Au Pairs - Playing with a Different Sex

Birmingham post punk band that was formed in 1979. Somehow they were mostly overlooked during their heyday. Playing With a Different Sex is definitely in my list of top 10 post punk albums, ever.

Feminist, leftist, funk-punk dance party with a strong dash of gender roles and sexual politics. Some of these songs are timeless, that jangly, jagged guitar is perfect and man, these are some of the grooviest basslines of all time. Sometimes, you just wanna dance, y'know?

equal, but different

Wipers - Youth of America

Wipers were undoubtedly one of the most influential bands for the American alt rock scene. Led by Greg Sage, they crafted what was essentially a mixture of hardcore punk's demolishing ferocity with prog rock's vernacular and a penchant for longer tunes. This is exemplified on 1981's 'Youth of America', which is just about one of the best albums ever.

Like injecting a raging bull with a barrel of coke. And then sitting on it. No other record would match this level of creativty and ferocity until Refused would release The Shape of Punk To Come, imo.

living in the jungle

Snowman - Absence

Snowman are an Aussie band, originally from Perth but based in London, until they disbanded in February this year. Which is kind of really fucking unfortunate, because they are one of the finest bands Australia had seen until now. This is their swansong 'Absence', released earlier this year.

Ethereal rock music is the best way to put this. Brings in the best bits of Liars, This Heat and Radiohead (for lazy comparison's sake) to create something singular and seductive all at the same time. Most underrated record of this year? perhaps.

∆

Gang of Four - Return the Gift

Simply one of the finest bands to grace the alternative scene, Gang of Four are a post punk quartet who play a stripped down, intelligent brand of punk with influences from funk, dub and modern minimalism, topped off with biting socio-political commentary. Insanely infuential (really, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers are a poor man's Gang of Four - something even Flea admitted) and with songwriting chops that rival the greats from any era, I'd call their first two albums ("Entertainment!", "Solid Gold") essential to any music catalog. And having seen them live just a week ago, I'd say, somehow they still manage to rock your balls off 32 years. Here's a good compilation of their best material - Raw, urgent and mandatory listening for anyone reading this. 

Rerecorded material of the best Go4 tunes. Enjoy! 

To hell with poverty

Prolapse - The Italian Flag

Ahh, to be a music fan is to come to terms with the fact that, while there is so much good stuff out there, most of it goes largely unnoticed, even by music enthusiasts themselves. Such is the case with Prolapse, a band that formed in Leicester in about 1992; and wearing their krautrock and post punk influences proudly on their sleeves - churned out 4 albums of near perfect music, and disappeared into nothingness. This is their best album, The Italian Flag; I could just keep praising it to high heaven but all I'll say is that this is one of the top 10 albums of the 90's. For a decade with so much fantastic music, it's a crime to let a band this unique and inventive go ignored. So without further adieu; here's an awesome piece on The Italian Flag from the now defunct Stylus Magazine.Rest assured that you will listen to this and realise exactly what I'm talking about.

Sometimes reference points aren’t much help, really. I’m really not sure if there’s any records out there quite like this. One day there might be. It’ll probably be successful. The NME’ll like it. The NME liked Prolapse, of course, but back in the dark, distant days of 1998 that didn’t cut much mustard with The British Record Buying Public. At least, not if you were Prolapse. Somehow the idea of a woman from the East Midlands and a big Scottish bloke talking, singing and shouting over, under and at each other while punk, post-punk and shoegaze came together and had an almighty row—somehow, Urban Hymns was more successful. Bizarre. 

Prolapse, from what I can gather, were a bunch of C86 kids who met while at university in Leicester and decided to make really depressing music together. The Italian Flag, their third album and the only one that got released on a major label, goes one fuck of a way beyond that. It’s immediate and yet a bit impenetrable at the same time. You could call it pop, but people would give you some very, very strange looks. 

One thing you can say with little fear of contradiction is that this is a very grown-up album, not because of the mature qualities of the musicianship or whatever people are saying about Doves this week but because of the darkness of the sound, not in the modern whining sarcasm that passes for wit too often nowadays, but the seriousness of the thing. Guitars are hefty, nervous, oppressive, edgy, scratchy. Linda Steelyard and Mick Derrick’s vocals are… it’s difficult to know what to say. She: clipped, hard East Midlands tones, sometimes lost in the mix, like being called to by ghosts, playing at girlyness, other times irritable, skulking shrugs, sometimes just plain fucked off. He: rasping Glasgae yelling, or low, threatening murmurs and whispers; sometimes he sounds drunk, sometimes he sounds fucking unhinged. 

