta 5, Pylon were a bit more raw, which is all the more charming on this understated classic.

6. The Bongos, Drums Along The Hudson (PVC/Cooking Vinyl) 82
There's a certain kind of taut, propulsive groove that is not necessarily uncommon in rock and pop music, but is hard to find it executed perfectly. It can be found in a handful of Velvet Underground songs, in Can's "Mother Sky," and much of the Neu catalog. That percussive, locomotive groove reached a chrysalis with The Feelies, and was carried on by The Woodentops and Th' Faith Healers among others. Finally on CD for the first time, Hoboken band The Bongos also scratches that itch nicely. Half the album is a collection of singles, but sounds remarkably consistent and fresh. There's enough sugary pop hooks in these songs to suggest that The Bongos could have reached a wider audience. They did make a valient effort in their major label debut, Beat Hotel in 1985, but it didn't quite match the magic of Drums Along The Hudson. Kudos to Cooking Vinyl for reviving this lost classic.

7. Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation: Deluxe Edition (Blast First/DGC) 88
Coinciding with this reissue, Sonic Youth performed the album in its entirety at a few concert dates. I skipped it because their 1988 tour was one of my early concert-going highlights. Trying to relive the experience would only end in disappiontment, as it could never measure up to the initial impact they made on me. The remastered disc with extras, however, is a more than welcome addition to my collection. Listening to Daydream Nation on my new soundsystem was certainly an improvement over my first exposure to it on my cruddy boombox in my cellblock-like dorm room. This reissue confirms with no doubt that Daydream Nation is Sonic Youth's all-time peak. It's the album they came closest to achieving the "ultimate goal," as Matthew Stearns wrote in the excellent 33-1/3 book -- "total rock catharsis and sonic regeneration." If you're not sure what that means, read the book. Better yet, put on Daydream Nation and turn it up until the windows shake.

8. Sly & The Family Stone, There's A Riot Goin' On (Epic/Sony) 71
Considered one of the all-time great albums, There's A Riot Goin' On was also one in most dire need of remastering. Due to various recording and mixing mishaps, the original was muddled and muddy. The remaster cleans up the sound as much as is possible with sources that were overdubbed to death. Ironically the music itself is quite spare, with a drum machine and a distinct lack of instrumentation and energy that marked The Family Stone's more celebratory efforts, including the recent singles "Hot Fun in the Summertime," and "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," which, maddeningly, are not included on any of the seven albums that were reissued. This album is a burned out shell, the hangover after the party/overdose, a slow funk lurching amongst the smoking ruins. To that effect, it's a massively influential album, including Prince and countless hip hop artists. But to be honest, at times I feel it may have been a bit overrated. The elastic bounce of 1973's Fresh and even 1974's Small Talk are a relief after this album. Nevertheless, Riot's crispy power is recognized.

11. Betty Davis (Just Sunshine/Light in the Attic) 73
Imagine Band of Gypsies era Hendrix, Fresh era Sly Stone and On The Corner era Miles Davis combined into one fearsomely hot funk diva. A common fantasy, but this one is real. Betty Davis was friends with Jimi and Sly, and married for a year to Miles Davis. By no means a groupie, she actually influenced the people around her, and was a force of nature, and an extremely talented writer and performer. Her first album distills everything perfectly, hard funk with jazz chops, with the band that rivalled Funkadelic, consisting of members of Santana and Tower of Power. Davis presented a persona part ass-kicking Cleopatra Jones, and part Frank Zappa wise-cracking pottymouth. She cast a feminist evil eye on pimp characters with lyrics like, "If I'm in luck I might get picked up ... I'm fishin' and I'm trickin' and you can call it what you want." And in "Anti Love Song" she sings, "You know, I could make you crawl/And just as hard as I'd fall for you/You know you'd fall for me harder." More often her voice would jump between shrieks and feral growls that are truly frightening. To today's audience, she's no less than the older, and better, forerunner of the likes of Macy Gray, Kelis and Missy Elliot.

13. The Woodentops, BBC Sessions 1985-89 (Renascent)
Lead by Rolo McGinty, The Woodentops took bits of Suicide, The Talking Heads, XTC and Echo & the Bunnymen and created their own propulsive pop similar to The Feelies. Incredibly, they had not heard The Feelies until well after recording their first album. Their songs had a perfect balance of diverse experimentalism and pop hooks. Morrissey constantly talked them up at the time, which was a brave gesture, considering the strong possibility that Giant is more consistently great than The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead. BBC Sessions finds The Woodentops more raw and experimental, with different arrangements than their albums. Some even prefer these sessions to the studio versions. I generally don't, but with such a brief catalog, it's a treat to hear anything from this band, who have reunited and are currently playing dates in the UK.

35. Laurie Anderson, Big Science 25th Anniversary Edition (WB/Nonesuch) 82
Sounds great, though its impact has diminished since I was first wowed by Anderson’s gimmicky approach in ’82. It seems the bonus track “Walk the Dog” can only be played on the computer. That’s really damn annoying.

55. Andy Summers & Robert Fripp, I Advance Masked (A&M) 82
I’m a bit disappointed with this – for every moment of shimmering beauty, there's another that's repetitious, grating and boring. I hoped that Summers’ jazz odyssey freakouts would have sparked more engaging, creative friction with the Frippertronics.

56. Genesis, Abacab (Atlantic/Rhino) 81
I'm not a fan of Phil Collins, but I loved the cold, steely sound of the title track on the radio at the time, and always meant to get it. It took me 26 years, and half the album is worth it. But it doesn't inspire me to dig into any more of their post-Gabriel stuff.

Some albums are just too good to settle for crappy sounding MP3s. Even as albums are slowly becoming available in lossless codecs, the pricing is way out of whack. At $1 a song, the deluxe reissue of Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth & Collected Works would cost $46. CDs still look just as great as books on shelves, and reissues usually have the perk of expanded album art and liner notes that are still fun to re-read now and then. Until complete catalogs become available in lossless audio at $5 an album, I'll continue to look forward to buying reissues of old favorites and lost classics. Here's the best of this year's batch.

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