The songs are monsterpieces of repetition and freeform clashing together, not ‘uncomfortable’, not ‘awkward’, just intensely brilliant. The energy is immense. ‘Slash/Oblique’ lunges in early. Steelyard coos “You, will, ne, ver, un, der, stand, me,” then babbles “IknowIneedmyheadexaminedIknowIneedmyheadexamined,” and Derrick throws himself in, yelling incomprehensibly wherever he can. The drums charge throughout, fit to burst, going so fast they’ve forgotten who’s meant to be keeping up with who. ‘Deanshanger’ is slower. Nearly more conventional, a bassline driving it along neatly—there’s some verses, and a chorus… it could almost be normal, were it not for the fact that Derrick is still making Aidan Moffat sound like Stephen Fry, there’s bagpipes that sound like they’re hurling invective at a cabinet minister and the chorus is actually just Steelyard singing some words that sound vaguely French but don’t actually make any sense. Still, she gets to be the shouty one on ‘Day At Death Seaside’, yelling “HAD TO LEAVE! BOUND TO LOSE! HAD TO LEAVE! BOUND TO LOSE!” amid horrible fairground organs and her yelling at someone about Oprah Winfrey and clearing the fucking mantelpiece. ‘Autocade’, on the other hand, sounds like Lush (that’s a very good thing) and doesn’t feature Derrick, because he thought it wasn’t very good. It really is depressing how little influence Prolapse have had on the British music industry. 

It’s intense, serious, grown-up, and incredible fun. ‘Killing The Bland’ (“I might have to kill you, which wouldn’t be fair. On me.”) could legitimately have been a proper hit single, We All Shout Together as the backing goes all psycho-punka and decides to race Derrick and Steelyard to see who can finish theirs first. ‘Visa For Violet And Van’ is the sort of song that swallows you completely whole, the pace militaristic and unrelenting for six minutes, a pounding, punishing rhythm destroying everything in its path without blinking. The guitar wanders and wails all over, lost and wounded. Steelyard sounds calm, detached. “My floor, kitchenware, underwear, haircare!” Derrick is on top form, screaming his verses, sneering his chorus (“Ah wis always wan point wan point wan point wan point wan ae thim!”), sounding like he’s making wanker signs right up in your face and could not give a shite what you’re thinking about that. A minute and a half from the end it dissolves into feedback and crashing. You barely notice. 

There’s really nothing quite like Prolapse—too complex and hefty for punk, too bold and fast (and, to be honest, fun) for shoegaze, too fucking odd for pop. ‘Indie’ feels like a whole can of worms that doesn’t merit touching, but maybe that’s just what Prolapse were, a properly independent band who didn’t appear to give the slightest fuck for what other people thought of them (as opposed to the kind of band who repeatedly declare that they don’t give a fuck what other people think of them) because they were rather too busy being themselves. It’s annoying that they completely vanished in 1999 after their final album, Ghosts Of Dead Aeroplanes, and that nowadays they seem to exist solely in the memories of music journalists. Despite the fact that Prolapse ran almost directly parallel with my teenage years, I didn’t actually know they’d existed till just before they split up, and I only started getting into them in about 2001, which is fucking stupid. You look at the raft of mediocre British guitar bands around today, all trying to do something new and different, and you realise that only five or six years ago this lot were everything they could never be. And it pisses you off ever so slightly. 


I know I need my head examined

Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures

Joy Division are, hands down, one of the greatest fucking bands of all time. Their debut, Unknown Pleasures, set new benchmarks in alternative music, and is without a doubt one of the finest and most influential records, ever. The fantastic album art describes it to a tee really, nothing before or after, only an erratic yet channelled burst of creative genius in the middle. 

So, It's 1979, and punk is pretty much dead - all the energy, bravado and balls it had is seemingly on life support. Enter Joy Division - four Mancunian lads who manage to paint a musical landscape that mirrors their own existential dread. This musical landscape, although a product of its time, sounds like nothing that came before it. 


You have driving, muscular basslines and a formally dressed vocalist singing in baritone (but never indulging in vocal theatrics) taking the centerstage; always in the company of  motorik percussion and an atonal, minimalistic guitar that sometimes growls, and at others provides texture; seemingly mimicking whatever demon it is that was consuming Ian's soul at the time. Martin Hennett's austere, dub-influenced  aesthetic recognises the importance of space in a work as bleak as this, and it all sets the stage for telling the tales of alienation, disorientation and despair during Thatcher era UK, in an entirely original way - a driving, metronomic opener in 'Disorder', the haunting, hellish lament of 'Day of the Lords', the maddening riff and subsequent explosion of 'Shadowplay', the chilling, hypnotic bass propelled illustration of epilepsy in 'She's Lost Control' as well as the cathartic build and release of 'New Dawn Fades' which foresees Curtis'  losing struggle to maintain his lifestyle - "a loaded gun won't set you free, or so you say." There is also the vacuous anti-anthem in the closer "I Remember Nothing", by this point all corporeal relevance seems to have been uprooted and shot calluously into deep space, leaving behind only echoes of sorts - "Me in my own world, you there beside; the gaps are enormous, we stare from each side"


Raw, relentless and visceral, Unknown Pleasures is much more than an insight to a restless soul bearing the brunt of decay; it's also a definitive segment of alternative music history as we know it. You just can't go wrong here.

A loaded gun won't set you free, or so you say